Arimatsu, the dyers' town (有松の町並み) 有松の町並み
Eight hundred metres of dyers' houses, and not a single utility pole above the street.
Arimatsu was founded in 1608, when the Owari clan persuaded settlers to establish themselves along the Tōkaidō (the great road between Edo, today's Tokyo, and Kyoto), on an empty stretch between the post stations of Narumi and Chiryū. There were no good fields, so the town came up with a product to sell to travellers: shibori, resist dyeing, where the cloth is tied before being dipped in indigo and white patterns remain in place of the knots. In 1784 a fire burned almost the whole village and the rebuilding took about twenty years: that is what you see today, low houses with wooden lattices, fireproof plastered walls, storehouses with black roofs. On 25 July 2016 the state listed the town's 7.3 hectares among the conservation districts of national importance, classifying it as a dyeing and weaving town: it is the first historic streetscape inside a big city to obtain that title. Since 2019 it has also been Japan Heritage, the label with which the ministry of culture recognises the story of an area, here as the centre with the widest variety of shibori techniques in the world.
Aichi
Arimatsu
