When Kikuo Morimoto, a kimono artisan from Kyoto arrived in Cambodia after the Cambodian civil war, the culture of weaving traditional Cambodian textiles was on the verge of extinction. Morimoto reclaimed idle, deforested land and created a village community sustained almost entirely by the traditional dyeing and weaving of Cambodian textiles. His efforts led to a renaissance in Cambodian traditional textile culture and set an example for combining a self-sustaining village and the revival of traditional culture, an example that has been widely lauded as an antithesis to modern civilization.