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Japan Shopping - Wafuku

What I brought back! Minus various uninteresting kitsuke things (though I can… take photos if people want?), some plain zori, and a pair of hakama I forgot to photograph. I made out like a bandit, basically, so some shopping notes!

The first two were from a used kimono shop that’s a block or two past the Animate in Osaka - the light green was 200¥ and the dark green was 100¥, no I am not making those prices up. They had more expensive ones, but by that I mean like… 1700¥ (roughly $15 USD). There were a whole bunch of shops crammed into a few blocks of narrow back alleys, and they had a fantastic mix.

The purple kimono was 1000¥, at Tansu-ya, which is a chain selling new and used kimono and accessories. They’re a little more expensive - the 1000¥ rack was their low-end stuff - but it’s a little more curated and better-quality than some of the stuff in the Osaka shops. This came from the Nippori shop, though I bought most of the kitsuke accessories at the one in Shinjuku (which is in an underground mall connected to the station and thus confuses google maps terribly).

All four obi  and the light pink leaf kimono are from temple markets. The red geometric obi was from a table set up by… Yakasa Shrine, I think? Possibly Gion Shrine. It was 1000¥ if memory serves but I was out with a friend and we wandered a lot that day. Not a full-fledged market per se but there were a few vendors.

The rest are from the antiques market that happens on the first Sunday of the month at Tou-ji in southern Kyoto, which was a wonderful assortment of old stuff, obscure and otherwise (one vendor had templates that had been used for kimono fabric design production, assumably at some place now closed - they looked pretty old). The kimono was 500¥, the black obi was 1000¥, and the kaku obi were 500¥ and 1500¥ (It doesn’t show in that photo, but one has a lot more edge wear and some slight fading). 

The first Sunday market is apparently the tame, small one - there are a few regular ones in both Kyoto and Osaka, and some are huge. You can also haggle, but I don’t know enough Japanese and the only thing I turned down because of price was a 4,000¥ quilted kimono and I don’t know if I could have talked down to how much I had on me. Doing a google search for ‘kyoto temple markets’ and ‘osaka temple markets’ will get you places and dates.