What one dialect word reveals about a city’s temperament and culture
In Kumamoto there is a word: wasamon (わさもん). It means “someone who loves what’s new,” “someone who tries things before anyone else.” The closest equivalent in standard Japanese is something like early adopter — but when people in Kumamoto say the word, you can hear a certain pride in it. Perhaps because it points not merely to a taste for novelty, but to a sensibility cultivated here over a very long time.
And in fact, in the 1970s, Kumamoto was home to a legendary store now regarded as a prototype of the modern select shop, and for a stretch of years overseas trends reached this city — far from any metropolis — remarkably fast. Even for someone with no particular interest in fashion, the story is a compelling one. How did a small provincial city come to stand, however briefly, at the leading edge of Japanese trends? A hint of the answer is folded into that single word.
Etymology: wasemono (早生者)
Wasamon is thought to derive from wasemono (早生者). Wase (早生) is an agricultural term for crops with a relatively short span from sowing to harvest; fast-maturing varieties, and crops pushed along early by their growing conditions, were both called wase. Attach mono (者), “person,” and the sense extends outward to “someone who rushes at things ahead of everyone else.” Worn down by time and sound change, wasemono became wasamon.
Kumamoto has a second famous word for local character, one that stands alongside this one: Higo mokkosu (肥後もっこす). Taciturn, stubborn, unwavering, cussed — it names the archetypal obstinate Kumamoto native, and is counted among Japan’s three great strains of pigheadedness.
On the surface the two words look like opposites, but they are two sides of the same coin. Beneath mokkosu and wasamon alike lies the same conviction: being the same as everyone else is unbearable. To defend your own style stubbornly to the end is mokkosu. To take up something new before anyone else and remake it into your own is wasamon. Both describe a people who won’t bend their own standards, and who aren’t afraid to stand out.
Why was Kumamoto “early”?
Honestly, it’s hard to point to any single reason why Kumamoto should be so alert to the new. Nagasaki spent centuries as a hub of maritime transport and Kyūshū’s gateway to the outside world; Fukuoka rose to become the region’s true center through the opening of Hakata Port in the late nineteenth century and the founding of Kyūshū Imperial University in the early twentieth. Measured against them, Kumamoto was never the center of anything.
So perhaps it’s worth going further back, to the lords and houses that governed here.
The figure credited with laying the city’s foundations is, without question, Katō Kiyomasa. He is best known internationally as one of the commanders of the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–1598) — a role for which he is remembered rather differently outside Japan than within it. But Kiyomasa was also a formidable administrator: he rebuilt and extended Kumamoto Castle, laid out road networks, organized the city’s waterways and drainage. He had a particular appetite for the newest technology of his era and for grafting new ideas onto old problems. Long before the word existed, he may have been practicing wasamon himself.
Four centuries later, Kumamoto people still talk about him — though the Katō house in fact ruled for only two generations. Higo then passed to the Hosokawa, whose lord was Hosokawa Tadaoki, a disciple of Sen no Rikyū. And who was Rikyū? The man who used tea as a medium to propose an entire philosophy of living, and whose influence over Japanese culture long outlasted him. Tadaoki, trained in that school, valued culture and was receptive to new things — which made Kumamoto fertile ground for the wasamon spirit to take root.
The pioneer, and the legend
In 1976, a twenty-four-year-old named Arita Masahiro opened a small clothing store in Kumamoto City called Outdoor Sports. For a provincial Japanese city at the time it was a rare thing: a shop presenting American lifestyle in earnest, and one that would go on to play a pioneering role in establishing the very concept of the select shop in Japan.
By coincidence, that same year in Tokyo, Shigematsu Osamu founded BEAMS. In a later conversation, looking back on those years, Shigematsu said he had always thought the fastest place in Japan was not Tokyo but Kumamoto. In an era when provincial cities were expected to trail behind Tokyo and Osaka, Kumamoto was sometimes bringing in the newest pieces ahead of both.
Curiouser still, certain items were popular in Kumamoto and nowhere else. There were people who wore the kind of rubber boots you’d pull on to muck out a stable, out on the street, on days without a cloud in the sky. Styles that would have been laughed off as hopelessly provincial in Tokyo were embraced in Kumamoto as wasamon style. Not chasing a trend but editing it to your own taste and enjoying it — this, too, was characteristic of the city’s fashion culture.
Arita went on to open stores across a range of genres around Shower-dōri in Kumamoto City, and in the 1980s became the first in Japan to carry Paul Smith and Margaret Howell, both still unknown at the time.
After a hiatus of roughly a decade beginning in 1990 — years spent largely absorbed in fishing — he returned in 1999 with the opening of Permanent (later renamed Permanent Modern), which grew large enough to support a branch in Tokyo’s Aoyama.
For twenty-five years Permanent Modern was regarded as one of a kind in the industry, and when Arita announced his retirement in 2024, the store passed into legend along with him.
The “fashion town” plan, backed by policy
Kumamoto’s wasamon streak was never the business of private shops alone. From the 1990s into the 2000s, the city took part in the New Textile Vision, a regional development scheme promoted by the then Ministry of International Trade and Industry (today’s METI). It was also folded into the Fashion Town project conceived under MITI and the Japan Fashion Association, and in 1998 it hosted a Fashion Town Summit. For a period, the effort to grow a local temperament into an industry took concrete shape as a public–private partnership.
Then, from 2011 to 2015, came Wassamoda, a fashion movement unique to Kumamoto. Models selected from the general public by open call learned to walk a runway from scratch and took the stage with the cooperation of local hair salons — a participatory civic event that carried the wasamon name outright.
The lineage, still running
Today, streets like Kamitōri, Kaminoura-dōri and Namikizaka are still lined with select shops full of character. Some carry pieces that are hard to find anywhere at all — America, Europe, Asia, no matter the origin — and the old wasamon spirit carries on, changing shape as it goes.
On the brand side, too, movement out of Kumamoto continues: small, but unmistakable. Tigre Brocante (Dragon Brocante at its Kumamoto store), proposing a way of living built on traditional Japanese materials and techniques from bases in Kumamoto and Fukuoka. JUN OKAMOTO, who trained at Bunka Fashion College and then honed his craft at Studio Bercot in Paris. Factelier, uncompromising about made-in-Japan. gogaku, built around French linen shirts. Brands based in Kumamoto — or created by people from it — keep appearing, and keep finding support at home and abroad.
In closing
Wasamon began as a plain agricultural term, rooted in early-ripening rice. It became a word for a temperament, a love of the new, and finally grew into the symbol of a provincial city and a cultural energy strong enough that the place was once called a pioneer.
Even for someone with no stake in fashion, art or pop culture, there’s a lesson in it. The value doesn’t lie in the speed with which you take up something new. It lies in re-editing it into your own context and enjoying it with your chin up, whatever anyone else has to say. That, perhaps, is the real substance of the wasamon spirit this city has carried for so long.
Trace history backward from a single word and the character of a whole city rises into view — and you begin to notice the culture still running underneath the place. Walking Shower-dōri, which once stood for the height of Kumamoto’s cultural moment; Kamitōri, where the line has never broken; and Kaminoura-dōri, which has lately become the center of Kumamoto style — feeling for the footsteps of the wasamon who moved through these streets more than half a century ago might make for an interesting experience of its own.
