This is an early source describing how deerskins were used in Japan. Carletti was a Florentine merchant who circumnavigated the world between 1594 and 1606. He stayed in Japan in 1597 and 1598 where he recorded this description of how deerskins were used by Japanese artisans.
Cover of Carletti’s Description of Deerskins
“They also obtain very large numbers of buckskins, which they call sichino caga, and which they prepare in a curious manner, cunningly painting in them with various designs diverse pictures of animals, and other things. And they do this with the smoke from rice straw which colors the entire skin except the part which has been covered with the form of the pictures, which remain impressed and delineated on the white unsmoked part of the skin.”
Citation
Carletti’s Description of Deerskins.