Virtual Beachcombing Festival: Japanese Sea Glass - Christina Sawka

as casually strolling through the aisles looking at all these different stalls when there is one particular one that caught my eye had all this beautiful colorful jewelry now the lady behind the counter she noticed me and she was really quick to ask do you know what see glasses well up into that point I've never heard of the thing I mean I love the beach all my life I was an avid shell collector as a child but never heard of this thing and thought to pick up sea glass and so that was here in Japan and it quickly began my addiction Kristi God hi my name is Christina Sokka and I live here in Japan I live in the northeastern coast of Honshu which is the main island of Japan in fact this very town was just a hundred and thirty kilometres or 80 miles away from the epicenter of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami which I'm thankfully a survivor of but unfortunately this town did get badly the story now can be said that some of the beach finds I find here could be debris from the tsunami but the ones that I do find a lot are very frosted very smooth well over that 10-year mark if not decades and decades old let me preface this with that by no means do I consider myself an expert I've only lived in this town for ten years but I do have wonderful fisherman neighbors and friends who have shared their wealth of knowledge with me there are experiences and skills history and culture that I'm so thankful for and I also have a very patient husband who has translated everything for me and to ensure 100% accuracy so with that in mind let's talk about Japanese seaglass so Japan obviously has all the standard colors of sea glass but it's the aqua sea glass that always gets the attention has all these different shades of teals and turquoise aqua Marines these are the ones that always stand out and they're often considered very rare on all the sea glass charts but here in Japan this color is very common so why is this aqua color so common here in Japan predominantly this aqua color comes from glass bottles that would have held things like sake the alcohol show you soy sauce robbing a a soft drink and also glass fishing floats which we'll talk about in more detail later so naturally the next question is why was aqua used in so many glass bottles here in Japan well in the discussion with the Japan glass bottle Association they shared that that bluish green color is the closest thing to natural glass due to the iron and the copper impurities found in the sand here to save time and money from having to remove those impurities they simply just use that bluish green glass so even though removing impurities did become easier over time it was found that in the show a period which is 1926 to 1989 the aqua color or glass bottles was actually quite popular and it was said to be very cool and refreshing and so those glass bottles like would show you and with sake they're often in that blue color particularly during that era so unfortunately many glass bottles were disposed in the sea over time it was natural for coastal towns like this for people to just throw for their garbage in the ocean in fact my husband said that in the 80s as a child swimming at the beach it almost looked like it was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that's how much trash there was although Japan is considered one of the cleanest countries in the world by many travelers because of its streets being litter free most people take their garbage home but actually comes as a surprise when they go to the beach to see just how much trash there is in recent years though there has been a push for more Beach clean in the public swimming beaches and there has been a noticeable step to keeping these beaches more clean which is a great thing to see so let's have a closer look at some of these Japanese aqua bottles this is a Japanese version of Adam Eaton it is called a tow beam which basically translates to 18 litres which is about five gallons it was manufactured 150 years ago it is basically a big sized unit of measurement that would carry things such a socket show you water vinegar and other solvents like most things wooden barrels were first used but then they move to this kind of glass up until the 70s and now plastic is used you can see that with this the rims here are really thick and those are the bottoms which would lead to a lot of the glass I find that's quite thick and this is a sake bug this is just a medium size when there are larger ones and these are the kind of glasses that I would find so the interesting thing is you would think that aqua is a terrible color to hold alcohol in because the light can easily penetrate through and spoil it so in the discussion with the Japan bottle glass Association they said that they simply just did not know at the time that it was ruining the contents inside nowadays though there is still sake bottles that are aqua but they are considered as summer drinks and their to be drunk cold they're not heated up it drunk quickly and they're often much much cheaper than their brown bottled counterparts another common use for glass in Japan is glass fishing floats it's very common to still find these on the beach I have been lucky enough to find one on my beach here and my husband found one up north where they're a little more common I do from time to time find the seals on the beach my absolute favorite one is this guy right here nice and chunky I think that this one comes from a 10 inch look here's a smaller one that I think came from a two inch maybe up to 3/4 inch float now my collection of glass fishing floats predominantly come from that fishing shack that we rescued just a year ago as they were literally tearing down the walls they said that we could pull out anything that we wanted to and ended up being hundreds of treasures and so that really is where my obsession for Japanese antique maritime began a little history about these fishing glass floats these were made from recycled glass in a discussion with the last remaining fishing glass float blower here in Japan which he's located up in Hokkaido up north he said that these were not made directly from sand but always from recycled bottles so they would bring in these bottles like coca-cola sake ramen a show you all those kind of balls that we discussed earlier and they would break them up melt them and create these beers with them due to the mixtures of color from all these glass bottles the result was that blue green color that dominates the glass fishing floats of course there are other colors like brown that came from beer bottles and even more rare colors like Koba purple orange red and that came from excess glass from glass factories that made high-end products Japan calls these glass fishing floats Lukie them up or beam them up which basically translates to buoy ball or glass ball Japan started using these floats as early as 1910 although they cannot claim to be the first ones to have used them because in fact in 1840 Norway started to produce them however once Japan jumped on board they became the leader of production in these floats prior to glass being used they used these wooden floats these were made from Polonia which are lightweight and buoyant however they were causing a problem with durability and their buoyancy wasn't quite to par so that's why glass floats in the sphere shape were created now one fisherman he explained to me that for every three of these wooden floats that were held together on the net you actually only needed one glass fishing float as a spear and so it became quite easier more cost-efficient to use glass fishing floats rather than these wood ones by 1915 small glass floats were mass-produced and soon operations opened up throughout Japan so what started as a three inch glass floats