For more than 100 years, a town in Nara Prefecture has been using leftover, high-quality cypress wood from the home construction process to create disposable chopsticks. But even in this process there are leftovers: slices of wood called hamidashimono that were simply collected and burned. So a team of designers worked with local craftspeople to upcycle these leftovers to create an izakaya-grade DIY chopsptick set.
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In April of 2016, a powerful earthquake rocked Kumamoto, toppling parts of Kumamoto Castle and damaging many other historical sites. One of those was 200-year old Soy Sauce maker Hamada Shoyu. Their oldest kura, or storehouse, had survived through the Edo, Meiji, Taisho, Showa and Heisei periods. So this earthquake wasn’t going to stop them. And, they had a powerful ally. When the earthquake struck, architect Kengo Kuma was one of the first to raise his hands and offer assistance.
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The rubber eraser is said to be roughly 250 years old. But for all its old age, the partner to any pencil has always had one major flaw. You can’t see what you’re erasing. Until today. Osaka-based stationery company Seed, who has been making erasers since the 1950s, has developed a translucent eraser.
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Mistletoe is an incubation office started in 2016 by serial entrepreneur Taizo Son, the younger brother of billionaire Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son. For the company’s new office in Tokyo, which opened earlier this year, architect Daisuke Motogi was tasked with a rather unusual request: to design a “perpetually unfinished” space that induces serendipity.
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Incense and matches, combined as one. This ingenious yet intuitive design comes from a 90-year old Japanese match manufacturer, who never stopped innovating. After years of trial and error, the creators of Hibi arrived at the optimal mixture of paper fibres, incense and charcoal to create the perfect strike-on-box incense match.
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Located in one of Japan’s industrial hubs of Osaka is Nakanishi Metal Works, a company that manufactures metal components like bearings that go into basically any machine that rotates. Their parts go into every single shinkansen.
The company is 95 years old and, given their industry and location, not exactly who you think of as a forerunner of modern, collaborative workspaces. But stereotypes are made to be broken, and that’s exactly what this company did when they decided to convert their 100-year old wooden warehouse into a beautiful space where employees could come together and share ideas.
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Japanese animator Eugene works for the award-winning studio Robot Communications. But as a side project, the animator has been creating a beautiful side project that recently came together in a pulsating short video of underwater sealife.
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Farewell My Tokyo are a series of framed artistic images created by designer Megumi Takami, who wanted to memorialize the essence of Tokyo for anyone who wants to keep a reminder of its colorful street signs, cozy neighborhoods, town landscapes, modern architectures and cultural landmarks.
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The Mitosaya Botanical Distillery is located in Chiba, right in the middle of the Boso Peninsula. A little over a 1 hour drive from Tokyo, the distillery is not only surrounded by nature, it houses over 500 different varieties of herbs on it’s sprawling 16,000sqm organic farm. It’s these and other local ingredients that go into the many varieties of brandy and spirits that the distillery produces.
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Bousai is the Japanese word for disaster preparedness. And given the fact that the country is so prone to natural disaster, bousai has been a point of increasing emphasis within the design community as many have turned to design as a means of facilitating better preparedness. Recently, a Japanese company that has been making firefighting equipment for almost 130 years, designed a minimal set of fire extinguishers to encourage people to keep one in their home.
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Japanese Aquarium Drops 2026 Version of Flowchart Illustrating Their Penguin Relationships. This Year There’s an English Version.
Tadao Ando Designed & Donated a Floating Library that Delivers Books to Children
0.02 EX Okamoto Condoms
Illustrations by Rei Kato are a Summer Vibe
The Kaki Flower Vase Creates the Illusion of a Floating Flower
