The Blue That Comes from a Living Vat

Fujita Kazuko greets you at the door of her workshop with both hands stained permanently the colour of deep water. The staining goes past the wrists, she explains, from forty years of reaching into the sukumo vat — a fermenting mixture of dried indigo leaves, wheat bran, wood ash lye, and sake that must be maintained at a precise living temperature, fed and turned each morning like a form of domestic animal. It is this biological complexity, she says, that gives Awa-ai its unique character: a blue that shifts in different lights from near-black to the particular colour of deep ocean water at noon. Industrial synthetic indigo cannot replicate it and she has no patience with those who suggest otherwise.