Nishijin Textile Center

This guide to the Nishijin Textile Center in Kyoto starts in 1467, when a ten-year war leveled much of the city and scattered its silk weavers to the port of Sakai. It follows them back to the ashes of the battlefield camp that gave the district its name, and traces how techniques picked up from Ming-dynasty Chinese traders reshaped the cloth they wove afterward. You'll hear how the craft survived a later upheaval too, when the emperor's court left for Tokyo and weavers had to reinvent their trade again. Watch a weaver's hands move across a loom the same way they have for generations.