The night before the birth of Sukajan
Occupation Army soldiers. Near Honmachi 6-chome
(From “Memories Album Kiryu”)
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August 15, 1945. Defeat in the Pacific War.
In the cruel arithmetic of history, that defeat also opened the door for something unexpected: the birth of the sukajan—an object stitched from contradiction.
Many collectors know “vintage sukajan” as a category that commands high prices. Fewer people understand how specific that early supply chain may have been. This is where Kiryu matters: a textile production area with roots reaching back roughly 1,300 years.
As early as September 13—just one month after the Gyokuon broadcast—American occupation soldiers visited Kiryu. One purpose was direct: to purchase textiles and textile products as souvenirs for home.
Kiryu had been spared major air raids, which meant something that sounds mundane but becomes decisive: machinery remained. Some large textile factories had been converted into munitions production; looms and equipment were taken. Yet thousands of looms still survived and continued producing wartime textiles—silk, silk-rayon blends, linings, and other specified materials. At war’s end, stock existed—sometimes openly, sometimes quietly stored where the eyes of authorities wouldn’t immediately land.
The former Japan Silk Co., Ltd. office building where the Occupation Forces were stationed (currently the Silk Co., Ltd. Memorial Hall)
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By early October, troop movements into Gunma accelerated. Units stationed in Kumagaya and nearby areas sent soldiers onward; Kiryu became a node in a rapidly expanding occupation network. The “why” becomes clearer when you examine Kiryu’s prewar position: by the mid-1930s, human silk (rayon) and advanced textiles were not peripheral industries here—they were the city’s economic identity.
After defeat, citizens bartered clothing for food in rural villages. Stations filled with people carrying rucksacks and wrapping cloths. Stalls appeared. Black markets formed—not as cultural curiosities, but as survival infrastructure.
Then the psychological shift: fear of the soldiers, followed by astonishment at their wealth and friendliness, followed by negotiation—broken English, improvised commerce, cigarettes and chocolate exchanged for dolls, fans, textiles. In that gap—between despair and trade—souvenir culture becomes possible.
Occupation Army soldiers directing traffic at Nishikicho Rotary
(From “Memories Album Kiryu”)
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One meeting matters in this origin story: the encounter between an officer who recognized Kiryu’s manufacturing value and a purchasing agent who understood how to mobilize local skill. Add one more ingredient: a population of people with sewing and embroidery ability—many of them war widows—whose labor was not theoretical but necessary.
If you want to understand sukajan, you must understand that it’s born from skill meeting demand under pressure.
Kiryu had a phrase that reveals its personality: “Nishijin in the west, Kiryu in the east.” Compared to Kyoto’s aristocratic tradition, Kiryu’s reputation is more open, more practical—rougher perhaps, but deeply adaptive. Unions coordinated exports, researched materials, and evolved with time.
War is political; defeat crushes people. But the same defeat can also force invention. That is the paradox sukajan carries: it is beauty born under constraint.
Decades later, some original sukajan that traveled to America returned in the 1980s via Japanese buyers and collectors. The jacket became a boomerang of memory. And its birthplace—Kiryu—remained a small city about 100 km from Tokyo, hidden behind the larger mythos of Yokosuka.
Rayon Satin
Kiryu textile factory in the early Showa era
From “100 Years of Kiryu, Isesaki, and Greenery (Kyoto Publishing)”
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Jinken—human silk.
Even now, when you listen to people who remember those days, you still hear the word repeated like a texture you can’t unfeel: “Jinken, jinken.” Rayon wasn’t merely a substitute; it was a modern miracle—smooth like silk, glossy, dense, and capable of turning scarcity into spectacle.
Shusuori—satin weave.
The weave matters as much as the fiber. Satin-back and back-satin weaves carry that signature luster while being vulnerable to snags—a physical reminder that luxury can be delicate. When we say “rayon satin,” we’re naming a union of material and structure. And this union is the surface language of early vintage sukajan.
