Atsushi Futatsuya will tell you, with total sincerity, that he doesn’t know how to teach Sashiko. What he knows is how to do it—the same way he knows how to eat, or breathe, or find his balance after a long day. Sashiko is not something he learned; it’s something he simply always was.
Which makes the story of how he became one of the few people in the world teaching traditional Japanese Sashiko to English-speaking audiences more than a little ironic. He spent the better part of his early life trying to escape it.

Three Months and a Shift

In 2011, a massive earthquake struck Japan’s northeastern coast. The tsunami that followed devastated entire communities. Not long after, Atsushi’s family shop received an order for 150 skeins of Sashiko thread from a disaster shelter. He made a call and learned that a recovery organization was launching a Sashiko project to give elderly women survivors a way to sustain themselves. The NPO needed someone young enough to survive a northern Japanese winter in a shelter, who could stitch, who could read a balance sheet, and who spoke the language. It was, Atsushi acknowledges with dry humor, a job description written for exactly one person--himself.
He went. For three months, he stitched alongside women who had lost husbands, homes, entire chapters of their lives. He had arrived ready to bear the weight of the womens’ grief. They didn’t need his emotional support. They had a remarkable acceptance of their circumstances.One of them, whose husband had been swept away in front of her, came to Atsushi one day laughing—her husband was surely amused, she said, that she’d finally gotten her stitching right. He didn’t know how to react. She understood his hesitancy. “It’s okay,” she told him. 
“My life was all about complaining,” he says. “Why did I have to stitch while others were kicking a ball?” He pauses. “And then I started thinking—maybe this acceptance is what Japanese culture can share with the world.”
The survivors’ acceptance of the unthinkable became Atsushi's pathway to surrendering to his family’s legacy. By 2012, he had made a decision: everything his grandmother had kept secret, he would share.

The Thing That Wouldn't Leave

The fight with his grandmother was nasty. His father played peacekeeper. Then his father passed away in 2013, and the buffer disappeared. His grandmother, anticipating the confrontation, fired everyone on their side of the family and shut Atsushi out of the business entirely.
He came back to the United States. His wife had a job here. He had no particular plan for Sashiko. And then he started stitching—just for himself, just for balance. He stitched on denim. He couldn’t stop. “If I don’t do it,” he says, “I would lose my balance.” He had spent years trying to convince himself he hated it. Once he stopped trying, the resentment dissolved. 
In 2017, a Japanese indigo dyeing group in New York reached out and asked if he could teach a workshop. He said yes, with one caveat: he had no idea how to teach it. What followed was years of patient reverse-engineering—breaking down movements so instinctive he had never once examined them. “I condensed my 30 years into six hours,” he says. What started as a one-hour workshop is now a minimum of six. Five days, when possible.
He was also, it turned out, uniquely positioned. The artisans who actually held the tradition were largely elderly, largely offline, and not speaking English. Atsushi was everything they weren’t. “Life is so interesting,” he says.

What to Expect and What to Let Go

For his five-day retreat at the Estelle Center this September, Atsushi is clear: the students most likely to struggle are the ones who arrive with the most experience. Muscle memory is powerful. So is the habit of control. Western stitching culture, he observes gently, tends toward precision—toward measuring, marking, managing the needle. Sashiko asks you to stop.
“We don’t try to make even stitches,” he explains. “It happens.” The analogy he reaches for is the kitchen: if you cook every day, you don’t mark each slice of onion with a Sharpie. You find a rhythm, and the rhythm does the work. “The more they try to control the needle, the more they suffer.”
Participants will work through three progressive modules—the foundational Unshin running stitch, applying Sashiko to mending, and Hitomezashi, the structured grid-based style that builds on everything prior. They’ll leave with a stitched Asanoha pattern and a personal mending piece. More than that, a different relationship to the needle.
He doesn’t call Sashiko art. He calls it practice. Process. Something close to prayer. “For us,” he says, “it’s just stitching—but it’s stitching the same way praying is praying.”
Atsushi Futatsuya’s Five-Day Sashiko Stitching Retreat is sold out with a waitlist. It runs September 14–18, 2026 at the Estelle Center for Creative Arts in La Veta, Colorado, with a meet-and-greet the evening of Sunday, September 13.