Note: The text below is the transcript of the YouTube video above.
A thousand years ago—long before AI—Japanese nobles created colour combinations so perfect, I couldn’t believe how refined they were.
For them, mastering colour wasn’t a hobby. It was essential education.
But when I visited a dye master in Kyoto, he said something that stopped me: “We’re losing our ability to see.”
Today, I want to share three lessons he taught me. Three things we’re forgetting.
This is deeper than you think.
Hi, I’m Satomi Takayama, a Japanese artist based in London. On this channel, I share inspirations I’m collecting for my creative journey ahead—art, craftsmanship, design, and the stories behind them.
I’m on my way to meet a master artisan who works with traditional tie-dyeing and plant-based dyes.
I’ve been thinking lately about what makes something beautiful—not just to look at, but in a way that actually moves you.
I paint sometimes with acrylic. And there are certain colours I could never quite get right. They just… they didn’t speak to me the way I wanted them to. I didn’t know why. But I had this feeling he might have the answer.
And he did. Just… not in the way I expected.
Terada-san is a Kyo-shibori artisan—that’s traditional tie-dyeing from Kyoto. He goes into the mountains himself to gather natural dyes from plants, and uses them to create kimonos and kimono accessories here in Kyoto.
When I saw the silks he dyed, I felt something in me just… stir. I’m sure this video only captures maybe half the beauty of how the colour soaked into the silk… but it was truly beautiful. And I thought—maybe that’s why I could never get those colours right. Because it’s about this reflection. This relationship with light.
But when did we lose this? When did we stop creating colours this way?
Synthetic dyes started in Britain in the 1850s. A chemist discovered how to make them.
Synthetic dyes gave us control. Predictability. Efficiency. You could make any colour with just a tiny amount of powder.
You didn’t need to observe nature anymore, didn’t need to wait for seasons, didn’t need years of sensitivity training.
And it transformed the world.
But now… now we’re facing another type of revolution.
AI can generate images. Create designs. Produce anything, instantly.
And I think that itself is wonderful. I really do. But I keep wondering: are we losing more things we shouldn’t lose? Are we erasing what makes life interesting?
The Industrial Revolution gave us speed and efficiency. But we lost our connection to nature. Our ability to observe. To wait. To feel.
So what’s this revolution going to cost us?
To understand what we’re losing, I need to show you something.
This is a book showing colour combinations from Japan’s Heian period—that’s the 8th to 12th century. Japan’s aristocratic era, before the samurai. We’re talking about over a thousand years ago.
To give you some context—around that time in Europe, it was the early Middle Ages, and from around the 11th century it moved into what we call the Romanesque period: monumental, deeply religious, and largely driven by church patronage.
And in Japan? Aristocrats were creating this. Observing nature and creating these impossibly delicate colour combinations.
I looked into this a bit more, and what I found was fascinating. For Heian nobles, colour wasn’t just aesthetic—it was a level of importance we can barely imagine today. Having a refined sense of colour was essential education for court life.
And how did they learn it? Through observing nature. They created miniature natural landscapes within their estates and observed the subtle shifts of colour through the seasons. That sensitivity to tiny changes—that’s what gave them the ability to create these layered colour combinations.
“Heian-period colours are all so beautiful—rich and deep, but never dull or muddy. This is kasane-iro (layered colours). All of this already existed in the Heian period. Colours are built by layering, often chosen by season.”
And each combination has this beautiful, poetic name. It’s not just ‘blue and red’—it’s something that captures a feeling, a season, a moment in nature.
Especially the women’s court dress—the jūnihitoe, or twelve-layered kimono. The colour sense in those layers is just… remarkable.
Can you believe people were creating combinations this beautiful a thousand years ago?
They weren’t just looking. They were observing. Feeling. Listening to the world around them.
And through that—through really paying attention—they understood colour in a way we’ve completely forgotten.
And Terada-san said we are losing that ability to truly see.
“They saw the world in a different way. With no information, they had to read nature—leaf shapes, subtle shifts in colour. To know what was safe to eat and what was poisonous. You only learn that by really noticing—seeing, smelling, sensing. In a way, their five senses were sharper than ours today.”
Even though modern conveniences should give us more time than before, we’re constantly chasing something. Always rushing. And in that moment, it hit me—without even realising it, we might be missing something really profound.
But here’s one more thing that really surprised me. He’s been doing this for nearly fifty years. Fifty years! But he still can’t predict how it will turn out. And that’s exactly the point.
Think about that for a second. Nearly fifty years. And he’s still working with uncertainty. Still learning from accidents.
The water temperature. The season. The humidity. The fabric itself. All of it affects the color.
And instead of trying to control every single variable, he listens. He trusts the process.
This is the complete opposite of how AI works, right? AI eliminates variables. It gives you perfect results every time. But he’s spent his entire life learning to embrace them.
And what really struck me was how he enjoys it all—like a child. It made me think about my own life. How I’m always rushing. Always chasing the next thing.
And he doesn’t even work alone.
“When my own knowledge and intentions meet the perspective of an artisan with 50 or 60 years of experience, and we bounce ideas back and forth—something unexpectedly interesting can suddenly emerge. That’s why experience matters.”
