Tie the cloth with thread before dyeing it, and the tied parts stay white. Arimatsu was founded on the Tōkaidō in the gap between two post towns, and it made its living selling shibori — bound-resist dyed cloth — to people passing through. Along the highway stand merchant houses in nurigome construction, their walls fully plastered, with mushiko-mado on the upper floor: narrow plastered lattice windows that read from the street as a row of dark slots. The whole frontage is built to resist fire.

Arimatsu was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2016, and shibori workshops and a museum still occupy the street. Meitetsu reaches Nagoya in about twenty-five minutes, work continues on finding uses for the old townhouses, and this is also, straightforwardly, a commuter suburb. In shibori the binding is the pattern: every knot is tied by hand, so two lengths of the same design carry the differences between the hands that tied them, which is visible in the finished cloth if you know to look.

Arimatsu was never a post town, so the grandeur of its merchant houses needs explaining. The trade was selling to people who were walking past and would not be stopping the night. To make a sale under those conditions you need something light, cheap enough to buy on an impulse and distinctive enough to be remembered — and a shibori hand towel meets all three conditions exactly. The town faces squarely onto the highway, with no side that matters more than the frontage, because the direction its customers would arrive from was known in advance and never varied.