mado · Glass and Rebirth

From a scrapped window

廃車の窓から

In Okinawa there are almost no trains. It is an island of cars, and every month several thousand of them reach the end of the road. Their bodies are stripped, and the metal goes on to a next life. The side windows are harder. For a long time that glass had nowhere to go but off the island, to be buried. mado — the word means "window" — is what happened when an Okinawan recycling company, Takunan Shoji, brought a plain question to a glass studio: can you make anything from this?

The answer is the glass in front of you. The windows are crushed, melted, and blown again by the makers of Ryukyu Glass Village in Itoman, the largest handmade-glass studio in Okinawa. Nothing is added to the melt — no colorant, no dye. Whatever color the window carried in its first life stays inside. Ice Green is the pale, cool green that clear car glass shows when you look at its edge. Smoky Black comes from the darker, tinted glass some cars carry, and settles into a quiet gray-black. Two colors, and both of them are simply the truth of the material.

Here is the part worth knowing before you pick one up. Because the glass is recycled and every piece is blown by hand, no two are the same. Small bubbles ride inside the walls. The thickness shifts a little from one side to the other. A lattice pattern — Diamond — is pressed into the surface from a mold, and even that lands slightly differently each time. Hold one up to the window and you can count them. These are not defects. They are the record of a window that was broken, melted, and given a second shape by someone's breath.

Ryukyu glass began this way. After the war, with nothing else at hand, Okinawa's glassmakers melted discarded bottles and started again. mado does the same thing on purpose, with the island's own waste, some seventy years later. It debuted in 2019 and received a Good Design Award in 2022. Take what would be thrown away, and make it new. Set it on the table, and let the light through.