Three colours: yellow, russet and black. Honba Kihachijō is dyed with plants and mud from the island itself, and the palette is limited to those three. Each has its own material and its own procedure — yellow from kobunagusa grass, russet from the bark of the madami tree — and the black is finished by immersion in iron-rich mud, which is where the depth of it comes from.

At the workshop both the dyeing and the weaving can be watched, so the sequence from raw thread to finished cloth is visible in one place rather than described. Meyu Kōbō has been operating for a hundred and forty-five years and is now the only workshop on Hachijōjima dyeing and weaving kihachijō — a fact that is stated plainly and is worth pausing on. Haneda is fifty-five minutes away by air, which is the only practical connection. Medical provision on the island is limited, and shopping means the shops that are on the island, so a household plans differently here than it would on the mainland.

A textile restricted to three colours has to compete on arrangement. With no possibility of adding to the palette, the differences between one cloth and another come down to how stripes and checks are combined and how the threads are ordered, so the conventions governing those combinations became correspondingly detailed and precise. The constraint came first, and the vocabulary grew up inside it rather than being expanded outward. That is the reverse of how most design is taught, and it produces a body of work that is easy to recognise at a distance and remarkably hard to imitate convincingly.