Straight Minamo Glass by Seiten

These ‘minamo’ glasses are blown individually at the Seiten glass studio in Okinawa.

Minamo is a Japanese word for the surface of water, and the texture here recalls the light as it appears on waves around the Okinawan islands.

Glass of the type made at Seiten by Kiyoharu Matsuda and his team, is known as saisei glass. Saisei literally means ‘reborn’, and in glass it refers to a process to melt and recreate empty drinks bottles into beautiful forms.

Blended for texture and colour, the glass is heated from fragments, before being blown and swirled into new shapes.

These glasses are a straight sided version of Seiten's minamo glass shape, that are comparatively tall in the hand.

Saisei glass has deep connection to Okinawa’s post war history, as craftspeople used the materials they could find to create a new lineage in glass. The results today refract sunlight, and seem somehow to encapsulate it within their material.

The glasses are around 9.2cm high and 7.2 cm in diameter.