Japan rediscovers the conch dyeing trick

Press, 11 February 1983, Page 14

Japan rediscovers the conch dyeing trick

From

PETER McGILL,

in Tokyo

A Japanese scholar has rediscovered the secret of the purple dye that denoted royalty and privilege in Rome, Greece/ China, Japan, and even the Inca empire. Professor Tsuneo Yoshioka of Osaka University began his investigations 20 years ago in the Shoso-in, an ancient warehouse of Japanese imperial treasures in Nara, the seat of the emperor in the Eighth Century A.D. “Purple” comes from the Latin word purpura, the name of a conch found in the ancient Mediterranean, which secreted a dark red liquid in a cyst at the entrance of its shell.

The archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, found many of these conch shells alongside Minoan pottery in Crete, dating the start of the royal obsession with purple to at least the Sixteenth Century B.C.

So important was purple to the economy of the area that it probably gave its name to Phoenicia — the modem State of Lebanon — through the Greek word phoinos, meaning “blood red”.

The purple dyeing technique was closely guarded by the Romans, 'with the result that when the Ottoman Turks sacked Byzantium in 1453, Europe and the Near East lost the trick altogether.

By this time, too, the stock of shellfish was severely depleted. The Orientals, however quickly developed an imitation. The Japanese used a root extract, and Japanese courtiers continued to be ranked according to the darkness of their purple clothes.

Until Professor Yoshioka extended his researches to Latin America, it was thought the conch shell method had been

lost forever. Professor Yoshioka discovered the Incas had produced purple cloth by roughly the same method as the Romans must have used, that the purpura conch still flourished along the Peruvian coast and that the ancient Inca dyeing method was still being used by villagers. Professor Yoshioka’s researches were sponsored by a Japanese department store and a Kyoto maker of kimonos. The Kyoto firm plans to start a dyeing plant in Peru next year for the production of “imperial purple” kimonos and obis (the sash around a kimono) for Japanese snobs.

Although Professor Yoshioka has no idea what such a kimono will cost, at 2,000 conch shells for each gram of dye it will be “very expensive.” — . Copyright, London Observer • Service.