Kiryu's sawtooth roofs: a silk-weaving town where the factories face north

Walk north from Kiryu Station on a weekday and the roofline starts to behave strangely. Between the houses a row of triangles rises like the teeth of a handsaw laid on its back, each tooth glazed on one side and blind on the other. From behind one of them, faintly, comes a rhythmic clack that is neither traffic nor construction. It is a loom, and it is still at work.

A town that built its roofs around the light

Kiryu (桐生) sits at the eastern edge of Gunma Prefecture, where the Kanto plain runs out against the hills. Two rivers, the Watarase (渡良瀬川) and the smaller Kiryu-gawa (桐生川), gave its dyers the water they needed. The town wove silk for centuries, and an old saying pairs it with Kyoto's weaving quarter: Nishi no Nishijin, higashi no Kiryu, meaning Nishijin in the west and Kiryu in the east.

「西の西陣、東の桐生」と呼ばれた、絹織物の町です。

The sawtooth roof, nokogiri-yane (のこぎり屋根), is what that trade left on the skyline. The upright face of each tooth is glass and points north, so the weaving floor takes in daylight without direct sun, and a dyed thread looks the same colour in the morning as it does in mid-afternoon. By local count some two hundred of these buildings survive. They are not gathered into a museum quarter. They stand behind garden walls, beside car parks, and at the ends of lanes too narrow for a delivery van.

Honcho-dori, from the arcade to the old blocks

The town's spine is Honcho-dori (本町通り), a straight street whose block numbers count down as you walk north. From the JR station the covered shopfronts of Suehiro-cho (末広町) lead you to it partway along. Turn left there and keep going. The buildings get lower and older, and the signboards change from plastic to painted wood.

The last blocks, Honcho 1-chome and 2-chome with neighbouring Tenjin-cho (天神町), form Kiryu Shinmachi (桐生新町), a nationally designated preservation district. The plots here are narrow and very deep, with a shop on the street, a storehouse behind it, and the weaving shed at the back. That is why the sawtooth roofs are easy to miss. Look down the side passages rather than along the frontage.

In 2-chome, Yurinkan (有鄰館) is a cluster of storehouses left by a merchant house that brewed miso, soy sauce and sake. One is brick, others are earthen-walled or timber, and the city now uses them for exhibitions, craft markets and concerts. On a day without an event the brick storehouse may be standing open and empty, cool even in summer. Confirm with the city's tourism association before counting on that.

The shrine where the street stops

Honcho-dori ends at the gate of Kiryu Tenmangu (桐生天満宮), and the town was laid out from this point southward. Most visitors bow at the worship hall and turn back. Walk around to the main hall behind it instead. Its outer walls are wrapped in carving, with dragons, waves and robed figures that have weathered to the grey of driftwood, and the detail is close enough to study from the gravel.

A monthly antique market fills the precinct with bolts of kimono cloth, iron tools, and the wooden shuttles and bobbins that the mills no longer need. The date is published locally and is worth planning around. Next door is the Kiryu campus of Gunma University (群馬大学), which grew out of a school of dyeing and weaving, so the quiet lane beside the shrine fills with students on bicycles when classes change.

Inside the sawtooth

Most sawtooth buildings are private workplaces or homes, and the correct way to see them is from the lane. A few can be entered. Orimono Sankokan Yukari (織物参考館 紫), in the Higashi (東) district east of Honcho-dori, is a working mill that keeps part of its old shed as a museum. It shows wooden looms and the punched cards that once told a jacquard machine what pattern to weave, and it has a dye room where visitors can try indigo. Expect a modest admission charge and a separate fee for the dyeing, and check the mill's own notice for closing days.

Elsewhere the roofs have new tenants. A brick shed in Higashi-Hisakata-cho (東久方町) houses a bakery, and others hold hair salons and ateliers. The walls vary more than the silhouette does. Some are timber, some brick, and some are Oya stone (大谷石), the soft grey-green volcanic stone quarried in neighbouring Tochigi. Near the station, the Kiryu Orimono Kinenkan (桐生織物記念館) sells locally woven cloth on its ground floor, and it is the simplest place to handle what the looms produce.

Wide noodles and a cutlet bowl

Kiryu's lunch is himokawa (ひもかわ), udon dough rolled flat and cut wide. In some shops the ribbons are as broad as a hand and arrive folded in the basket like cloth. Lifted with chopsticks, one drapes rather than dangles, and it takes practice to get it into the dipping sauce without a splash. Many noodle shops serve at midday only and stop when the dough is gone.

The other local habit is sauce katsudon (ソースカツ丼), small fillet cutlets dipped in a thin, sweetish sauce and set on plain rice, with no egg and no cabbage. Afterwards, the kissaten along Suehiro-cho and Honcho-dori tend to be the plain kind, with faded plastic food models in the window and a rack of sports papers by the door. Nobody will hurry you.

Getting there, and the station not to mistake

JR Kiryu Station is on the Ryomo Line (両毛線), which runs between Takasaki (高崎) and Oyama (小山), both Shinkansen stops. From the north exit, Tenmangu is roughly half an hour on foot, most of it along Honcho-dori. The tourist desk at the station can tell you whether rental bicycles are available that day. A second, smaller terminus, Nishi-Kiryu (西桐生) on the Jomo Electric Railway (上毛電気鉄道), sits a few minutes away in a wooden station house and connects to Maebashi. Ask at the window whether your IC card is accepted before relying on it.

The mistake is Shin-Kiryu (新桐生). Tobu's limited express Ryomo (りょうもう) from Asakusa (浅草) stops there, and the name suggests a central station. It stands on the far bank of the Watarase River, a bus or taxi ride from the old town. The service is comfortable and direct, but leave time for the transfer and check the bus timetable with the city before you travel. Fares and seat reservations are listed by each operator.

Come on a weekday if you want to hear looms, though small museums often close on a weekday of their own choosing. The basin is known for heat in high summer, and the weekend of the Yagibushi festival (八木節まつり) fills Honcho-dori with dancers and stalls. Spring and late autumn are the better seasons for walking the lanes, when the low sun shows up the glass in the roofs.