1968 Kaihara Selvedge Type III Jacket (Sample Case File)

This is a sample case file — not a real sale. Drew found this piece at a small Kojima warehouse clearance while sourcing for the flagship test: a single Kaihara Type III trucker jacket, dead-stock tag still pinned inside the collar, dated to a 1968 production run that never left the domestic Japanese market.

The pattern it echoes: mid-century Japanese workwear rebuilding American ranch-wear silhouettes from raw Okayama denim, then over-engineering the loom tension until the fabric outlived the original references it copied.

Why it matters now: this exact loom run stopped in 1971, and the handful of surviving jackets rarely carry original tags. It's a clean example of the sourcing and grading process this listing format is built to test — read as a demo, not as proof of a completed sale.

Sample provenance note: sourced through a long-standing Kojima contact; grading followed the same rubric every flagship listing on this site uses (construction, fade, repairs, and originality).

Original buttons intact, hem let out once by a previous owner, fade concentrated at the honeycombs and whiskers. No moth damage, no odor.