Japan · Textile / Weaving / Supplementary Float-Weave and Ikat
読谷山花織 (Yuntanza Hanaui)
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 'flowers' built from three base units, the jinbana (coin, for prosperity), ōjibana (fan, for flourishing descendants) and kajimayā (pinwheel, for longevity, after the pinwheel given at age 97), recombined into some thirty patterns and often set with kasuri. The techniques are traced to Ryukyu's 14th–15th-century trade with Southeast Asia through Yomitan's Nagahama port. Once a royal-commissioned cloth that commoners outside Yomitan were not permitted to wear, it declined from the mid-Meiji period, lost its weavers and surviving cloths in the war, and was so thoroughly forgotten that in 1964 — when the village mayor asked Yonamine Sada to revive it — she had never heard its name. Working from elders' memories and a few surviving festival garments, she reconstructed it; she became a Living National Treasure in 1999.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Not inscribed. National Important Intangible Cultural Property 'Yomitanzan Hanaori' — Yonamine Sada (holder 1999–2003); Okinawa Prefecture intangible cultural property (1975); METI Traditional Craft Product (1976), with Yomitanzan minsā
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