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.