Bryan was born in Vancouver, Canada and has lived in Japan for
28 years. He lives in an old silk farming house with his adjacent
tea, mulberry and indigo fields in a mountain village just outside
Tokyo. He continues and old local tradition of breeding silk moths,
rearing the silkworms, reeling and spinning silk from the cocoons
then colouring the silk with natural local dyes and eventually
weaving fine work on traditional Japanese hand looms. He has grown
indigo for 20 years, processing the leaves into indigo paste and
then fermenting the composted material in a dye vat. He is an
accomplished indigo dyer.
His farmhouse is a well-known destination to study indigo and
silk-related traditional Japanese handcraft.