they then expanded to a variety of sizes so those sizes include 1.5 inches all the way up to 18 inches now you'll see in this photo this is my collection the largest one there it's not an 18 inch is only a 17 inch what were these sizes used for but basically the smaller sizes were used for gill nets octopus lines and crab nets trout sardines shad and even larger fish like salmon these were caught with this size medium size were used for gill nets troll nets and to make stationary traps and also for long lining for tuna the larger size were used for tatami which are stationary nets they're also for marker buoys jig fisheries and long lining this was especially used in deep seas now engleson our fisherman neighbor and good friend that many of you Rea know and love he explained to me that boats are going out into deep sea would take like a thousand of these large floats so you can imagine just for one trip one thousand of those floats why they needed to produce so many floats and also why so many would get lost out and see and end up on short either as a whole or broken up into pieces of sea glass that I would find weight such as these be used at the bottom of the line so that the Nets could be kept straight therefore there's this perfect balance between the weights and the floats and I often find a lot of these old ceramic weights on the beach but today they have replaced by LED weights or LED lines another thing you'll find often on the beaches in Japan are these long sticks of bamboo often with rope in them or with a flag last week I counted about 20 of these sticks on the stretch of about 50 meters which is the size of an Olympic pool and this one explained to me that the bamboo sticks are used as flags in the sea to show her the beginning and the end of the nets are located the white side shows where it's deepest and the red flag shows where it's most shallow now back to glass floats one of the first things that every avid collector does is look to see if there is a mark these seal marks can tell us a lot about where they're from how old they are who use them if they're common or not common these marks were used to identify the float and be used as a trade mark it must be noted that not every float has a seal mark on it in fact it was usually done by the large companies and they're a symbol of the glass factory that made them surf for example the local glass blower that was here in this town who sadly is no longer with us he would not have marked the ones for the local fishermen here for those that were marked they often came in the first syllable of the company name or glass factory name so real quick lesson in Japanese language there are three written forms of it there's kanji there's cut the kana and hiragana and basically as a newbie here in Japan learning this totally messed with my brain but here's a real quick lesson basically kanji is the pictograph form that's taken from Chinese katakana is phonetic and its origins of words come from foreign names or objects so for instance my name and then hiragana basically is everything else that kanji and katakana does not cover so that is an incredibly simplified linguistics lesson now completed so keeping that in mind back to floats there are hundreds of marks are out there but basically there are just a few companies that really dominated the market so I'm going to show you a few that I have only about half my collection have ARC's I do have some of the really common ones so this one is sin and it's kanji and it comes from the sunlight glass factory Sendai is the main city where I live close to so these are fairly special to me then we have Keita which is very common also written kanji and it means north yes we have said which is in katakana and it's believed to be the mark of the old Auto Glass Company there's also Maru ha and Bette su which are other well-known marks that you just might be lucky enough to find in your collection there's plenty of information on these marks thanks to Amos wood and Walt pitch so if you haven't already done so be sure to grab the resources if they look far more in-depth into these different marks now to make these marks on the floats they would have used something like this I picked this up at an antique store earlier this year and it would have been used for wood but basically it's the same thing that they would have used for glass as well and one of the fishermen here he explained to me that although they did not stamp their own glass fishing floats they would often stamp their wooden floats and just basically shows who it belongs to so actually on the wooden float it would show sometimes if it's the company name the fishermen name and or the boat name so for instance we have this wooden fishing float right here and it's got sinkhole which is the ship name and then cheol and which is the company logo name and then Hasegawa just here on the edge here and that is the fisherman name so one thing that I absolutely adore with glass fishing floats are all the bubbles and the swirls and streaks that you find in this so were they deliberately made this way the answer is no they're actually a flaw because basically they wanted to work as fast and as cheaply to produce these and so they would not clean in between each production so basically there's that mixture of the colors which acts to the glass being mixed with colors and also the bubbles with the cooling down process another thing that I absolutely love about fishing floats are the net were attached to them so that they could be attached to each other and also to guard them from being smashed up some floats in fact are deemed as more valuable with the original netting on them I asked around to find out from the fishermen here if there was like a standard fishing net that was used or if there was like specific purposes for different designs that were used and basically they all said that I was just up to whatever the preference was their fishermen and also though it could help identify whose floats belong to him so very old ones with used natural fibers like hemp and they were hand-knotted newer ones from the late 50s use polypropylene which then proved to be more durable now the last thing I wanted to talk about which is always a popular thing and I'm always asked these questions is about the rollers so we've got the tohoku roller and the Hokkaido roller and basically the Tohoku roller is from the region where I live and the Hokkaido roller comes from up north and Hokkaido and you can tell the difference of them because this one is more rounded and even called fatty in some places and then this one is more parallel and this just straight like that and when I ask the fishermen like if there's different purposes for them they just said basically that's what was available in the region now one theory of why they created it like this this kind of design is that it was to help replicate what the wooden clothes look like and so therefore it would have been easier to substitute them in the wooden to the glass so if you are lucky enough to own a glass fishing float from Japan or some see glass from here now you know a little bit about its origins and its functions so now I want to leave you with a Japanese proverb cut your food etsu which literally means flower bird wind moon and that can be translated to enjoy the things that you learn about nature and then therefore you learn about your and you got to design a mess sayonara

Channel: Beachcombing Magazine

Views: 2,372

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: sea glass, beach glass, beachglass, glassing, beach comber, beachcomber, beach combing, beachcombing, beach, beachcomb, beach comb, beachcombing magazine, beachcombingmagazine, ocean, japan, japanese, fishing float, sake, bottle

Id: b0xKKLctQw0

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020