Imported from America: tufting goes abroad

On 1 November 1956 the Emperor and Empress of Japan toured Suminoe’s Sumiyoshi plant and looked at its tufted products. In 1974 the carpet industry’s association made the date Japan’s Carpet Day, which it still is.¹1“Japan’s Carpet Day, 1 November, marks the Emperor’s 1956 visit to Suminoe”, 1956, research note. Record The machine behind those products had come from the United States. In 1954, by the company’s own history, Suminoe was the first in Japan to bring in a mass-production tufting carpet machine from America.²2“1954: Japan imports its first mass-production tufting machine from America (Suminoe)”, 1954, research note. Record

This chapter follows tufting out of the United States into Japan and western Europe, up to the late 1960s. China and India, where the story runs longer and the sources are of a different kind, have chapters of their own (chapters 8 and 10). The hand-held tufting gun spread by another route and is the subject of chapter 9.

An import everywhere

The research brief behind this book looked for the arrival of tufting in Chinese, Japanese, German, French and Dutch sources, and in Hindi. Every national record it found described tufting as imported from America, and none named an independent inventor.³3“No country claims to have invented tufting”, research note. Record An absence of that kind cannot be proved, and it needs one qualification. Hong Kong sources credit Anthony Yeh (葉元章) of Tai Ping Carpets with inventing the tufting gun in 1973, and call it “the world’s first”; one English source says the “first electrical tufting gun” was patented in 1960.⁴4“No country claims to have invented tufting”, research note. Record That is a claim for a hand tool, not for the method, and chapter 9 weighs it. Where the arrival of the machine can be dated, the import accounts hold.⁵5“No country claims to have invented tufting”, research note. Record

Japan: an old weaver buys a new machine

By its own account, Suminoe was founded in 1883 by Denshichi Murata, a rice merchant who bought looms to weave carpets, and was incorporated as Suminoe Textile in 1913.⁶6“Suminoe (Suminoe Textile Co.)”, founded 1883; incorporated 1913, Suminoe (Suminoe Textile Co.). Record Its origins lie in dantsu, hand-woven carpet.⁷7“Everywhere, tufting was adopted by outsiders, not established weavers”, research note. Record The 1954 machine may not have been its first. A paper by Ōsumi Tadashi on the history of floor coverings, so far read only in machine-read snippets, reportedly says that Suminoe imported a used narrow-width tufting machine for trials in 1952, and that its broadloom machine of 1957 came from the American firm Super Tufter.⁸8“1954: Japan imports its first mass-production tufting machine from America (Suminoe)”, 1954, research note. Record Until the paper itself is read, 1954 stands as the company’s date.

The company’s own sources disagree on when sales began: its investor pages give 1956 for household carpet, its securities report February 1957 for mass sales.⁹9“1954: Japan imports its first mass-production tufting machine from America (Suminoe)”, 1954, research note. Record Its product for the mass market was Tufton, launched in 1957 at about ¥9,900 for a 4.5-mat unit, and conceived as a carpet that an average salaried section chief could buy with his bonus.¹⁰10“1957: Suminoe’s Tufton brings carpet to the Japanese mass market”, 1957, research note. Record Japanese Wikipedia calls it, in translation, “the turning point from made-to-order to ready-made, bringing carpet to the mass market”.¹¹11“1957: Suminoe’s Tufton brings carpet to the Japanese mass market”, 1957, research note. Record According to its corporate history, Suminoe went on to concentrate production at Nara in 1977, to make Japan’s first domestic carpet tiles there in August 1980, and to win JIS certification for tufted carpet at the plant in March 1983.¹²12“Suminoe (Suminoe Textile Co.)”, founded 1883; incorporated 1913, Suminoe (Suminoe Textile Co.). Record

The traffic had once run the other way. Sakai’s hand-woven carpet began in 1831, when the yarn merchant Fujimoto Shōzaemon had Izumi Rihei weave it and sold it as Sakai dantsu. His grandson Fujimoto Sōtarō (藤本荘太郎), called the “dantsu king”, improved the technique and went to America to promote it abroad, and the city’s page says exports flourished in the Meiji era.¹³13“Sakai dantsu (1831), and the ‘dantsu king’ who went to America”, 1831, research note. Record

