The thread is made by splicing ramie fibre by hand. Miyako jōfu is a linen cloth: ramie is split and joined by hand into thread, dyed with indigo, and then woven. It is said to have been created at the end of the sixteenth century by a woman named Inaishi, and from 1637 it was designated as cloth to be paid under the poll tax — which is the single fact that shaped everything about the textile afterwards.

The work is divided into stages, each of them handled by different hands: making the thread, the design, the bound dyeing, the weaving, the washing and finishing, and nuki, which is the repair of faults in the finished cloth. It is spoken of alongside Echigo jōfu and Ojiya chijimi as one of the fine linen textiles of the country, and at the local museum the looms and each of the stages of production are laid out in order, which is the only way to see how much of the work happens before the weaving begins. Miyakojima has an airport and a general hospital of its own, though moving around the island itself assumes a car rather than a bus.

Cloth paid as tax is cloth forced into competition over fineness. Once a standard for the levy exists, the way to satisfy it is to make the work finer, and the refinement of this textile therefore originates in an administrative requirement rather than in anyone's taste. That is an uncomfortable origin for a beautiful thing, and it is the accurate one. Thread is still spliced this thin on Miyakojima because a standard set under that system was inherited by the weavers who came afterwards, and none of them has been willing to work below it.