The cotton is grown, spun and woven in the same place. Moka momen begins in the field: the cotton is cultivated locally, spun into thread, and woven on takahata looms without the material leaving the district at any stage. At the local hall a number of those looms are set up, and visitors can try both the weaving and the indigo dyeing rather than watching them.

A takahata is worked seated, with the heddles raised and lowered by foot, which frees both hands and makes finer work possible than a simpler loom will allow — the difference shows up in the closeness of the weave. Cotton is not exclusively a crop of warm regions; it was grown across the Kantō plain, so the fields and the weaving were never far apart here and the supply chain was a walk rather than a shipment. The Moka railway and the roads connect to Utsunomiya, and there is employment in the industrial estates nearby, so households here are rarely dependent on the cloth alone and the craft is not carrying a whole local economy.

A district that starts from its own raw material has its output capped by its acreage. Buying in thread from elsewhere would lift that ceiling immediately, and this district has declined to do it, which means the scale of production is set each year by how much cotton is actually in the ground. That is a deliberate limitation rather than a failure to modernise, and it is the reason the output stays small. The price of the cloth includes the work of the field, all of it, and there is no version of this fabric from which that work has been removed.