The institutions show the same line from hand-weaving to tufting. The Japan Carpet Manufacturers’ Association traces its origin to the Osaka Prefecture Dantsu Trade Association, founded in 1895. The present body was formed in September 1995 by merging two older ones, one of which had been founded in 1968 as the Japan Tufted Carpet Association and renamed in 1973.¹⁴14“Japan’s tufting association descends from an 1895 hand-knotting guild”, 1895, research note. Record From 1971 the industry sent study missions to the American and European carpet industries; the title of a 1981 report, not yet found in any library catalogue, numbers it the tenth.¹⁵15“Japan Carpet Association study-mission reports on the US and European carpet industries”, 1960s–1981. Record In 1987 Maruyama Takao of the Osaka Prefectural Textile Research Institute’s Sakai branch reviewed the development of the tufting machine in Sen’i Gakkaishi; the research notes give the 1981 mission report as its only reference, which has still to be seen on the page.¹⁶16丸山孝雄 (Maruyama Takao), “丸山孝雄「タフティング・マシンの変遷と今後の開発課題」(Past, Present and Future of Tufting Technology)”, 1987, 繊維学会誌 (Sen'i Gakkaishi) 43(1), P22–. Record The association’s own history of the industry, from hand-woven dantsu to the present, was published in April 2008.¹⁷17日本カーペット工業組合, 『日本カーペット工業史』 History of the Japanese Carpet Industry (2008), 2008. Record

Japan also had a setback of its own. In a 2025 column the association wrote that “from around 1980 an unfair dust-mite problem arose” (in translation); the word “unfair” is the industry’s own judgement.¹⁸18“Japan’s carpet industry was hit by a 1980s dust-mite panic”, c. 1980, research note. Record

The hand tool came later and by a separate route. Yamagata Dantsu was founded in 1935 by Junnosuke Watanabe, a cotton weaver, to give work to a district hit by bad harvests, and he brought carpet technicians from Beijing (seven in one account, one in another). The company says it added hand-tufted rugs, called tesashi dantsu and nicknamed “Craftons”, in 1965 to save cost and time; elsewhere it says only “the 1960s”.¹⁹19“Yamagata Dantsu (Oriental Carpet Mills)”, founded 1935; hand-tufting from 1965, Yamagata Dantsu (Oriental Carpet Mills). Record In Thailand, according to its parent company’s timeline, Royal Thai was set up in 1967 by the Srivikorn family with Hong Kong and Philippine carpet makers, first sold carpet in Thailand under the “Tai Ping” brand and began exporting as Royal Thai in 1972. It makes hand-tufted and Axminster carpet, mainly for hotels.²⁰20“Royal Thai (Thailand Carpet Manufacturing / TCM Corporation)”, founded 1967, Royal Thai (Thailand Carpet Manufacturing / TCM Corporation). Record

Britain and West Germany

In Britain, according to the company’s history, Neville Cormack, aged 26, bought two tufting machines at a machinery exhibition in Manchester in 1955. In 1956 he founded Cormar Carpets “with the advent of a new method of making carpet, called tufted”, starting at Nunn Hills Mill and moving to Brookhouse Mill, Greenmount, in 1959.²¹21“Cormar Carpets”, founded 1956, Cormar Carpets. Record The machine makers came too. Grace’s Guide records that Cobble Brothers Machinery opened a British subsidiary in 1955, and that by 1960 Singer had taken over the American parent; the resulting Singer-Cobble also absorbed British Tufting Machinery of Blackburn.²²22“Cobble (Cobble Brothers / Singer-Cobble / Vandewiele)”, 1930s (Cobble brothers); UK subsidiary 1955, Cobble (Cobble Brothers / Singer-Cobble / Vandewiele). Record The machine side of that story belongs to chapter 5.

West Germany has the clearest contemporary witness. In September 1959 the trade journal boden wand decke named three producers, Tuftex of Hameln, Tufton of Emsdetten and Dura Tufting of Fulda, and reported that after a good three years of industrial use tufting already made 10 to 15 per cent of West German textile floor-covering output.²³23“1959: German trade press says tufting is used ‘only by outsiders’ and is breaking through”, 1959, research note. Record

Evidently the tufting process, which in Germany has been in use only for a short time and hitherto only by outsiders, is breaking through.

boden wand decke, September 1959 (translated)

Dura, the journal said, had been founded three years earlier and had a turnover of about DM 15 million.²⁴24“1959: German trade press says tufting is used ‘only by outsiders’ and is breaking through”, 1959, research note. Record The starting date is not settled. FuldaWiki says Christian Wirth founded Dura in 1955 and was the first to bring tufting from the United States to Europe.²⁵25“1959: German trade press says tufting is used ‘only by outsiders’ and is breaking through”, 1959, research note. Record German Wikipedia gives 1956 for the start of industrial tufting in Germany, a sentence that may rest on Mecheels, Vogler and Kurz’s history of textiles (2009), though the footnote has not been seen; Groz-Beckert dates European industrial tufting to 1955, and Baunetz Wissen to the early 1950s.²⁶26Stefan Mecheels, Mecheels, Vogler & Kurz, Kultur- & Industriegeschichte der Textilien (2009), p. 475, 2009, ISBN 978-3-9812485-3-1. Record

