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Dancing Lessons from God
economically into the modern world arena. The area of Nagano is
known for the Tsumugi Pass through the mountains—one means that
young Meiji women under contract had to escape onerous labor under
bad conditions in silk mills. Even if they managed to leave, they did
not always escape tuberculosis, highly correlated with the conditions
of the mills (see Tsurumi 1990 ). This information I gathered during
the archival-research stage of the project. In Nagano, during partici-
pant observation, I lived with, wove with, and conducted interviews
with participants in weaving sessions. After several sessions over sev-
eral years, I had a good knowledge of the social life and structured
patterning that constituted a large part of my research plan objectives
(Creighton 1998 b). There was always a dinner party at the end of each
week’s session during which the participants could ask the teachers (a
married couple who ran the sessions) any questions they wished. Al-
though different groups of women took part in these workshops, cer-
tain questions were inevitably posed each time, directed more at their
personal lives than at their interest in weaving. “How did you meet?
How did you get married?” When asked such questions, the male
teacher would first feign reluctance to speak, saying: “Oh no, I can’t
say, really.” Then he would go on to say: “Well, ok, let me see, now.
Oh yes, I was walking down the Ginza one day (a well-known trendy
shopping and commercial district in Tokyo) and I saw this woman
walking along. Something in my mind said, ‘Ah, are da’—that’s her,
and so it was.” Everyone would laugh at what seemed to be a clearly
fabricated story that did not really provide anyone any information
about how the couple had met and decided to marry.
The wife’s yarn was unwound for me over several workshops. I
learned, one year, that she had grown up in Hiroshima. On another
occasion, I learned her mother had been a Christian (a rarity in Ja-
pan), and so on, until one day she and I ended a session sitting for a
long time by ourselves winding silk yarns together into usable balls.
This gave us a special opportunity to talk to each other at length. As
one of the two main instructors, she was generally busy transmitting
knowledge of silk and weaving to all the students. The conversation
started with my asking her about my mistaken understanding of her
Christian background. “Oh no, I’m not Christian,” she immediately
