あけび蔓細工 (akebi-zuru zaiku); akebi = chocolate vine (Akebia)
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, openwork and ajiro (twill) patterns. Local accounts date it to the late Edo period at Dake hot spring on the slopes of Mount Iwaki, where baskets were sold to hot-spring visitors. It became an export craft that won medals at St. Louis (1904) and Belgium (1905). Aomori Prefecture designated it a traditional craft in March 1996.
Risk level: Vulnerable (few workshops in Hirosaki; one workshop says akebi vines are now about 10% of their peak abundance) · Not inscribed
Miyako jōfu (宮古上布) is a ramie cloth from Miyakojima and Tarama, woven from hand-spliced yarn so fine that a single warp strand is split to about the width of a hair.
Kumejima tsumugi (久米島紬) is a hand-woven silk pongee from Kumejima, west of Okinawa Island, and is often called the root of Japanese tsumugi.
Ryukyu kasuri (琉球絣) is the ikat of Haebaru, a town next to Naha and the largest textile producer in Okinawa.
Yonaguni-ori (与那国織) is the collective name for four textiles of Yonaguni, Japan's westernmost island, from which Taiwan is visible on clear days.
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).
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.
A plant-fiber basketry tradition transplanted from the Chaco interior to urban Rosario, Santa Fe province, by Wichí migrant weavers, most fully documented through named artisan Ruperta Pérez, who learned the craft as a child in Miraflores,…
The braiding of local wheat straw into cuelchas (long plaited strands, giving the craft its practitioner name, colchandera) and their sewing into the chupalla, Chile's national huaso hat, in Ninhue and neighboring communes of the Itata…
A fiber-processing and weaving craft using tibisiri, the leaf fiber of the Ite palm (Mauritia flexuosa) — the same palm species documented in this archive's Venezuela coverage as the moriche used by Warao weavers (CRAFT-2309), here…
The weaving of the couleuvre à manioc, a roughly 1.2-meter tubular, elastic press woven from arouman cane, used across French Guiana's Amerindian, Aluku (Maroon), and Creole communities to express toxic juice from grated bitter cassava.
The Hungarian reed craft (nádfonás) tradition — the weaving of mats, screens, and thatching bundles from the common reed (Phragmites australis) of the Great Hungarian Plain waterways.
A tradition of basket and wicker weaving from Trentino using willow (vimini) from cultivated osier beds in the Adige valley and rush (giunco) from Alpine wetlands — producing agricultural baskets, domestic containers, and decorative wicker…