Yokosuka Dobuita Street & the Sukajan Story: Postwar Origins, GI Souvenirs, and the Rise of Tailor Toyo

Dobuita, then and now

Dobuita Street in Yokosuka is only about three hundred metres long. It runs parallel to Route 16, a block from the main gate of the United States Navy base, and you can walk it end to end in five minutes. Yet for more than seventy-five years this short street has been where the souvenir jacket was sold, worn, argued over and reinvented. The street itself is the best guide to the jacket's history, because its shops have lived through every chapter.

This article looks at Dobuita through its shops: what the street was like in the 1950s, what happened when the customers thinned, and how a handful of shopkeepers kept the craft alive long enough for the world to rediscover it.

The street in the 1950s

Photographs from the period show a street of low wooden and concrete shopfronts hung with English signs, its pavements full of sailors in white. In the 1950s a sign reading "Souvenir Street" hung across Dobuita, and the description was exact. Shops sold lacquer, dolls, silk scarves, photograph albums, tailored suits and, above all, embroidered jackets. A sailor with a few days' leave could order a jacket with his ship's name on it in the morning and collect it before he sailed.

The customers set the style. They wanted the Japan of their imagination, so the shops offered dragons, tigers, eagles, Mount Fuji and cherry blossom. They wanted proof of where they had been, so the jackets carried maps, base names and ship names. They wanted something that looked right at home, so the cut stayed close to an American baseball or flight jacket. A whole visual language grew out of that exchange across the shop counter.

Japanese cinema noticed the street too. Shōhei Imamura's 1961 film Pigs and Battleships is set in and around Dobuita and catches the base town's restless energy, including a young tough in a souvenir jacket.

Shops that shaped the jacket

Many small businesses on and around the street made and sold jackets, and several of them are still there.

Prince Shokai

Founded in 1947, Prince Shokai is one of the oldest names on the street. Its founder, Saburō Watanabe, is credited with designing a famous trio of motifs: a hawk, a tiger and a dragon. According to the family, which now runs the shop in its third generation, the three animals stood for America, Japan and China. The shop has kept a repertoire of around fifty designs, and its made-to-order jackets have been known to involve waits of many months.

MIKASA

MIKASA has sold souvenir jackets on Dobuita since the early 1950s and is perhaps the best-known shop on the street for visitors. Its windows full of satin and embroidery are many people's first sight of a sukajan in its home town.

The custom embroiderers

Behind the shopfronts were, and still are, the embroiderers. A few custom shops on the street still offer hand-guided yokoburi embroidery, sewing names and motifs to order on the same kind of side-swing machine used in the 1950s. Some of their craftspeople have worked the machines for most of their lives, and they are the living link between the postwar jackets and today's.

The quiet decades

The street's fortunes followed the fleet. Through the Korean War and the Vietnam War, Yokosuka was crowded with sailors, and Dobuita did steady business. After the mid-1970s the number of visiting servicemen fell, the yen strengthened, and the souvenir trade shrank. Some shops closed; others turned to Japanese customers.

That turn proved important. Japanese young people had already adopted the jacket as a symbol of rebellious cool, and Japanese fashion magazines treated it as an American casual classic with a local twist. From the 1980s, vintage dealers began bringing old jackets back from the United States, where they had spent decades in the wardrobes of veterans and their families. Japanese collectors studied them, and Japanese makers, led by Toyo Enterprise and its Tailor Toyo label, began reproducing them with scholarly care.

The street rediscovered

In 2018 the shopkeepers of Dobuita formally declared their street the birthplace of the sukajan. The move came at a moment when the jacket was enjoying renewed international attention, after major fashion houses showed embroidered souvenir jackets in their collections and the style spread through global streetwear. The street now has a visitor centre, and its shops welcome travellers from all over the world who come to buy a jacket where it began.

In 2022 the Yokosuka Museum of Art gave the jacket its first major museum exhibition, PRIDE OF YOKOSUKA, with the cooperation of Dobuita's shopkeepers. We report on it in PRIDE OF YOKOSUKA.

Why the old motifs endure

Ask a Dobuita shopkeeper why the dragon, the tiger and the eagle still sell, and the answer is usually simple: they work. The animals have the strength and clarity to fill a jacket's back and read from across a street. They carry layered meanings, from protection and courage to the old East Asian pairing of dragon and tiger. And they are now part of the jacket's own tradition, so that a dragon on satin says "sukajan" as clearly as any label. Our guide How to Read a Sukajan takes the motifs one by one.

What the street teaches a collector

• Design repertoires belong to shops. Long-established shops have their own families of motifs, drawn and refined over decades. Recognising a shop's drawing style is part of reading a vintage jacket.
• Custom work was normal. Many jackets were personalised with names, ships or units. Those details are not damage or later additions; they are often the most valuable part of the piece.
• Old and new coexist. The same street sells new jackets, reproductions and originals. Knowing which is which takes a close look at labels, fabrics and stitching.
• The craft is still alive. A new jacket made on Dobuita by hand-guided embroidery is a genuine continuation of the tradition, not a souvenir of it.

If you plan to visit, our guide Dobuita Street, Birthplace of the Sukajan covers the practicalities. If you cannot, the sukajan collection holds jackets from Dobuita shops alongside vintage and heritage pieces, and our Hunting Salon™ can look for a particular shop, motif or era.

Tailor Toyo and the reproduction tradition

Tailor Toyo is the sukajan label of Toyo Enterprise, a company whose roots go back to the postwar souvenir trade that supplied jackets to American servicemen. Today it is best known for reproductions made with great fidelity to the originals: period fabrics, embroidery designs taken from surviving jackets, and construction details that match specific eras. Its ranges are often organised by period, from early postwar designs to Korean War and Vietnam-era jackets.

For collectors this matters in two ways. A Tailor Toyo reproduction is the most reliable way to wear a classic design without risking a fragile original, and its archive-based approach has helped document the history of the jacket itself. Our essay Toyo Enterprise: The Quiet Giant tells the company's story, and our Tailor Toyo collection holds examples across eras.

Questions readers ask

Is Tailor Toyo the original sukajan maker?

It is the best-known heritage maker with roots in the postwar souvenir trade, though many shops and workshops produced jackets in the early years. Tailor Toyo is valued today for faithful, archive-based reproductions.

How do I tell a Tailor Toyo reproduction from a vintage original?

Labels, fabric condition, zips and construction all help: modern reproductions carry current Tailor Toyo labels and fresh materials, while originals show age, period hardware and earlier labels.

The sukajan reading path

This article is one of a series on the souvenir jacket. Each takes a different angle; together they form the most complete account we know of.

• What Is a Sukajan?: the starting point: materials, motifs and how to choose one.
• History and Origins of the Sukajan: from postwar Yokosuka to global icon.
• Dobuita Street, Birthplace of the Sukajan: visiting the street where it began.
• Kiryu and Sukajan: the embroidery town behind the jacket.
• How to Read a Sukajan: what the dragons, tigers and maps mean.
• The sukajan collection: vintage, modern and collector pieces, each examined in Japan.
• PRIDE OF YOKOSUKA: inside the museum's sukajan exhibition.
• Nostalgia in Satin: the sukajan as museum heritage.