A project to create 1,000 tapestries from kimono damaged in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami is near completion, with 130 more pieces to go.
A project to create 1,000 tapestries from kimono damaged in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami is near completion, with 130 more pieces to go.
Eriko Shiomi, a music producer in the western Tokyo city of Tachikawa who came up with the idea two years ago, will hold workshops from Aug. 1 to allow more people to join the project and accelerate the effort.
The tapestries, each measuring 50 centimeter square, will be on display Aug. 19 at Suntory Hall in Tokyo’s Minato Ward, the venue of a wind orchestra concert by high school students from Fukushima Prefecture.
“The tapestries are support flags for disaster-stricken areas,” Shiomi said. “I hope participants will express their feelings in the work.”
Three years ago, Shiomi, 62, started to clean dirt-covered kimono provided by a tsunami-hit shop in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, and turn them into dresses.
She later made a tapestry using patches that came about during the dress-making process and other fabrics.
Shiomi has held tapestry workshops in the Indonesian resort island of Bali and Sri Lanka, as well as in and around Tachikawa.
About 800 people, including mothers with small children and elderly people with dementia, have joined the workshops and created 870 tapestries.
Those works have been displayed at events to support the reconstruction of the Tohoku region or loaned to interested parties.
The 1,000 tapestries are expected to decorate a hall where Fukushima high school students will hold a brass concert.
Shiomi hopes to join all the pieces to make one huge tapestry that can be used as a curtain at a theater in a disaster-affected area.