A Quick Guide to Kojima Jeans Street, Kurashiki, Japan

Okayama is best known as the home of Momotaro, a beloved folktale about a boy born from a peach. But the prefecture is also the birthplace of Japanese denim. In Kojima, a district of Kurashiki City, there’s a hub of stores and outlets where you can find the very best denim products. Here is a quick guide to Kojima Denim Street.

After World War II, when Japan was still occupied by the US, young people began to embrace American pop culture. Along with jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and movie stars of the ‘50s and ‘60s, denim jeans became the ultimate symbol of cool. American servicemen would sell their old jeans to Japanese thrift stores for extra cash, and a new trend was born. But as the pants became more popular, the rarer and more expensive they were.

To keep up with demand, local retailers began importing American jeans, but they were too expensive for the young consumers, who had anyway become used to the soft, worn-in feel of secondhand jeans. And that’s when Kojima, a small textile district in Okayama, decided to jump on the opportunity to create Japan’s own denim.

Kojima had been the center of Japan’s school uniform and cotton industries in the ‘20s and ‘30s, so the switch to denim decades later made sense. The only problem was trying to figure out how to incorporate traditional Japanese Indigo dyeing techniques while still maintaining the integrity of American-style denim. After some trial and error, the industry eventually became self-sustaining, and Kojima has been the home of Japanese denim ever since. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).