I discovered today that Japanese needle sizes increase in 0.3mm increments, instead of the European standard of 0.5mm or the US of general weirdness. Their crochet hooks tend to follow the European standard. Why are their knitting needle sizes so strange?
How did Japanese knitting develop? Is it as old as European traditions? There seems to be a similar modern revival of knitting in Japan as in the rest of the world (based on the amount of new Japanese knitting books being translated into other languages). Is there a particular reason?
Also, why don't Japanese people use the rest of the worlds standard symbology for knitting charts? Did they standardize earlier and now no longer wish to change?
Thanks! It's a lot of questions, but all of a sudden I am very curious.
I'm a historian of Japan but my specialty is ceramics and other material culture associated with tea culture, not textiles, so I'm a bit out of my depth here. However, a cursory search in Japanese implies that there was no widespread tradition of knitting (amimono) in Japan before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. There was the tradition of braiding known as kumihimo in which artisans produced tight, complex cords that were also quite beautiful, and which aristocrats and samurai used as part of their clothing and armor. But this is more akin to weaving, perhaps, than knitting.
Europeans arrived in Japan around 1543 and over the course of the sixteenth century successfully created trading networks between Japan and other parts of the world; converted huge numbers of Japanese to Christianity; and engaged in cultural exchange with the elites of Kyoto and various provincial cities. Eventually they were persecuted and Christianity was banned in Japan in the early seventeenth century.
The first reference to knitting in Japanese that I can find is in the diary of the influential Kyoto aristocrat Yamashina Tokitsune, dated Tenshô 6 or 1588. Then references increase in the late seventeenth century to the type of knitting called meriyasu, which comes from a Portuguese word associated then with knitting hosiery, meias.
Measurements in Japan were completely independent from Western standards even in the 16th century, and for most of the Tokugawa period (17th-19th centuries), Japan tightly controlled its borders and didn't allow Japanese to leave the country, so intercourse with people from other parts of the world was rare. I imagine that the knitting traditions that developed in Japan in the Tokugawa period, although they were influenced by European knitting at the start, evolved in distinct directions.