Japanese Denim Cults

A SHORT walk from the Ueno train station, near a hill where a doomed
band of loyalists to the Tokugawa Shogunate once made a fierce and
celebrated last stand against imperial Meiji forces, is a destination
sacred to another breed of die-hards: devotees of the Japanese denim
cult.

At first glance, Hinoya Plus Mart is not much of a
shrine. Open at the front, tucked beneath an overpass, and with its
wares floating from rails hung above a cobbled sidewalk, it looks like
the kind of place where big news might be a sale on three-packs of tube
socks.

But aficionados are not put off by Hinoya’s low-rent
aura, or by the dry-goods shops and fish markets that stretch for
blocks around. Initiates know that beyond the wall of fluttering pant
legs lies a trove of bluejeans produced by niche Japanese labels in the
kind of ultradesirable limited editions that recall Richard Serra
lithographs or Red Shoulder chardonnay. There is even a kind of daffy
ineffable poetry in the labels’ names: Skull or Skinny or Oni or Dubble
Works or Samurai or Sugar Cane.

Well into the era of so-called
premium denim, bluejeans priced at $200 and more, there are those who
find the notion of artisanal jeans an affront not just to the wallet
(the average pair of jeans sold in America costs about $20, according
to Marshall Cohen, of the market research group NPD) but also to the
memory of Levi Strauss. After all, his legendary 1873 design was for a
pair of unkillable, hard-wearing work trousers intended to outfit
miners bound for the ore-rich hills and sloughs and streams of the
California gold rush. That, of course, was an age when premium value
was set on mass- and not microproduction, a time before the market
inverted itself and transformed everyday stuff like coffee or
photographs into artificial rarities.