The encounter

Before I started making leather jackets at the Kadoya factory, I was quietly enjoying leather craft by myself.

With the bare minimum of tools, I tried to make wallets and bags and failed, tried and failed, tried to use them and improved them, had people use them and reflected on them. , there was a time like that.


The reason why I started leather craft was trivial, but when did I become interested in leather products in the first place?
My memory is vague, but it may have been that day when I was in junior high school, sitting at a barber shop in my neighborhood, reading Shonen Jump, waiting for my turn to get a haircut.

Even so, the red bean-colored sofa, which had faded in places and was worn out, was probably not made of genuine leather,
I'm not fascinated by the leather sash that old barbers swipe to sharpen razors.
I couldn't take my eyes off the shoes the previous customer was wearing after getting a haircut.

At that time, I saw engineer boots for the first time in my life.

Of course, I hadn't ridden a motorcycle yet at the time, and I wasn't into rock and roll.
The destructive power of engineer boots that grabbed the hearts of young people without any prior knowledge with a single blow! No tolerance! !

From that day onwards, whether I slept or woke up, my head was still filled with engineer boots.
Someday, when I had enough money, I would buy those shoes.

The engineer boots I got a few years later are still in good working order even after more than 20 years.


Looking back,

When I was in elementary school, why wasn't my school bag as smooth and shiny as everyone else's? I remember feeling skeptical.

The surface of the randoseru I was using was a little rough, and the cross section with fine cracks was brown, and the overall impression was somewhat dirty.

Recently, we have seen scenes where it is called a tea core and treated as something of value.
At the time, I didn't really like it because it seemed old-fashioned and poor for some reason.


On the other hand, I don't think that the elementary school students around me gathered after school and regularly soaked their randoseru with mink oil and enjoyed themselves. I think that the difference in leather quality was exposed over a long period of 6 years.

However, there's no way I could dislike my long-term partner so easily. And in my heart, you are also genuine leather, aren't you? It seems that I was misleading my real dissatisfaction with a misplaced sense of superiority.

The rough part is cowhide and the shiny part is horse cordovan leather.


However, I was a little concerned here, so when I looked into the randoseru,

Currently, many of the materials used for randoseru are synthetic leather called clarino instead of leather.
Clarino, which combines lightness and durability, has continued to evolve since its birth, and is now becoming the mainstream material for randoseru.

This material was born in 1965, and it is not certain whether it was marketed as a randoseru from that year.
At least the product would have already been shipped in the 80's when I was in elementary school,
Because it may not have been all shiny cordovan,
Let's just say that the boy's eyes that saw through the genuine leather were not wrong.

It's a little bit of a randoseru encounter with leather products, so






After all, I will say that the encounter is engineer boots.


[Ichishima]