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Okinawa Fair

MOGMOG · Okinawa Fair

Ryukyu:A Living Tradition in Okinawa

The culture of the Ryukyu Kingdom, expressed through island dishes, handblown glass, and stencil-dyed textiles. A culture rebuilt from the ashes, as Shuri Castle rises once more.

Shuri Castle, seat of the Ryukyu Kingdom

00 · Origin

Once, This Was a Kingdom

For roughly four hundred fifty years, Okinawa existed as an independent kingdom, known as the Ryukyu Kingdom, with its own language and a royal court.

An archipelago surrounded by the sea, Okinawa traded for centuries with Japan and China, both foreign nations at the time. Goods that came through this trade were reshaped in the Ryukyu style. Textiles, pottery, lacquer, and later glass all took on the island's climate and taste, producing crafts that blended many influences at once.

The kingdom became Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. The name ‘Ryukyu’ disappeared as a country, but its legacy survives in the name of a craft: Ryukyu glass.

01 · History of Ryukyu Glass

A story hand in hand with Okinawa

Ryukyu glass did not begin from abundance, but from scarcity. Ships once carried glass to the island, but most of it arrived broken. So Okinawa began to make its own. In 1910, a merchant from Satsuma opened a factory called the Okinawa Glass Manufactory in the capital city of Naha. It produced everyday items such as lamp chimneys, medicine bottles, and flycatchers, made from waste glass.

Workshops multiplied through the 1920s, and an industry took shape. Then, in 1944, air raids struck Okinawa. The glass workshops of Naha burned to the ground, and production came to a halt.

Around 1950, the son of one workshop owner whose business had burned down started again. There was no money for raw material, so he used what was available: cola and beer bottles discarded by US military bases stationed nearby. These were crushed, melted, and reformed into glass. This marks the true beginning of Ryukyu glass as it is known today. Before long, US service members and their families visited the factory and requested gifts unlike anything Okinawa had made before. The craftsmen developed new techniques through trial and error, and each attempt added a new design and refined their skill.

The colors that emerged from those bottles of orange, brown, green, aqua, blue, and violet, were not chosen deliberately. They were simply what could be found. Over time, they came to represent the colors of the island's own landscape. Even the bubbles trapped inside the glass and its uneven thickness, both unavoidable traits of recycled material, became defining features of Ryukyu glass, valued for their unique character and beauty.

In 1998, Ryukyu glass was officially designated a traditional craft of Okinawa Prefecture. A technique that began out of necessity is now recognized as tradition.

Read “The Story of Ryukyu Glass” →

Amber and aqua Ryukyu glass storage jars

02 · The Glass

Okinawa, Reflected

Every piece featured in this fair reflects a part of Okinawa. The makers drew colors and movement from both the sea and sky. The collection is organized under four facets: two that reflect the island itself, and two that reflect craft and time.

Sea & Nature

A clear sea lit by the sun, light moving beneath the surface, forest green where light filters through the leaves. Okinawa's landscape, changing color by the hour, set into glass.

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Night Sky & Cosmos

Stars rarely visible in the mainland skies, a Milky Way that stretches unbroken to the horizon. Okinawa's night sky, and the cosmos beyond it, held in silver leaf against jet-black glass.

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Bubbles

Born from melted-down old bottles, no two bubbles ever form the same way, and small imperfections transform into unique character in every piece.

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Light & Time

A stone path laid five hundred years ago, the legend of a feathered robe carried from person to person, gold and silver leaf that shift with the light. Okinawa's layered history, held inside the glass.

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03 · Rebirth

The Rebirth Continues

mado Ryukyu glass reborn from crushed car-window glass

mado · Glass and Rebirth

From a Discarded Window

Several thousand cars are scrapped on Okinawa each month, leaving behind window glass with nowhere to go. An Okinawan recycling company collects it, and Ryukyu glass artisans give it new life.

The result is mado. The side windows of scrapped cars are crushed and blown again into new glass, with no colorant added, so each piece keeps the color already present in the car's glass: a cool ice green, or a calm, smoky black.

After the war, when materials were scarce in Okinawa, Ryukyu glass got its start the same way, by remaking recycled glass. Today, that same practice gives new form to glass once headed for the scrapyard, and with it, a new generation of Ryukyu glass.

See mado →

SHURI · Okinawa and Rebirth (Coming Soon in November)

Lost but Found Each Time

Shuri Castle represents Okinawa's history, culture, and the pride of its people, standing as a symbol of the island's own rebirth. First built during the era of the Ryukyu Kingdom, the castle has been destroyed and rebuilt several times throughout its history, most recently after a fire in 2019.

November 2026 marks its reopening to the public.

SHURI series, arriving November 2026

Bingata by Shiroma Bingata Studio: Shuri Castle, a tribute ship and cranes

04 · Bingata

Cloth Worn by the Royal Court

Bingata is a traditional Okinawan textile, dyed using paper stencils. Its colors have come to symbolize both the Ryukyu Kingdom and the Okinawa of today. Flowers, waves, and other images evocative of the island are carved into each stencil, and every color is applied by hand, one at a time.

The people of Ryukyu learned from textiles from China and Southeast Asia, and developed bingata into a culture of their own. During the era of the Ryukyu Kingdom, it was worn by the royal family and the nobility, and its colors signified rank.

In the late nineteenth century, when the kingdom was abolished under what is known as the Ryukyu Disposition, bingata lost the court that had protected it and faded like a fire slowly going out. After the Battle of Okinawa, the workshops of Naha had burned, and not a single stencil or tool remained. Yet Shiroma Eiki, heir to a family of artisans who once served at Shuri Castle, began to revive bingata with whatever he could find.

Today, Shiroma Bingata Studio carries nearly three hundred years of history and has reached its sixteenth generation. Colors once held only within the royal court continue to live on, together with the spirit of Ryukyu.

05 · The Table

The Island Makes Its Flavors

Just as Ryukyu glass reflects the island, what grows on Okinawa reflects its soil. The fields lie close to the sea, where salt winds move across the land, and water runs underground through coral rock before reaching the surface.

Okinawa has a word for food: nuchigusui, meaning medicine for life. It may be surprising to find that the island's long-known longevity came from nothing extraordinary, only what its soil produced for the table each day.

See Okinawan Food →

06 · The Makers

Who Makes It

Every piece of Ryukyu glass carried by MOGMOG is made by Ryukyu Glass Creation (RGC), based in Itoman. RGC is the largest handmade glass studio in Okinawa, known to visitors as Ryukyu Glass Village. The studio was founded in 1983, when six individual workshops merged into a single cooperative.

Today, the studio includes sixteen Okinawa Prefectural Master Artisans and four Contemporary Master Craftsmen. RGC manages every stage of production in-house, from mixing raw materials to selling the finished work, overseeing more than one thousand products. It also operates its own factory in Vietnam, carrying Ryukyu glass from Okinawa to Japan, to the rest of Asia and the world.

RGC describes its work through three principles: art that becomes part of daily life; sustainable production rooted in more than a century of Ryukyu glass tradition; and Okinawan craft in service of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

MOGMOG is the only known distributor of Ryukyu glass from Itoman in the United States. Come by to take a look, hold a piece, and take one home.

07 · The Fair