Bingata
- Other Names: 形付 (katachiki, O: katatikii)
- Japanese: 紅型 (bingata)
Bingata is an Okinawan resist-dye textile design technique, involving bold, colorful patterns, often involving flowers, and often on a red or yellow ground. Traditionally, bingata garments were strictly limited to the Ryukyuan royalty and aristocracy.
Roughly 41 bingata garments associated with the royal family survive today,[1] including several which have been designated National Treasures. They are defined as bingata by the dyeing technique, and include garments made from a variety of materials.
Use
The Ryukyuan aristocracy did not wear bingata during major court ceremonies, but only for comparatively everyday situations, and regular court events.[2] They were worn mostly by adult women, and by young people both male & female; adult men generally only wore bingata when wearing it as a costume for dance or theater.[3]
As in traditional Chinese/Confucian belief, the color yellow was associated (out of the five cardinal directions) with the Center, and with the Emperor - or, in the case of Ryûkyû, with the king. Yellow garments, dyed using an arsenic sulfide known today as orpiment, or other plant or mineral dyes, were thus worn only by members of the royal family.[4]
Sumptuary regulations restricted the wearing of bingata were loosened at some point in the early modern period, and commoners were permitted to own and wear such garments. However, they remained extremely expensive; only the wealthiest of commoners managed to obtain bingata robes, and they generally wore them only on special occasions.[2]
Creation and Style
The process is done by using persimmon juice as a resist, blocking out areas one does not wish to dye. Dye is then applied through stencils, by hand, one section at a time, to produce the designs.[5]
It is believed that bingata technique and styles first emerged due in large part to the influence of Japanese dyed fabrics which were brought into the Ryukyuan royal court as gifts from the Tokugawa shogunate. By the 19th century, if not earlier, bingata garments began to show the influence, too, of the latest Japanese commoner fashions; for example, motifs of flowered roundels appear both in Okinawa and in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo around the same time.[6]
Garments with wide sleeves are known in Okinawan as ufujin (lit. "big/wide garment") or ufusudijin (lit. "big/wide sleeved garment").[7]
References
- Bingata! Only in Okinawa, Washington DC: George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum, 2016.
- Gallery labels, Naha City Museum of History, August 2013.
