Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Common thread
Shishu, a form of embroidery
By Cynthia Oi
that adorns rich kimono fabric in
Japan, transformed to a way of
life and friendship in HiloStar-Bulletin
SHIHO Nunes and Sara Nunes-Atabaki began their project as a catalog of images created by Shiho's father. Instead, mother and daughter collected a colorful tapestry of human stories all joined in the art of shishu.
Shishu is a form of embroidery that embellished the rich fabric of luxurious kimono, wall hangings and other upper-class textiles in Japan.
In Hilo, however, against a different background, in a different environment, in a different society, Yoshio Shinoda and his wife, Ima Shinoda, adapted shishu. It became an art form for working-class women.
"The Shishu Ladies of Hilo" chronicles the evolution of the new style and a stitching sisterhood that developed after Yoshio and Ima were deprived of their professions as Japanese language school principal and teacher respectively when World War II began.To earn money to provide for Shiho and her three brothers, the couple began making khaki trousers for the army. Yoshio also carved wood blocks to make printed souvenirs with Hawaiian designs for military personnel to send to the mainland.
When the end of the war also brought an end to the demand for pants and souvenirs, the Shinodas began to teach shishu.
The ladies who learned the art share the pages of book with Shiho's parents. Entwined with their stories are recollections of daughter and granddaughter.
The basement is so dark it takes a minute for my eyes to adjust ... . My grandfather sits at a table, the sleeves of his white shirt folded back, his head bent over a drawing. His concentration is almost palpable. He looks up over the rim of his glasses, smiles and nods at me, and returns to his drawing. He is tracing the wing feathers of an osprey onto white silk. His hand is certain, the bird flawless.Upstairs is a different world. Grandmother sits at the head of the dining room table surrounded by women stitching away ... . Sometimes I sit under the table, surrounded by neatly crossed legs, listening to my grandmother and the women. Once in a while I recognize a familiar expression, catch an English word, hear a burst of laughter. For the most part, I don't understand what pleases them so, what they find so amusing, but they always sound so cheerful and polite ...
-- Sara Nunes-Atabaki
When Shiho and Sara began talking with the ladies, they thought the book would focus on Yoshio's drawings and Ima's sewing.
"Remember, mom?" said Sara as she sits on the floor of Shiho's Kaimuki apartment. In one bedroom, Yoshio's work is piled carefully on top and under a bed. Ima's needlework is discreetly displayed down the hall.
"The first interviews we did with the ladies, the questions were technical," Sara said, "but after we started to hear their stories, we said, 'Wait a minute.' "
"The stories were so delightful, the things they said, the expressions about how they felt about shishu, were so charming," Shiho said.One professional who reviewed the book in its early stages told the women it needed more scholarly input, she said.
"And we talked about it -- Sara and I -- and we just decided, no, that's not our book. Our book is about the people and an activity that really engaged them for all those years."
The shishu ladies were mainly women who worked at blue-collar jobs and lived in sleepy Hilo town or in rural areas nearby. The needlework was not only a way to hold on to their cultural traditions, but a social activity.
In the book, Mitsuru Nakayama describes women she exchanged threads with as her "shishu friends." Matsue Yamamoto talks about her neighbor, Aiko Matsuoka, saying, "After we were done with our chores, Mrs. Matsuoka would come to my house and we would sit and shishu together."
I wonder: did my father and mother, when they were growing up, anticipate the road they would travel together? Where it would lead? How far it would be? Where it would end? Later, when there was no going back, were they happy in their choice? Were there regrets? In space, in time, in cultures, the mountains of Nagao and a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific are worlds apart. But even as I wonder, I think of my parents as I knew them best in their last years. My mother's face as she smiles at me in memory or from family pictures is of a woman fulfilled, happy with herself, her lot, her world ...-- Shiho Nunes
At 82, Shiho's smooth face also shows fulfillment. But she is anxious to finish work on an exhibition of shishu that will open in Hilo on Friday.
The book has consumed six years of her life and the exhibition "will take me to seven years," she said. "I have become impatient with this."
She is a slight, spry woman, gray hair neatly gathered in a net-covered bun at the back of her neck. She looks very much like Ima, who like her husband valued education for their children above all.
Shiho followed her parents' profession. She graduated from University of California in Los Angeles and the University of Hawaii teachers college. She taught school on the Big Island before becoming project manager for the state Department of Education and later was the assistant director of the University of Hawaii's Curriculum Research and Development Group.
Her lifetime of learning turned personal, she said, when she and Sara began researching the book."We learned so much about our family that I never knew," she said, pushing up the glasses that rest low on her nose. "To listen to all these ladies talk about my mother and my father -- it was amazing. They brought my parents to life."
The view of Yoshio and Ima from the ladies' perspective also helped Shiho define her parents' works so she could establish that the style they developed was unique.
The distinctions in Hilo shishu derive from Yoshio's adaptation of classic Japanese subject matter and its presentation.
The book recounts how Roger S. Keyes, a specialist in Japanese art, exclaimed "jungle shishu!" when he saw Yoshio's designs, for as an animal adapts to a new environment so did Yoshio adjust to his.
Keyes discusses what he called the "'influence of the land,' the combination of subtle and not-so-subtle forces and pressures that act upon and eventually modify traditional forms transplanted to a new setting."
'The Shishu Ladies of Hilo,' by Shiho S. Nunes and Sara Nunes-Atabaki, University of Hawai'i Press, 168 pages, $50 cloth, $24.95 paper
Beyond the different designs are its applications. In Japan, traditional shishu decorated formal clothing. In Hilo, the embroidery accented more everyday items, such as muumuus, cushion covers, shawls, aloha shirts, runners and bedspreads. Many of them are framed works to be displayed.While Yoshio created the designs, Ima decided on threads, stitchery and color. Shiho said the two would discuss each new design and figure out how best to bring it to shishu.
Ima was a stickler on stitching, she said, even down to the direction in which the thread was sewn in a design. More importantly, she realized the importance of the spirit that resided in shishu.
"What my mother believed about shishu was that when you sew, you are putting yourself into that stitch," Shiho said. "If you discipline yourself to do that work, you discipline yourself in other parts of your life as well.
"Girls who were gasa-gasa (fidgety, unfocused) had stitching that was gasa-gasa," she said.
"She also believed that in the process of doing the shishu, you are honing not only the skill, but your attitudes of perseverance and discipline," she said.
Yoshio and Ima didn't get rich in this enterprise, charging only 50 cents for a three- to four-hour lesson.
"They didn't make a lot of money teaching," Sara said. "What they did with shishu was an extension of their school teaching. It was just that now they were fully into embroidery."
"I don't think they had any real regrets," said Shiho. "They adjusted as they had done all their lives."
Yoshio died in 1973 at age 86, Ima in 1984 at 95. The shishu ladies who studied with them are elderly, most of them nisei. About a half a dozen women still teach the Hilo style on the Big Island, but few younger people are interested.
Sara doesn't do shishu; she is a fiber artist and finds her satisfaction in that medium. Shiho said she did "a lot of shishu in high school, but I have not stitched anything since."
"I'm not sure whether there will be enough interest to sustain it after a decade or two," Shiho said with a hint of resignation. Then she brightens. "But it will survive in one form or another.
"It will alter with time, that's for sure, but that's the history of shishu. It changes from time to time to time."
On exhibit
Click for online
calendars and events.
