Putting the Foot Back on the Ground: From Rikuoh to Gyoda Tabi, and the Contemporary Return of a Century-Old Craft ｜TOKOWAKA

Apr 10
6 min read

Updated: May 2

A woman in a white pleated skirt wears bright red-and-plaid Gyoda tabi, showing how the traditional Japanese split-toe footwear has found a place in contemporary everyday dress. — Courtesy of SAMURAITABI

In the old factory, someone is still racing time

The light in the factory is slightly yellowed. Cut pieces of fabric lie in stacks across the table. The sewing machines start and stop, their rhythm broken, as if someone were still trying to outrun time. A veteran craftsperson sits with his head down, guiding the cloth forward with his fingers, without a wasted motion. It is the quiet that comes only after years of repetition—skill so practiced it begins to look like stubbornness.

What lingers from Rikuoh is not simply the comeback story. It is scenes like these: fewer orders every year, fewer people wearing tabi, an old shop still lit late into the day, someone still seated at the machine. The tabi maker at the center of the drama survives with difficulty, but not out of sentiment. Anyone who has spent decades making something by hand knows that “tradition” alone is never enough to keep it alive. What keeps it from being set aside is simpler than that. Once it is on the foot, the body still recognizes it.

The foot knows the difference first

What makes tabi distinctive is harder to explain than it first appears.

The big toe is separated. The sole rests close against the cloth. At the back, a row of small metal fasteners—kohaze—closes the shoe one hook at a time, shaping it to the foot. The first time you wear a pair, the sensation may not strike you as revelatory. It can feel slightly unfamiliar at first. Then you take a few steps, and the difference begins to come into focus. The toes have room of their own. Pressure moves more directly through the foot. Balance feels steadier.

It is not like an ordinary sock, which gathers all five toes together, or a thick-soled shoe, which dulls feeling altogether. The difference is subtle enough that you may not have words for it. The foot does.

That is why it made perfect sense for Rikuoh to rework tabi construction into running shoes. The drama returns again and again to the idea of a “barefoot feel.” Put plainly, it is trying to give the foot back to the body. Tabi had been doing that all along. This was not a new idea invented by the footwear industry. It was an older technology—old enough, perhaps, to have understood the foot before many modern products did.

A still from the Japanese drama Rikuoh: the male lead studies a black tabi-style shoe that combines traditional craftsmanship with a modern rubber sole, evoking the craft heritage of Gyoda, Saitama. — Image sourced from the official *Rikuoh* website

Why Gyoda? Because an entire city once moved with tabi

That the story is set in Gyoda, in Saitama Prefecture, is no accident.

Gyoda is known as “the town of tabi,” a phrase that can sound like tourism language until you look at the history behind it. The city sits between the Tone and Arakawa rivers, where cotton and indigo were once major crops. Over time, a local foundation for indigo-dyed cotton cloth took shape. Making tabi required more than technical skill. It also required the right fabric, a stable supply chain, and an environment capable of producing experienced hands. Gyoda had all of it.

By the Edo period, local authorities were already encouraging tabi production, and the craft began to take root. By the Meiji era, sewing machines, banking, and electric power had arrived, allowing what had been a small-scale handmade trade to grow into a true industry. At its height, Gyoda produced more than 80 million pairs of tabi a year, roughly 80 percent of Japan’s total output. That number speaks not only to volume, but to the density of a local economy. Some people cut cloth. Some stitched. Some took orders. Some raised children on the income the trade made possible. At one time, the rhythm of the city was set by tabi.

Oshijo Castle, a well-known historic landmark in Gyoda, Saitama Prefecture, seen in sunlight with a wooden bridge in the foreground. — Oshijo Castle, a Gyoda landmark that appears in *Rikuoh* | Photo by tokowaka

How much invisible knowledge goes into a single pair

That, too, is part of why tabi still hold people’s attention. Their appeal lies not simply in their history, but in how precisely they embody things most wearers never see.

