Yachimun and bingata

Yachimun: three hundred and forty years on one street

Yachimun is simply the Okinawan word for pottery. In 1682 the kingdom consolidated three separate kiln communities into a single district at Tsuboya, in what is now central Naha, to concentrate the craft and the taxation of it. The street is still there and the potters are still on it.

Okinawan pottery is thick, generously glazed, and unbothered. The traditional forms are functional: karakara flasks for awamori, drinking cups, fermentation jars, and the shisa — the lion-dog roof guardians that sit in pairs on every second building in this prefecture, one mouth open to take in good fortune and one closed to keep it from leaving.

A large climbing kiln survives in the district, and the Tsuboya Pottery Museum explains what you are looking at in about forty minutes. But the street itself is the point: two hundred metres of workshops where you can watch the work and buy directly.

Buy a pair of shisa, not one. A single shisa is half a guardian, and every Okinawan who sees it on your shelf will know.

Bingata: the colours a subtropical court could afford

Bingata is a resist-dyeing technique: a stencil is cut, rice paste is pushed through it onto the cloth, and pigment is brushed on and worked into the fibre by hand. The paste is washed out and the pattern remains, in colours nothing on mainland Japan matches — vermilion, indigo, yellow, deep green, all at full saturation.

The patterns mix motifs from everywhere the kingdom traded: Chinese phoenixes, Japanese pines, tropical hibiscus and banana leaf. It is the visual record of a trading state.

Under the kingdom, colour was regulated by rank — the brightest yellows were reserved for royalty, and lesser families were limited to specific palettes. Most historical bingata was destroyed in 1945; the craft was reconstructed after the war by a small number of surviving families working from fragments and memory.