The story
Cloth dyed with akane madder appears among Japan's oldest textile fragments, and the word already colors the sky in the Man'yōshū poetry anthology (8th c.), where 'akane-sasu' — madder-glowing — is a fixed epithet for morning light. The true multi-bath madder process was so laborious it nearly vanished; modern dyers reconstructed it from Shōsōin treasury textiles.
