White pattern lifted out of a deep indigo ground. Yumihama-gasuri is a cotton kasuri woven in the Yumigahama district of western Tottori, and what identifies it is exactly that: white figures standing out of a dark blue field. The pattern is produced by binding sections of the thread before dyeing, so that the indigo cannot reach the bound parts, and the cloth is then woven from those pre-marked threads.

If the binding is even slightly out of position the pattern will not meet correctly once it is woven, which means the greater part of the labour in this textile happens before anybody touches the loom at all. Weaving has continued here for around two hundred and fifty years, since the Edo period, and the cotton itself was grown locally, on the sandy ground of the Yumigahama spit. Yonago is a railway junction with an airport close by, and the city has shopping and hospitals of its own, so this is a producing district attached to a functioning regional centre rather than to a village.

Sand is poor ground for rice and good ground for cotton. It drains freely, and cotton tolerates the salt that comes with a coastal spit, so land that could not be made into paddy was put under cotton instead — and weaving turned that crop into cash. The appearance of the cloth begins there, in the soil, rather than in anybody's idea of what a textile should look like. A deep indigo ground with white figures lifted out of it is, at bottom, what a district produces when it cannot grow rice and has to find something else to sell.