Sabae: Why a Snowbound Farming Village Became One of the World's Great Eyewear Capitals?

Two disadvantaged regions, on opposite sides of the earth, built the same industry 27 years apart. Then one chose to make, and the other chose to sell.

If the glasses you are wearing right now are made in Japan, there is a very high chance the frame was made in one specific part of Fukui Prefecture.

Roughly 95 percent of all eyeglass frames produced in Japan are made in the Fukui production region, centered on Fukui City and Sabae City. This region ranks among the world’s three great eyewear-frame production centers, alongside Italy and China.

(A note on the name. “Sabae glasses” does not refer to an industry confined to Sabae City alone. The birthplace was on the present-day Fukui City side, and the industry later spread across the Fukui-Sabae region. Today we use “Sabae” as the symbolic name for the whole production area. The city now calls itself, only half-jokingly, the “Holy Land of Eyeglasses.”)

And here a question arises. Why did eyeglass-frame production flourish in this particular place?

Eyeglasses are a precision industrial product, demanding delicate metalwork, tiny hinges, and high-grade polishing. We tend to imagine such precision handwork developing in large cities with demand for luxury goods, or in industrial zones where skilled engineers gather. So why does a corner of the Hokuriku region, which is not a port city, sits far from any metropolis, carries the logistical handicap of deep winter snow, has no local source of lens material, and had no pre-existing tradition of eyeglass craftsmanship, handle almost all of Japan’s eyeglass-frame production?

Let’s investigate.

Clue 1: An Industry That Was Newly Chosen

Geopolitical Principle: When an industry appears in a place with no prior tradition of it, the cause is not deep heritage but a deliberate human choice made at a specific moment, readable in the date it began.

Hear “Sabae, the town of glasses,” and you tend to imagine, if not quite Kyoto’s Nishijin weaving or Arita’s porcelain, at least a craft long rooted in the local soil.

But this industry’s history is surprisingly new. It began in 1905, roughly 120 years ago. Set against Nishijin weaving’s thousand-plus years and Arita ware’s four-hundred-plus, this is a newcomer.

And the place where it began was not present-day Sabae City. It was Shōno, in the village of Asōzu, Asuwa District: present-day Shōno-chō, Fukui City. A snowbound farming village adjacent to Sabae. Eyeglass-making started here, and later, as craftsmen became independent and former military land in Sabae was converted into factories after the war, the industry gradually spread into a production region centered on Sabae.

The man who launched this industry was Masunaga Gozaemon.

Fukui Archive　https://www.masunaga1905.com/story

He served as a village assemblyman and witnessed firsthand the plight of local farmers: in winter, the fields lay buried in snow, no farm work was possible, no cash income could be earned. So Gozaemon searched for work that could be done in winter and would bring in cash.

A crucial role here was played by his younger brother Kōhachi, who worked in the eyeglass trade in Osaka. Kōhachi knew that in the big cities, the habit of reading newspapers and books was spreading, and demand for eyeglasses was rising. Eyeglass-making could be started with little capital, demand would grow, and it could be continued indoors through winter. Seeing this, the brothers invited master craftsmen from Osaka and Tokyo and had the villagers learn the techniques.

In other words, this region’s eyeglass-making began from the choice and action of two brothers who read both a trend and a set of geographic conditions.

Clue 2: The Snow That Became an Advantage

Geopolitical Principle: A geographic handicap for one activity can become an asset for another. Heavy snow that halts farming creates a pool of idle winter labor, and idle indoor labor is exactly what fine handwork requires.

Why did eyeglass-making take root in a farming village?

One reason is that this region’s heavy snowfall created a distinctive geographic condition.

The Reihoku region of Fukui, which includes Sabae, is a heavy-snow zone on the Sea of Japan side. Sabae itself is not at the center of the snowiest belt, but the structure of winter snow and cold halting farm work, leaving rural areas short of cash income, was common across the Sea of Japan side.

And this very handicap was a stroke of fortune for eyeglass-making. Eyeglass-making is done indoors, performing fine handwork endlessly. The surplus labor of farming villages, shut in by snow in winter, unable to go properly outside, with idle hands, had ample capacity to handle this enormous volume of work.

