At age twenty-seven Ohira left Japan to study sculpture at Venice's Accademia di Belle Arti. His dissertation on the aesthetics of glass and his proximity to the glassmaking facilities of Murano led him to resume his youthful experiments with the medium by collaborating with Livio Serena, a master glassblower, on a series of goblets, bowls, vases, and bottles. Many of these early forms, as well as their colors, referenced classic sixteenth-century Italian wares.

This recent vase, however, combines restrained Japanese elegance and simplicity of shape with Italian techniques: the fusing of lengths and slices of murrine canes to produce pattern and battuto carving, in which the glass appears to have been beaten. The upper body of the vase, in semitransparent aqua blue, is reminiscent of Venetian lagoons and canals, while the polished white lower portion is opaque but punctuated by translucent "windows" of blue glass—the whole evoking the phenomenon of acqua alta (high tides that cause flooding). A thin red band running along the narrow lip adds the only other color to the vase.