The clothes are sold where they are sewn. Kojima is a denim district — cutting, sewing, and the finishing work that gives a pair of jeans its particular surface — and along four hundred metres of street in Ajino, the manufacturers keep their own shops. What matters is not the retail so much as the fact that some of them will let you watch the finishing: the washing down, the abrasion, the hand work at the very end that decides where a garment will wear pale. See that first and the prices stop looking arbitrary, because you have watched somebody spend an hour on one leg. You also stop wondering why garments of the same cut look so different from one door to the next, since the cloth is frequently the same and the hands afterwards are not. The shops are small and the staff are often the people who made what is hanging up.

Kurashiki's centre is half an hour away by car, and work in sewing and finishing is advertised locally throughout the year rather than seasonally. Step off the street and this is a quiet town of houses and workshops, so anyone expecting a shopping district will be disappointed within a block of leaving it.

The point of buying at the source is not the price, which is rarely lower here and is sometimes higher than it would be in a city. Kojima made cotton work clothes and school uniforms before it made denim, so the sewing skill was already here when the demand changed. The first domestic jeans were produced in this town. That history is why the shops are manufacturers rather than retailers. It is that the label has a person behind it, and you have just spent twenty minutes watching them work.