Shima Shima (Striped Textile Patterns), plate

Shima shima (縞々, Stripes), 1904, is a woodblock-printed design album published in Kyoto by Yamada Unsōdō, designed by Furuya Kōrin (1875-1910), devoted entirely to striped textile patterns. The plate shown is one of more than two hundred designs the album collected; the underlying volume is preserved in private collections and was scanned for general circulation through Wikimedia Commons. Shima patterns — a category encompassing every variety of vertical, horizontal, and combined-line repeat used on Japanese woven textiles — were a core working vocabulary of the Kyoto kimono trade, and they functioned in late-Meiji Japan as a register of taste, region, and social status. Furuya's album organizes the genre methodically, gathering classical and modern stripe combinations in colour woodblock plates suitable for direct reference by Nishijin weavers, kimono designers, and lacquer ateliers using stripe motifs as ground patterns. The book belongs to the same group of Unsōdō zuanchō issued under Furuya's editorial supervision between 1903 and 1910 (Unkashū, Kodai moyō chōchō, Shasei sōka moyō, Kōrin moyō, and the orihon volumes of matsu, take, and ume motifs) and represents the most strictly functional end of his pattern-book practice — a working catalogue of textile motifs raised to the level of a freestanding decorative-art object.