The Story of Ryukyu Glass

The Origins of Ryukyu Glass

Glassmaking in Okinawa is said to have begun in 1910, when a merchant from Satsuma opened the Okinawa Glass Manufacturing Works in Naha.

At the time, the factory produced everyday items such as lamp chimneys, medicine bottles, and flytraps. Alongside newly sourced raw glass materials, discarded glass was already being reused in production.

A decade later, in the 1920s, additional factories such as Fukuda Glass Works and Maeda Glass Works were established, and Okinawa's glass industry gradually expanded.

This progress was sharply interrupted, however, by the Second World War. In 1944, the glass factories in Naha were destroyed by the fires of war, and glass production in Okinawa came to a temporary halt.

Glassmaking Reborn from Discarded Bottles

Glass production finally resumed after the war. Building on the prewar legacy of Maeda Glass Works, the craft was revived, and the artisans who worked there eventually took over the business themselves. In 1952, this new venture became Okuhara Glass Manufacturing Works, which continues to produce glass in Naha to this day.

Materials and funds, however, were not easy to come by in postwar Okinawa. What was close at hand, instead, were empty cola and beer bottles. Seeing this, glass artisans began breaking down discarded bottles, melting them in kilns, and reshaping them into new vessels.

This practice of reusing materials was not an isolated case. Around the same period, Okinawans made shirts from parachute fabric and fashioned island sandals from old tires.

What would today be called recycling or upcycling was not, at the time, born of environmental awareness. Rather, because new materials were difficult to obtain, people found new purposes for what they already had on hand. Glassmaking was one clear example of this resourcefulness.

In time, this recycled glass would come to define the very character of what is now known as Ryukyu glass.

An Encounter with New Forms

Postwar Okinawa was also home to many people connected to the American military and their families, who had settled on the island. Having left their own countries behind, they visited Okinawa's glass workshops and placed orders reflecting tastes and habits from home: punch bowls, wine glasses, water pitchers, tumblers.

These were forms that Okinawan artisans had rarely, if ever, made before.

How could such unfamiliar shapes be created in glass? The artisans experimented repeatedly, discovering methods through their own hands. With each new order came a new form, and in responding to these requests, their skills grew more refined.

This encounter with a different way of life brought new designs to Okinawan glass.

By the 1960s, new glass workshops were being established one after another, and Okinawa's glass industry entered a period of significant growth.

Colors and Character Born from Renewal

The raw material of that era, discarded bottles, left its own distinct mark on the appearance of Ryukyu glass.

Glass made by melting down old bottles often contained small air bubbles. Because each piece was crafted by hand, slight variations in thickness and shape naturally occurred as well.

If clarity and perfect uniformity were considered the standard of beauty in glass, early Ryukyu glass stood somewhat apart from that ideal. Yet those who held these pieces found charm in their very differences. The bubbles and the subtle unevenness in thickness came to be embraced as the individual character of each handmade vessel. In time, this even developed into a technique in which bubbles were deliberately incorporated by design.

The colors, too, carried the history of recycled glass. In the early postwar years, Ryukyu glass appeared in a wide range of colors: orange, brown, green, light blue, blue, and purple. Most of these were not colors created intentionally for the finished pieces, but rather the original colors of the discarded bottles used as raw material.

By a kind of fortunate coincidence, the colors that emerged from this recycled material echoed the very scenery of the island: the sea, the sky, the plants, and the hues of an Okinawan sunset. Through the continued use of materials found on the island, a distinctive style gradually took shape, one that seemed to capture the landscape of Okinawa itself.

Toward Ryukyu Glass

In 1972, Okinawa's reversion to Japan brought change to the environment surrounding glassmaking. The market, which until then had centered on American military personnel and their families, expanded to include visitors arriving from mainland Japan.

Alongside this shift in the market, new developments emerged in technique and material. The air bubbles that had once appeared by chance in recycled glass came to be incorporated deliberately, eventually becoming established within the glass industry as the technique known as "bubble glass."

In addition to discarded bottles, glass made from specially blended raw materials also became more common, and artisans further broadened their range of colors, forms, and techniques. Glass made by blending silica sand, soda ash, and limestone became the mainstream approach, though the specific materials and methods vary by workshop and by piece.

Even so, tracing this history reveals one recurring thread: artisans looking closely at the materials available to them, in that time and in that place, and transforming them by hand into something new. What was once cola and beer bottles has, in recent years, become the window glass of used cars, now reborn as a new line of glass work called "mado." The deep tones seen in the mado series come from the tinted rear windows of automobiles, while the vivid ice-green hues originate from side windows.

Since its beginnings in 1910, Okinawan glassmaking has changed over time in its materials, in what it produces, and in the people who use it. With each change, artisans absorbed what was new and shaped it into their own craft.

In 1998, Ryukyu glass was designated a Traditional Craft of Okinawa Prefecture. It did not, however, exist from the start as a finished tradition. Rather, Ryukyu glass is something that has taken shape gradually, over more than a century, through the everyday life of Okinawa and the changes of its times.