Snow was a disadvantage for agriculture, but it generated surplus winter labor, and that labor connected to indoor handwork. Had this region been warm and snow-free, with farming possible year-round, the motivation to take up an unknown craft like eyeglass-making in earnest would likely have been weak. The heavy-snow geography, combined with the Masunaga brothers’ choice and action, was a major factor in the rise of this region’s eyeglass industry.

And there was one more important foundation. This region had no tradition of eyeglass-making, but it was surrounded by nearby centers of handcraft: Echizen lacquerware, Echizen washi paper, Echizen forged blades.

漱石の猫, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

TR15336300101, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

These techniques were not directly transferred to eyeglasses. But a culture of fine handwork, of patiently continuing detailed tasks, was already rooted here, and that was a major plus for eyeglass production to take hold.

The same structure appears in other snow countries of Japan. The metalworking of Tsubame-Sanjō in Niigata, the medicine-peddling of Toyama, the lacquerware of Aizu. In heavy-snow regions, surplus winter labor was channeled into indoor handwork or itinerant trade, and distinctive industries grew.

Clue 3: The Town That Became a Single Factory

Geopolitical Principle: When one craft is divided into hundreds of specialized steps spread across many small workshops in close proximity, the entire town functions as one factory, and that density is itself a competitive advantage that cities cannot easily reproduce.

This region’s eyeglass-making has another major characteristic: a division-of-labor system.

Making a single eyeglass frame involves more than 200 steps. Cutting metal, pressing, brazing, polishing, plating, attaching hinges, painting, assembly, inspection. Rather than a single factory handling all of these, many small businesses each take charge of individual steps. The region holds several hundred establishments, each specialized in one step.

There is a geographic background to how this division of labor came about.

Masunaga Gozaemon did not monopolize the technology. He spread the techniques his invited craftsmen had taught to the surrounding farmhouses. One household became good at polishing, another at brazing, and step-specialized cottage industries multiplied across the region without number.

What supported this was proximity within the production region. Each small workshop gathered within a short distance, so handoffs between steps were smooth, and this made it possible to network an intricate division of labor. In cities, land is expensive, and it is difficult for many small workshops to cluster step by step, so this division-of-labor style is actually harder to produce there.

The phenomenon in which firms, craftsmen, and techniques of the same industry gather in a specific region and raise the competitiveness of the whole area is called, in geography and economics, industrial agglomeration, or a cluster. Broadly, the automobile industry, with its many parts suppliers and subcontractors, is a typical industry with this agglomeration-oriented location. Belluno’s eyewear in Italy, Solingen’s blades in Germany, Switzerland’s watches: many of the world’s famous production regions share this structure.

Compared with the Suntory Yamazaki distillery we examined in an earlier essay, the difference in the logic of location becomes clear. Yamazaki’s whisky was a location bound to immovable natural conditions: water and climate obtainable only in that place. Fukui-Sabae’s eyewear, by contrast, is a location whose power comes less from natural conditions themselves than from people and techniques gathering in one place. A location of agglomeration.

And this agglomeration produced a technology that later astonished the world. In the 1980s, the Fukui-Sabae region took on the development of frames using titanium, a metal extremely difficult to work. Research advanced from around 1981, and in 1983 the region is credited with the world’s first successful commercialization of light, strong, allergy-resistant titanium frames, which soon became a new international standard.

What made this possible was, again, agglomeration. Specialists in each step gathered, and when one factory failed, another tried a different method. This distributed trial and error supported the challenge of an exceptionally difficult material. (There is a grim engineering footnote here: titanium dust is flammable and explosive, which is part of why the metal is so hard to work, and why the cluster’s accumulated, distributed know-how mattered.)

Clue 4: The Twins and Their Diverging Fates

Geopolitical Principle: When two regions on opposite sides of the earth develop the same industry from the same kind of disadvantage, comparing them isolates the variable that geography cannot explain: human strategy.

Let us shift our gaze outside Japan for a moment.

Belluno in Italy, ranked alongside Sabae among the world’s great eyewear regions. Trace its history, and the resemblance to Sabae is startling, almost uncanny.

