Black Bear Brand Jeans Begin and End in Okayama
Black Bear Brand Jeans Begin and End in Okayama
Woven there, cut there, sewn there, finished there.
A coast that grew cotton
Kojima sits on the Seto Inland Sea in Okayama. In the Edo period the farmers there reclaimed land from the sea. The soil came up too salty for rice, so they planted cotton, which can take the salt. That is where the story of Japanese jeans begins, in a field that was once the sea.
Socks, uniforms, then jeans
When motorized sewing machines came in the Meiji era, Kojima started making tabi socks in great numbers. Later came school uniforms. Today around seventy percent of the school uniforms in Japan are made in Okayama prefecture. A few miles inland, the town of Ibara began weaving a thick indigo cloth in 1901.
In April 1965 the first jeans ever made in Japan were sewn in Kojima. The region never looked back. In 2023 the Sanbi region, Okayama with eastern Hiroshima, made 23.9 million square meters of denim. That is almost all of the denim made in Japan.
The cloth
My denim is woven on shuttle looms. A shuttle loom carries the weft yarn back and forth across the cloth, and every pass closes the edge. That clean edge is the selvedge. The cloth comes off the loom about 75 centimeters wide, narrow and dense.
The yarn is rope dyed. It is dipped into indigo again and again. It comes out of the vat a pale yellow green and turns blue in the air. The indigo stays in the outer ring of each yarn and the core stays white. Over years of wear the blue gives way to that white core, and that is where the character of a pair of jeans comes from. My denim sits in the 13 ounce range.
The sewing room
The jeans are cut and sewn in Okayama by a family sewing room that has run for more than five generations. They put a triple needle seam on the yoke and the rise. The button is a Black Bear Brand YKK donut button. The back patch is Horween leather.
Every pair of men's jeans is cut with the same long inseam, and that is on purpose. How a pant sits is personal. I roll mine. Other people have them hemmed in person, after the first wash, once the denim has settled. Each person does their own thing.
Why Okayama
I am in Okayama twice a year. I go because the best denim in the world is woven there and the best people I know at sewing jeans work there. Thirteen years ago I brought Black Bear Brand back, and I wanted the jeans to come from the place that does it best. In Okayama the whole process lives in one prefecture, from the loom to the last stitch.
A Way Of Life.
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