Hello, my name is Tokuko Ochiai, co-founder of amirisu. Starting today, I’d like to share rewritten versions of posts about my knitting career, which I originally wrote several years ago on our online shop’s blog.
I first time expressed that I wanted to share my thoughts and views with the world was in a letter I wrote to my husband before we got married, back when I was 22. I explained to him that I wanted a career where I could express myself. A lot has happened since then, but now I can say that I’ve managed to build a career where I am able to do this in some way, and I’m glad I was able to make that happen.
First, let me share some of my background. Until high school, I grew up in Isahaya, a rural area in Nagasaki Prefecture where fireflies still flew through the flatlands. My family consisted of my parents, grandparents, and my older sister, who is just a year older than me. Looking back, we lived in quite a large house, and I spent my days running around the fields and hills nearby as a child.
My father was an engineer at a company, and my mother was a calligraphy teacher. Since my father loved classical music, my sister and I both started piano lessons at the age of three, as though it were his dream. I later switched to classical guitar when I was in the second grade of elementary school and practiced seriously until university. Since my sister was seriously committed and practiced on the grand piano in our living room at all hours, it was often too noisy to watch TV. As a result, I spent nearly all my free time reading books. To this day, I can’t join in when my husband talks about old TV shows, since I hardly watched any when I was young.
In between running around outdoors, reluctantly practicing instruments, and reading, I often did handicrafts. There was a storage room full of materials, and I would freely pick what I liked to make bags and small items. Even now I can recall the dim atmosphere of that room and the smell of the sewing machine.
I first learned to knit when I was ten years old. I remember being given the exact same yarn and needles as my sister so we could knit black-and-white scarves. I don’t actually remember whether I finished mine or not.
In winter, my mother would knit sweaters and other items she found in the Kurashi no Techo magazine. I really wanted to make bigger garments like that myself, but I simply couldn’t read the Japanese-style written patterns. When I asked my mother or grandmother for help, they couldn’t give me the kind of clear answers I wanted. I would spend my precious allowance on beautiful books, but in the end, I couldn’t understand them either. Back then, I felt that knitting books were just for looking at.
The funny thing was, I still wanted to use my hands. I often took out books with crochet motifs or knitting books just try out the stitch patterns themselves. I couldn’t make garments, but I made many small pieces this way. This was the reason that I was more into sewing than knitting until high school. Knitting was something I did, but it remained mysterious and difficult.
When I started living on my own at university, it suddenly became difficult to sew. At home, we had a sewing machine and all the tools, but I couldn’t afford to buy everything myself when I lived alone. Knitting, however, only required yarn and needles. And that was when I finally discovered the convenience of mail-order shopping as a university student.
This was my routine: buy a book, order the specified yarn and needles via postcard, then knit. Repeat. Not the internet, postcards! Many books started publishing full charts for their patterns around this time. Since I could read charts even if I couldn’t understand written instructions, I was able to compare the two and gradually learn how written Japanese patterns worked.
That said, I still didn’t really understand gauge. Looking back, my body type also didn’t fit the one-size-fits-all sizing in most Japanese books. I never actually finished anything that was made for me. However, I really loved the act of knitting itself. I would knit while listening to the radio at my part-time job in a used bookstore. In fact, that was the beginning of the knitting lifestyle I still live today.