TUBS, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Belluno's eyewear industry began on March 15, 1878, when Angelo Frescura, born into a local family in Calalzo di Cadore, founded what is considered the first eyewear factory of the Cadore region, in the valleys at the foot of the Dolomites. And his motivation rhymes precisely with the Masunaga brothers'. Frescura was determined that Italy should stop importing eyeglasses from abroad, and so, in one of the least industrialized areas of Italy at the time, he began assembling imported metal frames with lenses he made himself.

Snowdog, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The parallels run deeper than the founding dates. Cadore had no natural advantage of location either. The area was isolated from the main trade routes, but this turned out not to be an insurmountable obstacle, especially for a product that fits in your hand and weighs just a few dozen grams. And just as Sabae’s farmers had idle winter hands, Cadore had idle water: the frame-making machinery was set up inside the region’s grain and oil mills, drawing the hydraulic power to run it from streams always full of water. Two disadvantaged regions, each turning the one resource it happened to have, snow-freed labor in one case, mill-stream power in the other, into the foundation of a precision industry.

Snowbound farming Sabae and mountain-valley Belluno did not share identical geographic conditions of climate, market distance, or national institutions. But the structure was strikingly similar: a land not blessed with geographic advantages transplanted the eyewear industry from outside to support local livelihoods, and grew a cluster of cottage industry. And the two began only 27 years apart. On opposite sides of the earth, the two regions traced remarkably similar origins.

This tells us something. “It became eyewear because it was snow country” is, by itself, an insufficient explanation. Because the same thing happened in the snowless mountains of Italy. What they shared was a choice: people trying to survive in a disadvantaged land chose eyewear, a transplantable handcraft, and chose to substitute their own production for imports.

But the fates of these twins later diverged sharply. The two regions were once rivals. In recent years, however, Belluno has pulled far ahead of Sabae in production volume. What separated them?

What divided the fates of two regions born from such similar circumstances was not the superiority of their technology, but the result of a choice about how to sell.

Clue 5: The “Making” Region and the “Selling” Region

Geopolitical Principle: Geographic conditions can grow world-class skill, but skill and the power to set prices are different things. The gap between them is filled by human strategy, which geography cannot supply.

Belluno transformed from a region that only makes into a region with strong power to sell.

Behind this lay Italy’s fashion industry and the brand power of “Made in Italy.” Just as Italy, once a subcontractor to France in apparel, cultivated its own designers and created brands, eyewear too changed its character by binding itself to fashion. From the late 1980s, Belluno firms produced eyewear for luxury brands under license, transforming glasses from a “device to correct vision” into a “part of fashion.” In a market where the “Made in Italy” label carried value, they grew their power to sell.

Eventually, firms like Luxottica grew into vertically integrated companies handling everything from design through manufacturing to distribution. What they gained was not only the power to make excellent products, but the power to make the world recognize their value, to set their own prices, and to sell on their own terms.

The symbol of this is Ray-Ban.

SenseiAlan, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

Ray-Ban was not Italian. It was an American brand, created by Bausch & Lomb. When Luxottica acquired it in 1999, it reorganized production around Italian manufacturing strength and shifted sales toward high-end stores. It transformed Ray-Ban from discounted sunglasses into a global fashion brand. Belluno’s strength lay not only in the power to make, but in the power to design brands and command how they are sold. Today, Luxottica produces eyewear under license for brands including Giorgio Armani, Bulgari, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, Prada and Versace, and owns labels such as Ray-Ban, Oakley, Oliver Peoples and Persol.

Fukui-Sabae, by contrast, thoroughly raised its power to make. As a result, its technology, exemplified by titanium working, reached among the highest levels in the world. But much of this was OEM, advancement as a subcontractor manufacturing other companies’ branded products. The power to convey value to consumers directly and sell as a brand did not grow for a long time. Where Italy’s eyewear industry has an outward-facing market, exporting roughly 90 percent of production, Fukui-Sabae was long supported by the domestic market and OEM.

