Yamato Corporation has made sandals — and only sandals — since 1963. The plant in Matsuyama is run by a small team, most of them veterans with decades on the floor. Reela, their leather room sabot line, was not planned. It came out of an invitation to an interior design exhibition in 2016, where outdoor sandals felt out of place. Rather than make ordinary slippers, the team asked what they could produce using their existing knowledge that no one else was doing. Genuine leather room shoes, it turned out, were surprisingly rare.
Each pair is built on a wooden last — a form traditional to shoe production, rarely used in sandal making. After the leather is shaped around it, the piece rests for several days before removal. Natural cowhide, tanned in Japan, must be cut one piece at a time; a single production run yields only a few dozen pairs, and each takes approximately a week to complete. The result is used not only in private homes but in luxury hotels and high-end ryokan as a hospitality item for guests.
