Kaifu Hana

She was a merchant and weaver, born in Tokushima. She invented a type of crepe de Chine, a light and fine plainwoven dress fabric, called awashijira and was the first to export her products to Korea, China, and Southeast Asia.

As commoners before the 1860s were forbidden to use silk, they tried to figure out how to make cotton fabric more luxurious. One hot summer day, a woman named Kaifu Hana was drying a cloth called Tataeshima, a material typically used to make summer kimono in the area. Suddenly it started raining, and her cloth became completely wet. She hung it to dry it under the strong sun, but when the cloth dried, it looked a bit bumpy. This is thought to be the origin of Awashouai-shijiraori, which became very popular thereafter, with annual production reaching 1,500,000 kimono in the 1890s. Tokushima prefecture had about 200 factories with more than 5,000 employees dedicated to the craft at the time.