Naha Field Trip

Today's adventure took me to an urban jungle: Naha!  This is the largest city on Okinawa.  Until today, the only time I'd really spent in Naha was at the airport and at the port, and my activities in both of these places were limited to waiting around before my departure to somewhere else.  However, Naha is not a bad place and offers lots to do for both tourists and those of us who live elsewhere on the island.  Our first stop today was a quick bit of history about "bingata" and a chance to practice some coral painting ourselves.

Bingata is a style characteristic of Okinawa, usually with bright colors of flowers, birds, and other nature-inspired items on a solid background.  You can purchase fabrics with more-or-less the same print on different backgrounds, but it can also have very unique styling and colors.  Bingata can be found on everything from clothing to scarves to purses and wallets.  We found a little place near Shuri castle where you could try your hand at bingata with a coral theme.  Real corals provide the stencil that you transfer to your fabric with a technique similar to rubbing.

There are only four starting colors: purple, blue, red, and yellow.  You use combinations of these colors to create other colors.

Then, you can use all of these colors to create different effects on each coral piece.

Our "brushes" were more like silk pom-poms.  Despite their bulky appearance, you can create wonderfully detailed corals with different colors, amounts of paint, and pressure.

The three of us chose a scarf, and here's my final product:

As you create more designs, you realize what works and what doesn't.  It's VERY EASY to end up with something that looks more like Rainbow Brite than a seascape.  I should have put my Project Runway viewing skills to work and realized that less is more.  Oh well.  I'll just have to come back and try my hand again at a bingata scarf, or maybe just bring plenty of yen and buy what the experts make.

After we finished our scarves, we strolled through the shops and stalls of Kokusai Street, a popular destination for tourists.  Sometimes you get the feeling that these shops offer little different from the beach bum shops of Myrtle Beach, Daytona Beach, or any summer beach shop on the east coast of the U.S.  However, there are little gems here and there, such as the salt store and the fish market.  I'm not much of a shopper, but I could be enticed to return again at some point.