Kurashiki, Okayama Pref. – The first thing you notice when arriving in Kojima is how much the town seems to have given itself over to indigo — especially the neighborhood around Kojima Jeans Street.

Lines of jeans hang above the road. Train station elevators are wrapped in denim graphics. Shop signs, banners and storefronts repeat the same deep-blue vocabulary along the main street and surrounding lanes of what had once been a fading shōtengai (shopping arcade). Even the surrounding attractions seem to orbit the material: There are denim museums and cafes whose names, interiors and menus draw on the history and aesthetics of the workwear.

It could easily feel like a gimmick. Instead, the effect is more persuasive: a production town turning its industrial history into public identity. The polished Japan Blue Jeans storefront sits near smaller boutiques and workshops, where raw denim is arranged by weight, weave and shade, and where words like selvedge, puckering and chain stitch sound like a local dialect.

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