The woman helping to keep Japan’s traditional crafts alive

Tina Koyama left Silicon Valley to build a future for Japan’s handmade traditions. Five years on, her Kyoto-based studio, POJ, works with more than 20 craft traditions and has turned cultural preservation into a viable business model.

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There is a word the Japanese use – mottainai – that has no clean equivalent in English. It describes the feeling of regret when something of value is wasted or lost; a grief, almost, at the squandering of potential. Tina Koyama first encountered it as a child, accompanying her mother on a visit to a bamboo weaver’s workshop in Akita prefecture. The craftsman worked quietly, then mentioned casually that he had no successor. Nobody had been willing to learn. She was young and let the comment pass. Years later, she discovered he had closed the workshop and died, and the weight of that early visit settled on her properly for the first time.

Japan is losing its handmade traditions at a rate that should unsettle anyone who cares about material culture. Traditional craft – the lacquerware, the ceramics fired in ancient kilns, the textiles dyed with natural pigments extracted from bark and root – has been in structural decline for decades. The economics are punishing: a craft requiring years of apprenticeship and the slow production of objects cannot compete with manufactured goods on price or volume, and the domestic market is no longer large enough on its own to sustain workshops. Skills that took centuries to develop are now simply stopping. Not with any announcement. Just quietly, one closure, then another.

What makes this loss so particular to Japan is the depth of what stands to disappear. Shigaraki ware – fired in one of the country’s six ancient kilns, its rough ash-glazed surfaces prized by tea masters for centuries – is still being made, but the practitioners doing it to a traditional standard are vanishingly few. Echizen lacquerware in Fukui traces its origins back 1,500 years.

The Oryoki bowl – the nesting lacquered wooden vessel used in Zen Buddhist ritual, requiring extreme precision – is now produced by a handful of artisans in Ishikawa, among them Hiromichi Nakade, one of the few remaining in Japan who still makes it to the standard the tradition demands. In Mie prefecture, a wood-bending technique used to craft hinoki frames had fallen out of active use.

Enter POJ Studio – Pieces of Japan – the Kyoto-based craft collective that Koyama founded in April 2020, which has spent the five years since doing something the craft world badly needs: making this kind of skilled, labour-intensive work economically rational again. 

The model is straightforward in principle but difficult in practice. POJ works directly with artisan families across Japan, co-develops products with them, invests in moulds and samples upfront, charges no consulting fees, and commits to purchasing everything produced. Artisans are paid fairly and in advance. The studio sells through its own online shop – now shipping to over 160 countries, with the United States its largest market – and through a restored century-old machiya in Kyoto's Higashiyama district that functions simultaneously as gallery, workshop and retail space.

Koyama is an unlikely architect of this renaissance. She was raised in Switzerland –  her father an architect, and her Japanese mother a craft buyer who made deliberate, repeated efforts to bring Japan into daily life at home, through food, through language, through periodic visits to workshops – before studying visual communication at the Zurich University of the Arts, a school whose roots run back to Bauhaus thinking. She went to Tokyo, then to Silicon Valley, where she spent six years at Twitter leading UX and international product strategy. It was there, surrounded by venture capital and billion-dollar app valuations, that something clarified. “I realised how transformative even a fraction of that capital could be for craftspeople in Japan,” she has said. The contrast between the two worlds – one racing forward, one quietly closing its doors – became impossible to sit with.

She had never particularly thought of herself as an entrepreneur, had watched her architect father navigate the difficulty of running his own practice, and had no appetite to repeat it. What shifted was the recognition that her combination of skills – product thinking, systems design, cultural fluency in both Japanese and the expectations of an international consumer – was almost precisely what the problem required.

She returned to Kyoto to build the brand during maternity leave, shaping an audience before she had a single product to sell. When she launched, it was with one object: a kintsugi kit made with real urushi lacquer, at a time when authentic versions were almost impossible to find. The pandemic, which gave people time and a sudden appetite for slow, demanding processes, did the rest.

Five years on, POJ works with over 20 craft traditions. The range of what those partnerships produce is a study in how old techniques find new relevance. 

Takahashi Kogei in Fukui, for instance, has been carrying the 1,500-year-old tradition of Echizen lacquerware for over a century; with POJ, they have developed trays and boxes made explicitly to last another hundred years. Wataru Sakai, a woodcraft artisan in Fukuoka working under the moniker Double Double, hand-carves each fork, spoon and knife from ebony with a philosophy of deliberate restraint – the meal, he says, is the main character; the cutlery simply serves it. In Mie prefecture, designer Kazuto Yoshikawa collaborates with the Miyagawa family workshop, makers of mirror frames since 1946, to revive a dormant hinoki wood-bending process using timber sourced from sustainably managed forests.

In Kyoto, Masao Kiyoe has spent 47 years natural-dyeing textiles from a workshop on the path up to Kiyomizu Temple – shibori tying and kusaki-zome, the extraction of colour from plants, bark and root. Neither skill came through formal lineage. Kiyoe originally worked in construction, but a workplace accident redirected him, and he taught himself both techniques from scratch, in a field where the two processes are traditionally kept separate. The indigo wall pieces he now produces with POJ are among the studio’s best-selling objects.

Then there is Wataru Myoshu, a Kyoto ceramicist whose vessels take their reference not from nature but from things marked by time – aged building surfaces, ancient bronze, Roman glass. Objects that have been changed rather than protected. The results sit somewhere between archaeology and studio practice, and are among POJ’s most singular pieces.

Koyama approaches every partnership the same way: she listens first. She arrives at workshops without a product brief, asks craftspeople what they hope their own futures look like, and works outward from there. The object that eventually exists is one both parties have arrived at, rather than one imposed from outside. There is, she says, rarely any creative tension. POJ takes on the financial risk throughout – the moulds, the sampling, the commitment to buy – which changes the nature of the relationship from transaction to something closer to alliance.

Koyama’s ambitions now extend well beyond product. A woodworking school has opened in Keihoku. A pottery residency is under construction in Shigaraki – eight students at a time, in a space being built with a traditional temple carpenter, with the first programme planned for early 2027. A foundation is being established. 

She has also begun talking about what she calls “craft villages” – actual communities where production, education and rural life are woven together so that younger people can picture staying, or returning, or arriving from abroad to learn. The kintsugi apprenticeship programme has already produced alumni now teaching the practice in Los Angeles and New York.

The engine behind all of it is something Koyama does not try to obscure. “From a young age, I've been very aware of mortality,” she said. “Questioning what gives life meaning and what, if anything, endures.” It is a very particular kind of ambition – not to be remembered, exactly, but to build something that does not require her continued presence to carry on. The craftspeople she works with think in generations. 

She has decided, it seems, to think that way too.

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