Otaki represents a rural-based business breathing new life into shinafu, a woven Japanese textile with a 6000-year history, made with linden bark yarn originating 10,000 years ago. Through collaboration with professional designers, she aims to realize the potential of shinafu for interiors and innovative uses.

Junko OTAKI

  Uetsu Shinafu Weaving・ Niigata

  • Artist's Story

    Working from the felling of linden trees to the peeling of bark, Junko Ōtaki develops new dyeing, design, and weaving approaches so that the ancient linden-bark textile Uetsu Shina-fu can live in contemporary life. Reflecting on its essence and appeal, she seeks to carry techniques rooted in the Jōmon period into the future, practicing onko-chishin̶creating the new from the old.

    Born in 1977 in Sakado, Saitama, she completed graduate studies at Tohoku University of Art & Design, then worked in contemporary art in Japan and abroad before being deeply moved by the Matagi hunting culture in Yamakumada, Murakami, Niigata, where she relocated and married into the Matagi head family. After inheriting the village’s Uetsu Shina-fu tradition, she founded Yamakumada Kobo, working to enhance the value and vitality of shina

    cloth.

    2018 ‒ Renovates a traditional house and establishes “Yamakumada Kobo”

    2022 ‒ Finalist, 4th Mitsui Golden Takumi Award; Selected, National Traditional Craft Exhibition; Selected, Japan Folk Crafts Museum Exhibition ‒ New Works

    2023 ‒ Selected, National Traditional Craft Exhibition

    2024 ‒ Craft Leader, JapanCraft21 Japanese

    Traditional Crafts Revival Contest Author of the book “When I Kept Making Contemporary Art, I Found Myself Married into a Matagi Family” (Yamato Keikokusha).

  • About the Craft