Hiroko Ito, a 93-year-old knitting artist whose work was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK four years ago, appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on June 30th. She talked about how she started knitting and her current activities.
She started knitting when she was four years old. She is the third of six siblings, and there is a six-year age gap between her and her fourth sibling. "I grew up spoiled because I thought of myself as the youngest," she says. Her mother probably thought it would be unfair to her if a fourth child were to be born, so she taught her how to knit, and she says, "Once I started, I became completely absorbed in it."
During wartime, when resources were scarce, she would unravel two small knitted items and knit them together into one. "All we had was raw silk yarn. It was bumpy yarn. That's what we used," she said.
Even now, her knitting classes at home, held once every two months, are attended by "students who have been with her for 50 or 60 years." While typical knitting classes teach one pattern per session, she smiles and says, "I teach in a way that suits each individual, so it takes a lot of time."
She says the people in her knitting class are very close. They've known each other for decades, so their relationship feels "closer than ordinary relatives," and she added, "When someone's husband passed away, we all cried together. They're all such wonderful people. That's why I can keep living."
