Wearing blue work clothes, his hair covered with an indigo scarf and his hands and fingernails stained blue, Hama ushers me to his studio, which occupies the second floor of his house and is outfitted with long, narrow tables built to accommodate lengths of kimono fabric (a standard kimono is about 40 feet long and 16 inches wide). From a back door off the studio, stairs lead to a shed that houses his fermentation vats and a small yard, given over in its entirety to sheaths of dyed kimono fabric, stretched from one end to the other — like long, slender hammocks — to dry.

Of the dozens of steps involved in his process, some are highly complicated and some are simply tedious, such as the repeated washing and starching and rinsing of the fabric, but all are time-consuming. “Craft is doing things with your hands. Once you manufacture things, it is no longer craft,” Hama tells me. As a holdout devoted to maintaining the tradition against all odds, almost to the point of tragic absurdity, Hama is not interested in the easy way. He does not buy prewashed fabric, and instead of premade starch, he makes his own. He sets down one of the stencils he has carved into persimmon-hardened paper called washi — a slight modification of an 18th-century pattern, which he has backed in silk to keep the intricate design intact — onto a length of fabric fastened to one of the tables. (He doesn’t make his own paper or persimmon extract, but only because he doesn’t think the variety of persimmon used today yields the same quality tannins as those from his grandfather’s day. As a result, he has planted a tree from which he hopes one day to make his own.) With a hera, a spatula-like tool, he evenly slathers a glutinous rice paste over the stencil to resist the dye. Because Hama wants a precise consistency to his paste, which varies based on the intricacy of the design and the weather conditions, he mixes his own, a process that takes half a day. He squeegees the excess off the stencil and, by eye, proceeds down the table, lining it up where the previous one left off. The fabric is then hung in the studio to dry before he can do the same work on the other side: Once sewn into a kimono, it won’t even be visible. Next, the fabric is moved outside, where it gets covered in soy milk (also homemade) to help keep the glue in place as it dries in the sun; this is repeated three times on each side before the dyeing can start. We head down to the fermentation dye vats, which are steaming cauldrons cut into the floor of a lean-to shed. Each indigo dyer has his own recipe for adding lime, ash, lye from wood and wheat husks to the sukumo (or composted indigo plant), which must be kept warm and stirred for a couple weeks in order to ferment and become dye in a process called aitate. Hama works according to the seasons. In the summer and monsoon seasons, it is too hot for indigo, as the paste will melt, while in winter, he must rise each morning at 3 a.m. to descend into the cold, adding new coals for a consistent temperature.