Miriam Schapiro was born in 1923 in Toronto, Canada, to Russian Jewish parents, but she was brought up in Brooklyn, New York.

Shibori tie-dyeing in Arimatsu dates to early in the Edo period (1603-1867), when the craft was devised as an industry in a village poor for growing crops.

Wooden-framed buildings with a wide street frontage and storehouses with a lattice-patterned plaster walls still line this ...