From Thread Merchant to Hakata-ori Weaver

The history of Nishimura Orimono began as a thread merchant. The ancestor of the Nishimura family, the feudal lord from Nagasaki, Masuemon Nishimura, participated in Toyotomi Hideyoshi's division of Hakata in 1587 and received the "four sword diamond pattern" emblem for assisting merchant Sotan Kamiya.

"From the Sengoku period to the Edo period, we operated as thread merchants for a while, but due to the Edo shogunate's policies that aimed to prevent the outflow of gold and silver abroad, the import of silk threads became restricted. At that time, the head of the family, Gihei Nishimura, chose to change the direction of the business and started Hakata-ori. This was about 164 years ago."

Since then, the Nishimura family has woven the history of being Hakata-ori weavers, but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.

"Now, the weaving machines are made of iron, but back then they were wooden, so during the Fukuoka air raid in 1945, both the building and the weaving machines were completely destroyed. It was my grandfather, the fourth-generation president, Masataro Nishimura, who rebuilt everything from scratch."