Especially from the late 1940s into the early 1960s, Kiryu’s human-silk textiles—already internationally admired before the war—were positioned perfectly for occupation-era demand. At this time, acetate was not yet widely practical. Human silk dominated. It was cheaper than silk, scalable with effort, and visually convincing enough to read as “special” in the eyes of buyers hungry for beauty after violence.
Scene from an obi fabric exhibition in the early Showa era
From “100 Years of Kiryu, Isesaki, and Greenery” (Kyoto Publishing)
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Kiryu’s textile story is not just production—it is strategy. Market research teams, overseas representatives, relentless product development, union coordination. It is the kind of organized ambition that makes a city legible to foreign powers. If America “knew” where Japan’s silk and human-silk strength lived, Kiryu was on that map.
And like all star industries, textiles eventually faced structural decline: recessions, oversupply, government loom purchases, closures, and then the shift toward synthetics like acetate and nylon. This is why fabric can date a jacket: a vintage acetate sukajan often points toward the 1960s; earlier rayon satin points you back toward that raw postwar window where Kiryu’s material advantage mattered most.
A hand-drawn graph showing the amount of yarn used in paulownia production areas (unit: 10,000 kg) from 1945 to 1948.
From the history of modern Kiryu export textiles
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Horizontal sewing machine (Yokoburi Shishu)
Singer horizontal swing sewing machine (Kiryu City Tourism Exchange Division)
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Have you heard the name “Yokoburi”?
This is one of the most important words in sukajan literacy—because it explains why early embroidery feels alive. Unlike lockstitch sewing machines used for garment construction, the horizontal swing embroidery machine has no presser foot or feed dog. The needle moves side-to-side; the fabric is guided by the craftsman’s hands; and the stitch width is controlled by knee pressure.
Computerized multi-head embroidery can be perfect—flat, clean, repeatable. But the beauty of yokoburi is its human variance. Even if the pattern is “the same,” no two pieces are identical. Different hands create different rhythm. That variability becomes a signature—the collector’s heartbeat.
Kiryu’s later shift toward jacquard and computerized systems in the 1970s increased productivity, but it also marks a cultural turning point: from hand-guided expression to industrial repeatability. In the postwar era, however, the horizontal swing machine was a bridge between older hand embroidery and the speed required by occupation-era demand.
Imports of sewing machines accelerated in the Taisho era. Singer’s presence in port cities like Yokohama and Kobe—combined with aggressive sales methods—pushed machines into tailors, factories, and households. In Kiryu, machines were introduced through wholesalers and often modified locally, because repair workers and mechanical talent were part of the city’s industrial DNA.
This matters because sukajan was not born in a vacuum. It was born in a city where the entire ecosystem—material, machine, repair culture, union coordination, and workforce—already existed.
In postwar scarcity, widows raised children. Young girls learned. Side jobs became full industries. By the late 1940s, businesses organized, and by the late 1950s Kiryu’s share of horizontal embroidery output is described as overwhelming. In other words: Kiryu wasn’t “one place that made some sukajan.” It was a place that could scale the technique that made sukajan visually distinct.
Dawn of the sewing industry
Kiryu’s wartime conversion—looms delivered, factories restructured—reads like a tragedy. Yet the leftover machinery, the idle embroidery equipment, and the forced improvisation created a pathway: from weaving city to garment-making capability.
After the war, the garment industry surged under occupation demand. People changed jobs rapidly. Embroidery shops began sewing jackets. Buyers began selling finished pieces. Even unrelated trades drifted into production. It sounds chaotic because it was—yet that chaos is the exact condition under which new “industries” are born.
What looks like “legend” later is often just unrecorded coordination in real time: who had machines, who had thread, who had access to materials, who could sell to which channel, who spoke enough English to negotiate, who could attract the attention of buyers or officers.
Gunma Sewing Tokyo Branch
From “Gunsui Shinbun Tsuzuri”
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A Tokyo branch opens. A sewing company becomes a bridge. Export anecdotes appear. Complaints, price shifts, new naming, new markets—this is the postwar pattern: product becomes product-and-story, then becomes livelihood.
And that “product” blossoms into the occupation-era souvenir that we now call sukajan.
