Bind the thread before dyeing it, and the bound parts stay white. Kurume-gasuri is a cotton kasuri: the sections of yarn that will form the pattern are bound tightly before the thread goes into the indigo, so that the dye cannot reach them, and the cloth is afterwards woven from those marked threads. The position and length of each binding determines the design, which means the pattern is essentially finished before weaving begins.

It was designated an Important Intangible Cultural Property in 1957, and the technique is described as having more than two hundred years behind it, most of that time as ordinary working clothing rather than as anything precious. Weaving houses are scattered across the Chikugo plain, twenty-one of them listed by the trade association alone, and at several of them the sound of the looms can be heard from the road outside before you find the door. Kurume is a Shinkansen stop with a good many hospitals in it; the weaving houses themselves are about twenty minutes out from the city by car, among the fields rather than in the town.

Cloth made this way conceals its own errors until the end. At the thread stage the pattern is invisible; only when the fabric comes off the loom does anyone learn whether the figures have met correctly, so there is exactly one moment of verification and it comes last. That is a demanding way to work, and it puts all the discipline at the front of the process. Two hundred years of continuity means two hundred years of preparation exact enough to survive a single verification at the very end.