Okinawa
— the blue that runs between a thousand islands.
Not only on a wall.
“The chain of small islands that finish Japan in the south. Coral water that holds its colour through the typhoon months, then settles back. The walls of Shuri Castle above Naha, the sanshin played on a wooden porch, awamori poured into small cups. The grandmothers in Ogimi village live a long time. There are reasons the page on longevity keeps coming back here.
Okinawa, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Okinawa Prefecture is the southernmost of Japan's 47 prefectures, an arc of about 160 islands stretching some 1,000 kilometres from Kyushu toward Taiwan. The capital, Naha, sits on the largest island, Okinawa Honto. The prefecture's population is roughly 1.47 million, with around 800,000 in the greater Naha area. The Ryukyu Kingdom ruled here as an independent tributary state from 1429 until annexation by Japan in 1879, and the cultural inheritance of language, music, and cuisine still reads as distinctly Ryukyuan rather than Japanese.
The reefs around the Yaeyama and Kerama islands hold some of the clearest water in the western Pacific, with horizontal visibility regularly exceeding 30 metres in winter. The Kerama Islands, about 40 kilometres west of Naha, were designated a national park in 2014, and the colour the locals call Kerama Blue runs through the tourism literature for a reason. Coral cover has fallen since the 1998 and 2016 bleaching events, but the manta cleaning stations off Ishigaki and the humpback grounds off Zamami still come back every winter.
The typhoon season runs roughly June through October, with the heaviest activity in August and September; the Okinawa Meteorological Observatory tracks an average of seven storms passing within 300 kilometres each year. Winter is mild, with January lows averaging 14°C, and the cherry blossoms here open in January rather than April, beginning on Mount Yaedake. The Eisa drum festivals fall in the Obon week of the lunar calendar. The Naha Tug-of-War in October pulls a 200-metre rope through Kokusai Street.