Germany tufted early, but no German builder of industrial broadloom tufting machines has turned up. German Wikipedia gives the machine’s lineage to Looper, Cobble and Muse, and Card-Monroe, and names Groz-Beckert as a leading supplier of gauge parts and Hofmann Handtuft-Technik as the German maker of hand-tufting machines.²⁷27“Germany tufted early but never built the machines”, research note. Record Several tufting-machine patents were filed in Germany, but whose they were has not been checked.²⁸28“Germany tufted early but never built the machines”, research note. Record

France, the Netherlands and Belgium

In France the process is credited to Louis Balsan. French Wikipedia says that in 1954 he succeeded his cousin François at the head of the family firm and steered it towards “a new process he brought back from the United States: tufting” (in translation).²⁹29“France: Louis Balsan brings tufting back from the United States (1954)”, 1954, research note. Record The heritage association AMSI-Balsan says that the first tufted product was carpet in carded wool, with synthetics later, and describes Louis as running the firm from 1954 to 1973 under the presidency of his cousin Jean de Layre. Balsan’s own catalogue dates the introduction of tufting to 1954, while French Wikipedia’s article on the firm heads a section “La reconversion de 1955”. Production ran on machines 5 metres wide, described as unique in France. No source yet dates the first machine or the first metre.³⁰30“France: Louis Balsan brings tufting back from the United States (1954)”, 1954, research note. Record

The Netherlands came later. At Genemuiden, in Overijssel, “the first tufting machine, a kind of giant sewing machine with hundreds of needles, arrived in 1967” (in translation), says the regional canon. By the end of 1972 ten factories there had tufting machines, and ten years later 49 machines made 23 million square metres.³¹31“Netherlands: tufting machines installed at Genemuiden in 1967”, 1967, research note. Record

Belgium, which the research brief counts among the three largest exporters of tufted carpet (a ranking still to be traced to its source), has no dated beginning in any source found.³²32“Belgium: no source dates tufting’s arrival in West Flanders”, research note. Record The nearest anchor is American: in 1964 the tufted-carpet maker Trend Mills opened a subsidiary at Ronse, in East Flanders, and after Champion International took it over in 1969 tufted broadloom was concentrated there. Beaulieu, founded in 1959 by Roger De Clerck at Wielsbeke in West Flanders, is described as starting with weaving, not tufting.³³33“Belgium: no source dates tufting’s arrival in West Flanders”, research note. Record “Beaulieu International Group”, founded 1959, Beaulieu International Group. Record The flow later reversed. In 1978 De Clerck’s daughter Mieke and her husband Carl Bouckaert founded Beaulieu of America, which became a large tufted-carpet maker in Dalton before its bankruptcy in 2017,³⁴34“Beaulieu International Group”, founded 1959, Beaulieu International Group. Record and in 2013 the Belgian Vandewiele group bought Cobble.³⁵35“Cobble (Cobble Brothers / Singer-Cobble / Vandewiele)”, 1930s (Cobble brothers); UK subsidiary 1955, Cobble (Cobble Brothers / Singer-Cobble / Vandewiele). Record

Outsiders and old weavers

The research brief proposed a pattern: that tufting was taken up by outsiders, not by established weavers.³⁶36“Everywhere, tufting was adopted by outsiders, not established weavers”, research note. Record West Germany’s own trade press said as much in 1959. Japan offers some support. Nihon Jūtan of Sakai installed its first Wilton loom in 1955 but a tufted-carpet machine only in 1981, at its Sakai Takasago plant; Toli, founded in 1919 as a linoleum maker, sold its first carpet, a needlepunch, from June 1967.³⁷37“Japan’s established weavers were the last to tuft”, 1955–1981, research note. Record But Nihon Jūtan was itself founded only in 1951, as an upholstery weaver, and Japan’s first tufter, Suminoe, was a carpet weaver of 1883.³⁸38“Everywhere, tufting was adopted by outsiders, not established weavers”, research note. Record The British case was asserted in the brief without a source.³⁹39“Everywhere, tufting was adopted by outsiders, not established weavers”, research note. Record The pattern is real in places, and not general.

This chapter argues that tufting left the United States as a machine to be bought, reaching Japan in 1954, France in the mid-1950s and the Netherlands in 1967, and that no national record found so far names a rival inventor of the method. The claim that outsiders adopted it first holds for West Germany but not for Japan, where an old weaving house led.