Occupation Forces
Current Kiryu Textile Memorial Museum
Built in 1934 (Showa 9), Nationally Registered Tangible Cultural Property
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On September 13, 1945—about a month after the war ended—occupation forces gathered at what is now the Kiryu Textile Memorial Museum. Weavers sold goods that war had made difficult to move. Production restarted. Woven inventory became souvenirs: handkerchiefs, ties, mufflers, tablecloths. Dolls and battledores sold well. It wasn’t just commerce; it was the earliest shape of postwar cultural exchange.
Occupation forces traveled Japan searching for ceramics, silk fabrics, and regional goods. Part of it was personal—souvenirs as proof of presence, gifts for family, a way to soften separation. Part of it was administrative—tracking supply and stabilizing production for a society shifting from war economy to survival economy.
At street level, there were always more materials than official channels suggested. Secret stock, black-market flow, improvised routes. Childhood memories describe heaps of parachute silk. That detail matters because it tells you how “wartime material” becomes “postwar object.”
Yokohama was burned down. Large pier on the upper left, Hotel New Grand on the right
From “The End of the Japanese Empire” (Shinjinbutsu Oraisha)
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The occupation expanded with astonishing speed: Yokosuka landings, headquarters in Yokohama, GHQ operations in Tokyo, troop distribution across the country. This scale matters because it created a moving market—thousands of individuals with money, nostalgia, and a culture of personalization.
In a Japan with no soap, scarce food, patched clothing, and a future that felt like darkness, people still had to decide: How do we live? And from that question, markets are born.
When you imagine sukajan being born under these conditions, the jacket changes: it stops being “retro fashion” and becomes an object of compressed human history—economics, shame, ingenuity, and pride all stitched into one wearable surface.
Souvenir Shop
Souvenir shop in Yokohama/Isezaki Town
From "Mainichi Graph Special Edition Sun Photo Newspaper 3 1945" (Mainichi Shimbun)
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After the war, Kiryu was sometimes nicknamed “Shanghai of the northern Kanto region”—a sign of how dense the street economy became. Around stations, stalls multiplied. Streets filled with people trying to trade their way into tomorrow.
This is the setting in which “souvenir shop” becomes more than a storefront. It becomes a system: a place where occupation demand meets local craft, where textiles become cultural objects, where personalization becomes a business model.
A survey of vendors in 1946 shows how survival-shaped the black market was: war victims, unemployed, veterans, survivors. It begins as necessity and gradually becomes a social space—something “essential” rather than merely illegal.
Kiryu was viewed as having heavy black-market activity, and textile businesses faced harsh scrutiny. Yet from the private sector perspective, leftover war materials and inventory were real. When the official customer (the Japanese military) disappears overnight, people find new customers. In 1945–46, those customers had uniforms, money, and a culture of customization.
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A purchasing agent hears about a social gathering, rushes to the right restaurant, and speaks with a mix of hospitality and calculation: welcome Kiryu with all its might. From there, he moves fast—English lessons, displays inside cooperative buildings, products positioned as souvenirs.
This is the birth of a local “souvenir shop” framework. And inside that framework, soldiers request embroidery directly on their uniforms—because they can recognize skill. When the uniform customization becomes too popular and gets restricted, the desire doesn’t vanish. It redirects into jackets.
The most important shift is subtle: demonstration becomes marketing. Young female craftsmen are hired so customers can watch the work. Names are embroidered proactively using arrival lists. Fees are paid to intermediaries. This is not “cute postwar nostalgia”—it is advanced commerce under pressure.
Soon, sukajan appears in Ginza stalls. The pipeline from Kiryu to Yokohama and beyond strengthens. Kiryu produced; Yokohama sold; Tokyo amplified. And the garment becomes a moving emblem of the era—contradiction made wearable.
If you want a final thesis for why Kiryu matters, it’s this:
Kiryu didn’t just make early sukajan possible. It made early sukajan scalable—through materials, machinery, labor networks, and an industrial temperament that could pivot from war to survival without waiting for permission.
Today, when a collector holds a true early piece—rayon satin shining, yokofuri stitches slightly uneven in the most human way—they are holding more than a jacket. They are holding a city’s hidden continuity.