With AI, it’s gotten so much easier to create something on your own. But here? Beauty comes from connection. From collaboration. From being willing to let go of control and trust the process—and trust other people.
After coming back to Japan for the first time in a while, I’ve come to really appreciate those imperfections—those distortions that come from unexpected moments. I think that human touch, that quality… It’s going to become especially valuable going forward.
Walking out of his workshop, I couldn’t stop thinking about those lessons. In a world obsessed with speed, these ways of really observing—they’re vanishing. In Japan, skilled artisans are getting older. And as demand for traditional crafts declines, fewer young people are choosing this path. To keep people with these amazing sensibilities around, we need more people interested in these traditional crafts. But the reality is, many of these crafts have lost their original use. Fewer people wear kimonos. So these skills need to find new applications to survive.
So I’m curious: In your country, in your community—what’s being passed down? What’s at risk of disappearing?
Are there people still carrying these traditions forward? How does that work where you are?
Please share your stories in the comments.
And, Terada-san’s work gave me a whole new perspective on my own dream—creating spaces that blend these traditions with contemporary life. If you want to see more of his work, I’ve linked his Instagram below. He does exhibitions in Japan sometimes, so definitely check it out.
I’ll be visiting more artisans across Japan, so please subscribe if you want to come along.
Next time, I’m doing something a bit different. After eight years in Britain and now being back in Japan, I want to share five things I love about Japan—from the perspective of someone who left and came back.
Thanks for watching. See you next time.
Behind the Story
Oh, thank you for watching today’s video as well. How was it? Did you like do you enjoy today’s video, too? Um, yeah. So, Terada-san is just such a nice person. I visited his workshop twice, actually. I’m always like fascinated by how passionate he is to create the colours that he wants, and I can tell he really enjoys it. It’s really it’s always nice to talk to him, and I appreciate that he gave me like opportunities to visit his studio twice. Thank you so much. So when I was making today’s video, I was thinking about something. So in the main part, I was talking about how skilled artisans are getting older and how demand for traditional crafts is declining, and it’s getting harder for artisans to sustain their crafts. And what I realised is that, yeah, of course, preserving craftsmen’s skills is really important, but at the same time, we need to think about how to preserve our ability to see as well. As Terraen said, we are losing our ability to see. It’s because we always use smartphones, and it’s just so easy to look at things, and we lost time to carefully see things. When people cannot tell the difference, you know, craft people’s work isn’t appreciated. When it’s not appreciated, there’s no demand. When there is no demand, they can’t make a living, and then the craft disappears. Not because the skill is gone, but because nobody has the ability to appreciate it anymore. So what I kept thinking is that we need more people who are interested in the beauty of craftsmanship, more people who can see the difference, more people who appreciate what these artisans do. Maybe one of the things that I’m trying to do with this channel is to practice recovering the ability to see together. I still wear a kimono on special occasions like the tea ceremony and weddings. I really do enjoy wearing a kimono. It’s just such a beautiful like an artwork, really. Like I said in the main part, what I like about it is that they really pay attention to the season. You can enjoy the season in their designs, and it’s just a really beautiful culture to be preserved. And also, I really enjoy seeing the details, the delicate details of how it’s dyed. But at the same time, I really do understand how hard to wear kimoders and and keep the kimonos at home. It’s not really practical for modern life. It just takes time to put on kimonos. Although I learned how to put on a kimono myself, I kind of forgot how to put on a kimono. So I always have someone to put a kimono on me. And I always have someone to set up my hair and it just takes like over maybe three hours to dress up and get ready for for the events and just and then once it’s done, so you need to do dry cleaning. It’s not one layer but also there are lots of layers underneath and so you need to do dry cleaning of all of them so it just it’s not really it just costs a lot and it’s hard to wear it’s just yeah that’s why I said it’s not practical but like for example I brought two kimonos to London I ended up not wearing that much I only wore them once in London and once in Austria and then I decided to bring them back because I couldn’t do dry cleaning there because I don’t know who I can trust, dry cleaning kimono. So I totally understand why fewer people wear kimono nowaday because it’s just so hard in terms of cost, time and maintenance, as I said, but I’ve been watching traditional kimonomakers try so many different things to survive, like making cushion covers, bags and sofas and using all of those kimonos’ fabrics and techniques. And I find that really fascinating. It’s not giving up on their crafts. It’s finding new ways for it to survive and to live. So maybe videos like this can hopefully be a small part of that, like a way for people to discover that these skills exist. But I’m not only talking about Japanese crafts, but also crafts in other countries, too. I think that each country, each region has their own unique, traditional craft to be preserved. And I will share what I learned, like growing up in Japan, because in Japan, there are so many craftsmen. So I can talk about how they are trying to make them survive. But I would love to know what other countries do for that. Anyway, thank you so much for watching today as well. It’s already February, and I hope you had a great start to the year. I’m trying to make as many videos as possible this year, too. But there are a couple of big projects coming up, and I might not be able to actively create videos, but I’m trying my best. So, please subscribe to my channel if you haven’t done it yet. And I will see you soon in the next video.
