Change the buttons, change the look of an outfit. Swap many buttons to match the occasion. Add buttons as accents on a hat or bag.
A modest fashion trick — and not so rare in the Showa years. Clothing shops that sold jackets and suits often sold spare buttons as well.
Even without fashion in mind, boys’ school-uniform buttons used to come off all the time — torn off, more than unsown. Classmate girls somehow always had needle and thread and would sew them back on at recess. Even after starting work, shirt buttons came off fairly often. The cleaner’s press may have been part of it. There was a time when spare buttons were sewn on the shirt tail; these days a button coming off is rare.
The other day, though, a jacket button chipped, and I went looking.
My commute to Palaceside Building uses the Asakusa Line with a change at Nihonbashi to Tokyo Metro Takebashi Station. Near home I could not find a shop that stocked buttons. Then, from a bus I boarded at JR Omori Station, I spotted a small button specialist out the window. It is in the Will Road Sanno shopping street, not far from Omori. I jumped off and walked back: the shop in the photos, Mikane. Tokyo is large; there must be other button shops. This one had buttons packed on three walls of a small room. About 2,000 on one wall, the owner said — 6,000 on three. Six thousand in 800 boxes in the shop, and another 2,000 at home. The owner is a lively 77-year-old woman. “Next time bring the garment,” she said, and she found a perfect match. “It’s a kind of hobby, but if it helps people I open three days a week.” She of course knows at once where every button is kept.