Statistics show this gap clearly. Sabae’s eyewear-related shipments fell from 116.6 billion yen in 1992 to 69.1 billion yen in 2016, nearly halved. Sabae’s production and sales peaked in 1992, and since then the volume of units shipped and the number of people employed have dropped by around a third, while about 40 percent of the city’s eyeglass companies have gone out of business. Inversely, over the same period, low-price mass-production regions in China grew rapidly. By one report, Wenzhou’s production value expanded more than tenfold in about twenty years. In the low-price and mass-production segments, the presence of overseas regions like China grew large.

Geographic conditions are a factor in growing excellent technology, but that does not translate directly into evaluation and selling power. There, a factor beyond the reach of geography, human strategy, is strongly involved.

And an event symbolizing this consequence occurred in 2018. Luxottica, grown from a base in Belluno Province, acquired a 67 percent majority stake in Fukui Megane Co. Ltd., one of Sabae’s major makers, specialized in titanium and solid-gold frames. As Luxottica’s chairman put it, “For the first time in the history of eyewear, we will have two great artisan schools under the same roof, Italian and Japanese.” The side that commanded brand power and sales networks had absorbed the manufacturing strength of the side that had perfected technology.

The Verdict: Disadvantage Is Not Destiny, and Neither Is Skill

Why did a snowbound farming village become one of the world’s great eyewear capitals?

Not by miracle. The chain ran like this. Heavy snow halted winter farming and starved the village of cash income. That handicap generated surplus indoor winter labor. A culture of fine handwork already existed nearby. Two brothers read a rising urban demand for eyeglasses and a set of local conditions, and transplanted a new industry. The technology spread household by household into a step-specialized cluster, and proximity turned the whole town into a single factory, capable even of the world’s first titanium frame.

But the story does not end with making. Consider the counterfactual. Had Sabae grown brand and sales with the same intensity it grew technology, had it chosen to sell under its own name rather than as OEM, or had Belluno stayed a pure subcontractor, the fates of the twins might have differed.

And there is a Japanese region that chose “to sell” and revived: Imabari towels in Ehime.

Kashiwa Satō, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Imabari, too, was pushed by cheap imports. Its makers, once numbering around 600, fell to a little over 100, becoming subcontractors for overseas brands. It had fallen into a plight much like Sabae’s. Then, from 2006, Imabari launched a branding effort. It created a region-wide brand, “Imabari Towel,” under whose banner each company sells. This was the same idea by which France’s Champagne region built a brand as a wine-producing area. By setting its own quality standards and granting the brand mark only to towels that passed, Imabari turned production back to growth and grew exports. It converted “making good things alone does not sell” into “selling precisely because we make good things.” A “making region” became a “selling region.”

How geographic conditions are used is a human choice. The two regions had remarkably similar starting points, but their present positions, Belluno as a “selling region” and Sabae as a region that perfected “making,” are the results of choices. Yet that is only a present position. The future can change with future choices. In recent years, Sabae has aimed to shift from being simply a producer to a place that both produces and retails its own brands, breaking away from dependence on the OEM model, with young managers launching their own brands, raising a unified regional identity, and drawing visitors to the “Holy Land of Eyeglasses.”

A disadvantageous-looking geographic condition can become, through human choice, the seed of an industry. This is not a miracle. And what becomes of that region from here will likewise be decided by the choices of the people who live now. The accumulated choices that past people made within their geographic conditions remain as culture and industry, and through the choices of people living today, they change shape toward the future.

Geography is a record of survival strategies.

Japan is one of the most geographically extreme places humans have ever settled: a chain of volcanic islands wracked by earthquakes, drenched by typhoons, and folded into mountains and narrow plains. And yet it became home to one of the world’s great civilizations.

How? The answer is geography, read closely.

Most writing about Japan looks at it from the outside. I read it from the inside, the way a geologist reads rock: as a record of forces, choices, and survival written into the land.

I’m a Strategic Geography Advisor based in Japan, and this newsletter is a field guide to the country’s hidden geography, the logic that placed its ancient capitals, shaped its food, and taught its people to live with a restless land.

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Issei Takinami is a Strategic Geography Advisor and author of several bestselling geography books in Japan, including 『面白すぎる地理の話』 (The Fascinating Stories of Geography, Sangyo Henshu Center, 2026). He serves as Representative Director of the Institute for Japan Regional Geography (IJRG).