Ome Textile Industry Cooperative

What Is the Ome Textile Industry Cooperative?

The Ome Textile Industry Cooperative (青梅織物工業協同組合, Ōme Orimono Kōgyō Kyōdō Kumiai) is a weavers' cooperative in Nishiwakecho, Ome City, Tokyo, descended from a guild founded in 1932, whose four buildings on its grounds were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties of Japan on November 29, 2016.

The four are the Main Building, the Former Tokyo Metropolitan Textile Testing Station, the Former Textile Processing Factory and the Former Receipt-Issuing Warehouse, entered as consecutive numbers 13-0369 to 13-0372. Three were registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the nation; the factory alone was registered as a model of design. The cooperative's land has also picked up a nickname, Oriku 123, taken from its street number, 123, and used by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in its guide to local heritage.

A Bedding-Fabric Town and Its Weavers' Guild

Ome first became known in the Edo period for Ome-jima, a striped cloth woven from silk and cotton. Later the town turned to yaguji, the patterned cotton used to cover futon bedding, and according to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government it supplied roughly 60 percent of the national market for it at its peak in the decade after the Second World War.

The Ome Textile Industry Cooperative traces itself to the Ome Textile Industry Guild, founded in 1932. In 1948 the guild was reorganized as the present cooperative under a new law on commercial and industrial cooperatives. Ome City's newsletter credits it with running the Ome textile fair together with the Tokyo government, a juried show meant to raise quality, widen the range of cloth and open new markets.

Demand for bedding fabric fell away as Japanese homes changed, and production of Ome yaguji ended in 1999. What survives on the cooperative's grounds is the back office of a textile district: a place to test cloth, to process it, to store it and to run the business, all within a short walk of each other.

How the Four Buildings Sit on the Site

Three of the Ome Textile Industry Cooperative buildings share the lot at 3-chome 123. The warehouse stands across the road at 127-6, and all four fall within about 100 meters, so a loop around their exteriors takes only a few minutes.

They date from a single burst of building. Ome City puts the warehouse at around 1932; the testing station and the factory went up around 1935, and the Main Building around 1940. The testing station was moved to this site around 1947.

Keeping them was not a foregone conclusion. A 2024 interview recounts that a member of the cooperative's board once proposed clearing the site for apartments. The cooperative's secretary-general and the city's town manager spent two years assembling the case for registration instead, and the original drawings turned up in a storeroom only after more than a year of searching. Since registration the buildings have been put back to work as a cinema, a restaurant and gallery, craft studios and a hall.

Visiting the Ome Textile Industry Cooperative

At the Ome Textile Industry Cooperative, two buildings can be entered as a customer. The former testing station is now Cinema Neko, a small cinema that opens at 9:30 a.m. and since August 2026 has had no regular closing day apart from the New Year holidays. The former warehouse houses Mayugura, a dining room with a gallery upstairs; it is normally closed on Tuesdays and posts its hours month by month.

The Main Building is the cooperative's working office, staffed on weekdays from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and the former factory is let out as individual studios. Neither is open to the public as a matter of course, so plan to see them from the paths on the grounds. Inside the cinema and the restaurant, follow each venue's rules on photography, and outdoors keep clear of people at work (checked October 1, 2026).

The Ome Textile Industry Cooperative is about a 7-minute walk from Higashi-Ome Station on the JR Ome Line, or about 15 minutes from Ome Station, according to Cinema Neko. There is pay-by-the-hour parking on the grounds, and both the cinema and Mayugura hand out parking discount tickets.