Kojima

Kojima (児島), a district in southern Kurashiki, is revered worldwide as the birthplace of Japanese denim and the origin of selvedge jeans production outside America. In 1965, Maruo Clothing (now Big John) produced Japan's first domestically-made jeans in Kojima, pioneering techniques that would define Japanese denim's reputation for craftsmanship, attention to detail, and innovative dyeing methods. The district's textile heritage dates to the Edo period when local weavers produced gakuran (school uniform) fabric and canvas sailcloth.

Today, Kojima is a pilgrimage site for denim enthusiasts, with the Jeans Street (児島ジーンズストリート) — a 400-meter shopping street lined with over 30 boutiques and factory outlets selling premium Japanese denim brands like Momotaro, Japan Blue, Kapital, and Studio D'Artisan. The area showcases the full denim ecosystem: traditional indigo dyeing workshops, vintage sewing machines on display, custom tailoring services, and museums documenting jeans history. Kojima's denim obsession extends to civic infrastructure — blue-painted vending machines, denim-themed manhole covers, and even a denim-themed tourist information center. The craftsmanship emphasizes old-style shuttle looms producing selvedge denim (characterized by finished edges that prevent fraying), rope dyeing techniques, and hand-finishing that creates unique fade patterns over years of wear.

The district's rise to denim prominence built on skills the area had already spent generations refining. Kojima's weavers moved from sailcloth and school-uniform fabric into work-wear textiles as Japan industrialized, and the same attention to durable, heavyweight cotton weaving that made the town reliable for canvas eventually made it a natural fit for denim once American jeans culture arrived in postwar Japan. Local manufacturers studied vintage American denim closely, reverse-engineering shrinkage patterns, thread counts, and dye saturation in pursuit of fabric that could match — and in the eyes of many collectors, surpass — the originals.

That reputation for obsessive reproduction now underpins a broader identity as a craft town rather than a purely industrial one. Alongside the boutiques, small workshops still operate indigo vats using natural fermentation methods rather than synthetic dye baths, a slower and more labor-intensive process that produces the deep, slightly uneven blue prized by denim enthusiasts worldwide. Walking the district on a weekday morning, when shutters are still going up and dye workers are tending vats before the shops open, gives a clearer sense of Kojima as a working textile town rather than simply a shopping destination.