I’ve been working on a fabric pattern design inspired by folk art of the Ainu people. The Ainu are an indigenous people in Northern Japan. I may be naive but it seems that, in Japan, everyone knows about them and the discrimination they have had to suffer as well as the waning of their old and rich culture, but nobody talks about them. It was so difficult to find a decent book about Ainu designs.
Well, maybe I exaggerate, maybe they are not so universally ignored. I don’t know.
Here are some of the designs. I must stress the word “inspired,” because they turned out to be quite different from real Ainu designs.
Here is an example of ornamentation on an Ainu garment.
Reika's Picture Notebook 