This study of twelve tsujigahana textile fragments reveals a complex set of entangled histories acquired throughout their four-hundred-year travel through time and space. They once shared a single existence as a garment, likely worn by a high ranking member of sixteenth-century society. Subsequently, the garment was fragmented and made into an alter cloth, crossing the border from a secular to a sacred context. By the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century, the sacred cloth was dismembered and established separate narratives as collectible objects in the hands of individual collectors. Currently, the fragments again share a common history through their classification by modern scholars as tsujigahana. These fragments exist today in museum and private collections, divorced from their original sixteenth-century function as clothing. By tracing the history of a group of Japanese textile fragments, this paper examines the selective processes that transformed a secular garment into a rarefied museum object.
     Based on their stylistic and technical affinity with other sixteenth-century textiles produced using similar decorative techniques, the twelve fragments highlighted in this study are today categorized as tsujigahana, poetically translated as "flowers at the crossroad". The economic and aesthetic value presently ascribed to these fragments is intimately connected to their designation as tsujigahana. Fragments and garments bearing the tsujigahana label maintain their status as highly coveted objects in today's art market. Yet, the current interpretation of tsujigahana as a specific combination of textile techniques is a modern construct that conflates the enigmatic sixteenth-century term with a twentieth-century meaning.
     The methodology employed in this paper —focusing on an object-in-motion within distinct temporal and spatial contexts— exposes information concealed by more traditional approaches to the study of Japanese textiles and casts this group of fragments in a new light. The historicized view of these textiles and the term used to label them challenges modern constructs that link the word tsujigahana to garments previously owned by famous military men. Rather, garments reassembled from fragments provide new evidence for the study of sixteenth-century clothing history and feature women and young men as the primary wearers of tsujigahana. Additionally, tracing the transfiguration from garment to fragments highlights the economic and numinous qualities of cloth as ritual offerings in the practice of donating a deceased's clothing to temple. Moreover, this object-based approach establishes previously unexplored social connections between painters, dyers, and dealers of the modern era who collected tsujigahana textiles and contributed to the metamorphosis of fragments labeled as tsujigahana into cultural relics. The transformed shape, function, and value of these fragments represent significant imprints left on the historical record by subsequent generations and reveal the process through which tsujigahana textiles were preserved and acquired their cultural significance.