Five kasuri figures and four, alternating. Yaeyama minsā is a woven sash in which groups of five and four kasuri marks are set alternately, and that arrangement is fixed rather than being one pattern among several. At the workshops visitors can sit down at a loom and weave a small piece themselves, which is the quickest way to understand the tension of the warp and the timing of the foot pedals against each other.

Because the number of figures cannot be altered, the differences between one weaver's work and another's have to emerge elsewhere: in the colour, and in how densely the ground is beaten in. Ishigaki has an airport and a hospital of its own, so life on the island is largely self-contained, though prices and rents are correspondingly high for somewhere this far from anywhere. The cloth exists for one purpose, as a sash, so its width and length are also fixed, and the attention that would otherwise go into varying the format goes into the weaving itself.

A textile with a prescribed pattern looks like one in which skill would be hard to see. In practice the opposite is true: with the design fixed, the eye goes straight to whether the kasuri marks line up and whether the ground is beaten evenly, and neither of those can be disguised by a clever design. Constraint exposes the maker rather than protecting them, which is the reverse of what people assume about traditional patterns. A district that weaves the same thing over and over is examined a good deal more closely than one whose designs change every season.