Textile & Fashion

Sarasa is a cotton cloth imported from India, Persia, Siam and Indonesia on Nanban ships. Patterns are printed using woodblock, copperplate, or wax-resist. Occasionally sarasa is silk, not cotton. Its motifs looked exotic in Japan and was unlike anything that had been seen before. People wore it for the pleasure of its foreign feeling, although it was expensive and so largely monopolised by those of high status. Sarasa was also used in the tea ceremony, where various items of cloth are required. Dyes are often vivid reds, taken from insects like the cochineal beetle, or fresh vegetal dyes from South-Sea plants.
Cotton cloth had been made in India since at least 3000BC, and hand-decorated sarasa appeared also BC. The elites of Egypt and Rome wore it, imported from India. From the mid-Edo Period, sarasa was made in Japan too, in the regions of Sakai, Nagasaki, Amakusa and Nabeshima. It became known as wa-sarasa. An additionally technique in wa-sarasa was use of templatee.