I was still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago when northeastern Japan was hit by the tsunami in 2011, and I remember seeing a video of nuclear plants collapsing and someone saying, “Japan is finished.” After graduating, I hosted art workshops with Peace Boat, a humanitarian organization that travels around the world to help underserved communities in places like Senegal and Morocco, but it felt a little hypocritical, given the situation in Japan. I wanted to learn more about my people and my heritage. So as soon as the boat trip ended, I started making trips to northeastern Japan every year to learn about its craftsmen and their traditions, which are dying out. That’s when I was introduced to kokeshi, the two-centuries-old practice of making dolls out of wood, and started this collection.

My background is in sculptural fine arts, but kokeshi is what made me become a designer. It’s a whole system. It starts out with carver-farmers planting trees out in the mountains, then harvesting and cutting them into little logs so they can turn them into dolls, using a lathe. The leftover wood chips go into the stove to warm the house, and the ashes left over from the fire go back to the farms as fertilizer. In contemporary design discussions, sustainability and material usage are often at the forefront, and that’s all there in kokeshi.

Now when I present my work, I point to kokeshi as the core of my practice. As a designer, I want to highlight other crafts and traditions I admire. Preservation is important to me, and since I’m not a historian, my role is to make these traditional crafts relevant to the present. Tradition doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing the same thing over and over. We have to ask, What is the version that applies to the culture we have today? As we “modernize,” kokeshi introduces us to a new way of making, one about looking back in order to move forward.

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A Chicago Designer Finds Lessons in the Toy-Making Traditions of His Japanese Heritage