A pattern consisting of straight lines produced by the color scheme of warp and weft thread. Up until the Momoyama period (1573 – 1603), this pattern was not called 縞 – shima then but 筋 – suji, which has a meaning closer to “line.” From the early modern era, many stripe-patterned textiles were brought to Japan by European ships mainly from Spain or Portugal. Since these striped textiles were brought from another continent across the ocean, people started to call them shima-mono, literally “island things.” From this, they later adopted a different character for shima (縞, meaning “stripe”) which is a homonym of the character for “island” (島, also read as shima).