Among the last

Okinawa had no glass tradition worth the name before the war. It had a war instead, and afterwards it had rubble and rationing and a great quantity of empty bottles, because the American forces drank beer and cola and threw the bottles away.
Craftsmen in Naha melted them. There was nothing else to melt.
Recycled bottle glass carries the label glue and the dust into the furnace with it, and this becomes bubbles, and bubbles were a fault. The good work was clear. Everybody understood this. When Seikichi Inamine, who had entered the Okuhara glassworks at fifteen to help feed his family, decided that a glass full of foam was not a failed glass but a different glass, his colleagues said he had lost his mind.
He kept going. Rice bran into the melt, then binchōtan charcoal, then curry powder, red earth, red coral. The colours that came out had no comparison, he said, because the bottles brought their own colour with them. Brown from beer. Green from soft drinks. Black from whisky.
In 1988 he opened his own free-blowing studio in the pottery village at Yomitan and called it Rainbow. Japan named him a Contemporary Master Craftsman in 1994. Stockholm gave him a peace prize in 2002. He said, when they asked him, that his origin was always the vessel as an article of daily use.
After Okinawa reverted to Japan in 1972, pure raw glass became easy to buy, and most of the island's workshops stopped melting bottles. Rainbow did not. Recycled glass hardens in roughly a third the time. It cannot be drawn thin. You work fast or you lose it.
Seikichi Inamine died at his house in Zakimi in September 2023, at eighty-three. His eldest son had already taken the furnace.
In 2020 the workshop lost ninety percent of its sales. Seiichiro's answer was to put more work into each piece and charge more for it, which is the opposite of what a failing business is advised to do. He is now making things his father never made. Glassmakers will be surprised, he says. They may say Inamine Seiichiro has gone stupid.
Then he laughs, because that is exactly what they said about his father.
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The glass on the table in front of me is blue at the rim, going down through grey and ochre in bands that have crazed into a network of fine cracks, like a riverbed in a dry season. A green seam runs through the lower field. It is a drinking glass. You could put water in it.