Paper short abstract:

In aging rural Japan with a low birthrate, endangered craft of sedge hats has thriven elders' conviviality. They strive to pull the past into the present realities through succeeding skills, oral history, local chronicles and the state narrative of cultural heritage.

Paper long abstract:

Rooted in shades between plains and mountains, sedges have sewn successive ties of mutual trust among families of Fukuoka Village. In the northwest of the Japan Alps, deep snow has fostered sedge hat production, creating a communal side job during the slack season in the rice-farming village. For the last four centuries, Fukuoka sedge hats have fashioned flexible forms to screen scorching sunlight, snowstorms and human gaze. Villagers crafted wild sedges in turn from their pioneering generation, developing techniques of its cultivation and hat manufacturing. While witnessing the multilayers of Japanese landscapes and lifestyles, sedge hats have sustained the utilization of spring water and mountainous muds. Enduring centuries of seasons, its labor division has fabricated an intimate communal family network among villagers as craftspeople, intra-village brokers or outward merchants with emphasis on domestic gender roles, men processing bamboo ribs and women sewing sedges. Yet it barely survived modernization and economic globalization that opened access to alternative umbrellas and Western hats. Along with other daily utensils until today, those imports entangled sedge hats in the nationwide historicization of domestic crafts with simultaneous frictions between obscure regional products and increasingly familiar mass products. Entering the twenty-first century in the absence of young successors, its technique was designated as a national Important Intangible Folk-Cultural Property with the grave urgencies of preservation. Now engaging local journalists, officers and schools, the craft is warming hands of the elders who seam the past into the temporary realities with threads of conviviality that they have spun.