Bingata

Fragments of bingata survive from the 14th century, and the craft may go back to the 13th. Bin is usually read as colour and kata as pattern, though the written form 紅型 only spread in the Showa era, after the scholar Yoshitaro Kamakura used it in 1924. Under the kingdom the royal government kept dye houses around Shuri Castle and protected them. Bingata dressed the women of the royal and aristocratic families and their sons before they came of age. Most of the motifs come from Chinese symbols of good fortune, and the colours are used freely: cranes in red and green, cherry blossoms in yellow.

When the kingdom ended in the Meiji era the dyers lost their patrons, and many left Shuri. The Battle of Okinawa then destroyed most of the stencils and tools that remained. After the war Eiki Shiroma and Sekiko Chinen, both from old dyeing families, led the revival. They cut stencils from Japanese army maps they found, used broken records as spatulas for the resist paste, lipstick in place of pigment and spent cartridge cases as nozzles for the paste bags, and they dyed postcards for American soldiers to make a living.

The process starts with a design drawn on paper and carved into a sheet of persimmon-tanned paper with a small knife held point forward. The dyer lays the stencil on the cloth and spreads a rice paste over it to protect the parts that should stay undyed, then brushes in the colours by hand. Japan named Ryukyu Bingata a traditional craft on 31 May 1984.