Kiju Fukuda was born in 1932 in Kyoto. In 1997, he was designated as a Living National Treasure, becoming the first person to receive this distinction for embroidery.

Fukuda extensively studied traditional embroidery techniques under his father Kizaburo, a leading expert in embroidery. After hard training, he succeeded to the family business. His work covers not just embroidery, but the selection and dyeing of the cloth, and its imprinting with gold or silver leaf. He has created subtle modern expressions that are unique to embroidery, and in doing so, developed his own style.

Most of his works achieve beauty by combining dyeing and imprinting with gold or silver leaf. As he says, embroidery is half-solid, threads swell on the surface and give off colorful lights depending on the angle you view them.

In 1999, he received the purple medal of honor from the Emperor.

The Japanese word 'tayori' seems to have gained the more recent meaning of 'letters'. A hand-written letter makes you enjoy imagining the sender based on the unique form of the written characters and illustrations.

But 'tayori' then turned into the telephone message, and has now become something done by e-mail communication on the Net. As you can get in touch with someone sooner and for greater distances, the word 'tayori' itself is falling out of usage.

'Tayori' has the same sound as 'dependence' in Japanese. I feel that both senses of the word 'tayori' have something in common. If you are worried about the sender, the words 'You have not given me tayori' might have the meaning 'You do not give me dependence'. People might have lived 'depending' on someone's letter.

Because we are losing 'the ways to depend on others', we are getting worse at 'taking advantage of others' in a good sense.