A colourful celebration of Okinawan crafts and culture.
In this title, Okamura has made a highly visual index of craft objects and tools that are unique to Okinawa. These are paired with short captions written in hiragana, which is part of the stencil composition. To balance the composition, Okamura has incorporated natural elements, such as branches of plum blossom, chrysanthemum and peonies. The design of each plate and the colours are a nod to traditional Okinawa textiles, known as bingata. This is essentially the same as dyeing technique as katazome, which uses card stencils, dyes and resist paste. Bingata, however, has a very distinctive use of colour and is specific to Okinawa. Okamura creates a lovely tribute to Okinawa, with use of katazome printing on paper while incorporating typical bingata colours and motifs.
There is a brief afterword by the colophon, in which Okamura laments on the long, cultural history of Okinawa, and how it is now rather a lonely island in the southern seas. Though it is slightly at odds with the cheerful nature of the illustrations, it gives a sense of Okamura’s feelings toward the importance of preserving traditional crafts.
Rare. 2 copies in OCLC, none outside of Japan.
