本美濃紙 (Hon-Minoshi, "true Mino paper")
The hand-forming of washi paper in Mino, Gifu Prefecture, along a 1,300-year tradition traced to a surviving 702 CE household register document, still preserved in Nara's Shosoin Repository, made from paper mulberry (kozo) fiber grown along the region's clear Nagara and Itadori River valleys — with the finest grade, Hon-Minoshi, made using a technique unique to Mino that adds a horizontal rocking motion to the standard vertical rocking used elsewhere in Japanese papermaking, produced today by only a limited number of formally authorized craftsmen, and named as one of just three washi techniques inscribed by UNESCO in 2014, alongside Sekishu-banshi and Hosokawa-shi — a distinction the already-archived Echizen washi tradition, despite its own strong reputation, does not share.
Risk level: Vulnerable · UNESCO Representative List (2014) — Washi, Japanese Hand-Made Paper (Hon-Minoshi)
Production of incense sticks on Awaji Island, Hyogo, which makes about 70% of Japan’s incense.
Shuri textiles (首里の織物) are the court and aristocratic cloths of Shuri, the former Ryukyu royal capital — a family of figured weaves and ikat rather than a single technique.
Lacquerware of the Hirosaki area of Aomori Prefecture in which patterns are built up in many layers of colored lacquer and then revealed by repeated grinding and polishing back through the layers (togidashi kawari-nuri).
Yomitanzan hanaori (読谷山花織) is the float-weave of Yomitan Village on central Okinawa Island: on a plain-weave ground, typically dark indigo or white, colored threads — white, yellow, red, green — are floated to form small geometric…
Basketry from the Hirosaki area of Aomori Prefecture in which wild akebi vines, and wild-grape (yamabudo) bark, are harvested in autumn, dried, soaked, stripped of nodes and plaited by hand into handbags, trays and colanders in plain,…
Kintsugi ('golden joinery') is the Japanese lacquer-and-precious-metal technique for repairing broken ceramics, in which fractured pieces are rejoined using urushi lacquer and the resulting seams are finished with dusted gold, silver, or…
Vessels, translucent wall panels, lamps, table surfaces and framed images made from plant fibers formed in water (banana, waru and gamal, chosen according to the piece), related in principle to the Asian practice of forming a sheet from…
A ritual art of Mathura and Vrindavan in which scenes from the life of Krishna are cut by hand with scissors into paper stencils and then made as temporary floor patterns with colored powders, or, in the jal sanjhi form, with colors…
Samarkand paper (Самарқанд қоғози) was the finest paper in the medieval Islamic world — mentioned by Arab geographers as early as 751 CE following the Battle of Talas, when Chinese papermakers captured by Arab forces introduced the…
Jianzhi (剪紙 — 'scissor paper') is the Chinese paper-cutting tradition maintained in Taiwan by Hokkien and Hakka communities — a tradition brought from Fujian Province and adapted to Taiwanese Buddhist, Taoist, and folk religious contexts.
Etching of text and pictures on seasoned palm leaves with a sharp iron stylus, the lines then blackened with lampblack or kohl paste, as practiced in Odisha, above all in Raghurajpur village near Puri.
Taohuawu nianhua (桃花坞年画) is the Suzhou school of Chinese New Year woodblock printing — historically the most commercially important print tradition in China, distributing millions of prints annually across the country during the Qing…