As a part of their online interview series for The Textile Museum Journal, contributing scholar Yu-Ning Chen offers an historical and literary analysis of “mosurin,” a plain-weave wool fabric made in Imperial Japan (1868-1945). Chen discusses military-related patterns on mosurin fabric, representations of mosurin in print media, including Japanese prewar textbooks, and descriptions of both the consumer culture surrounding this fabric and the female factory labor involved in its production in modern Japanese literature. Chen argues that mosurin in Imperial Japan was linked with popular consumerism, labor activism and imperial and wartime propaganda.