OSAKA, Japan — Across Japan, traditional craftsmen are struggling to find young people willing to carry on their arts. But one centuries-old legacy has found a pool of talent not likely to dry up for quite some time -- prisoners.
In a program meshing the need of artisans to find successors and of prisons to keep their wards from sitting idle, convicts in this city in western Japan are keeping a venerable carpet-weaving style alive.
With crime rising and judges handing out tougher sentences, Japan's 74 prisons and jails are 10% to 15% over capacity, with nearly 64,000 inmates. About 51,000 were sentenced to prison with forced labor, says Kazuo Matsunaga, a Justice Ministry corrections official.
Japan's economic slump, meanwhile, has hit prison enterprises hard, prompting outside contractors to cancel or scale down projects and putting prison officials under pressure to find work to keep the inmates busy.
"Because of the slump, it is difficult to find work desirable for inmates," Matsunaga says, adding that unskilled work such as assembling paper bags and sorting garbage is increasing. "We must give them something to do."
At Osaka Prison, the second largest in Japan, a work program designed to train prisoners in carpet weaving has done more than just fill idle hours -- it has saved an art from extinction.
Woven in a style imported from China, Sakai carpets have been made in an area of Osaka by the same name since the 1700s. They were a major export from Osaka to the United States and Europe through the late 1890s and have been designated a national treasure.
The last professional Sakai carpet maker died in 1992. But a group of amateur weavers and city officials saw the local prison as a chance to keep the art alive. In 1994, they arranged a six-month weaving program to train a prison worker to be an instructor at the prison.
Today, nine inmates are in the carpet program, including two on a one-year training course required before they can start making works for sale.
The convicts are now the only people making the carpets professionally. "Sakai rugs can be manufactured only at our prison," says Yoshio Shimada, an Osaka Prison official.
One of their current works, being woven by the most experienced pair, is a thick wool carpet as big as a king-size bed. It portrays kimono-clad customers at a sword shop a couple of hundred years ago, with several swordsmiths sharpening knives in the background. When completed, the $5,100 carpet will decorate the entrance to Sakai's city hall.