A traditional pair of Gyoda tabi enters a highly detailed sequence of work the moment the fabric arrives. First comes preparation for cutting: the cloth is arranged and stacked so the pieces will not shift once the blades come down. Then comes cutting itself, each section shaped precisely according to pattern. After that, attention turns to the kohaze structure at the back. There is thread-passing, then reinforcement stitching to secure the threads in place, followed by the addition of backing cloth on the reverse side. Only after that foundation is set are the metal fasteners attached.

From there, the tabi begins to take shape. Joining the outer fabric to the lining is one stage. The upper part of the foot must be sewn so the lines sit cleanly. The heel curve—the part that follows the shape of the foot—has to be drawn out gradually and with care. The most demanding work is often the split-toe front. The precision of that stitching is something the wearer feels immediately. Then come the closing seams around the perimeter and reinforcing stitches that prevent fraying and strengthen the structure. Only at the end does the final shaping bring the pair into its finished form.

Laid out this way, the process can make it seem as if tabi matter because they are complicated. But complexity is not the point. More steps do not automatically produce something better. What matters is that every one of those steps returns, in the end, to the foot. Where the cloth should pull in, where it should give, where it cannot be too rigid, where it needs to hold—each decision is there so that a piece of fabric will no longer feel like mere fabric once worn. A craftsperson may not explain that elegantly. The hand explains it instead.

There is no easy way to fake that. Whether the heel rubs, whether the toe catches, whether your center of gravity slips while walking—the wearer knows immediately.

Tabi did not stay in the past. They changed shape, too.

In recent years, tabi have slowly come back into view, perhaps for precisely that reason. People have begun paying attention again to their feet, to the way they walk, to how shoes affect the body. Things once treated as too ordinary to notice are now being asked fresh questions. Do they help you stand steadily? Do they leave you tired after a long day? Do they crowd the toes? Seen in that context, tabi no longer feel remote. They carry the history of a local industry, but they also offer a practical experience of wear that still makes sense now. They are not artifacts preserved behind glass for the sake of nostalgia. Put them on today, and they still hold up.

More interestingly, tabi have also developed a different visual life. Beyond the familiar white cloth and indigo-dyed tones, newer versions have begun to appear in colors, patterns, and silhouettes better suited to daily dress. The materials have changed as well. Some styles now adjust the weight, texture, and durability of the fabric to suit contemporary life. None of this turns tabi into something else. It simply allows them to enter the present more naturally.

That has expanded their appeal. Yes, there is still the comfort—the breathability, the close fit, the distinctive gait that comes from the split-toe construction. But tabi have also begun to answer to modern ideas about dress. They can be seen as an object that carries an older craft tradition forward. They can also be worn as part of an everyday wardrobe. The cloth no longer serves only the body. It has begun, quietly, to stand alongside contemporary taste.

What Rikuoh leaves behind is more than perseverance

This is also where Rikuoh is most moving. It is not simply a story about an old shop surviving through grit and conviction. It is about the possibility that techniques which seem close to being discarded may not have left daily life at all. They have simply been understood again in a different way.

What endures, in the end, is rarely the slogan. It is more often something specific: the clearer sensation of the sole meeting the ground, the extra ease created by the split toe, the possibility that an old object might find its way back into a present-day closet.

From Gyoda to Taiwan, tabi step back into daily life

For anyone curious to take that one step further, SAMURAITABI, from Gyoda in Saitama Prefecture, is a good place to begin. It continues the making tradition of Gyoda tabi without trying too hard to describe itself as new. Instead, it carries the craft quietly into the present. The brand is now officially available in Taiwan as well, which makes the distance feel suddenly shorter. You no longer have to travel to Japan to touch the cloth for yourself or try a pair on.

At first, you may notice the split-toe shape, or the line of small fasteners closing across the back.

Then you walk a little farther, and what stays with you is usually not the appearance. It is the moment the sole meets the ground, just a little more clearly than usual. The sensation is small—too small, perhaps, to sound like a declaration. But often that is exactly how something like tabi survives: by way of something this slight, and this convincing.