The Idea Behind Chowa

When I heard Japanese culture discussed in the West, I often heard the same references: geisha, katana, kimono.

They are all meaningful parts of Japan, but I always felt slightly uncomfortable with the way they had come to represent an entire culture. They were visible, recognizable, and easily romanticized. Meanwhile, many of the ideas that I felt were more central to the way Japanese culture actually functions—the quieter philosophies, rituals, relationships, and standards of care—rarely seemed to travel beyond Japan.

I began wondering whether there was a way to communicate that layer.

And I wanted to do it from New York.

One of the reasons I love New York is that the city has an unusual generosity toward new ideas. If you bring a perspective that is sincere, ambitious, and genuinely different, people will listen. New York is not afraid of cultural collision. It allows ideas to leave their original context, meet something unfamiliar, and become something new.

That was the environment in which CHOWA began.

Around the end of 2022, I started thinking about a Japanese philosophical idea that could become the foundation of a company.

The first word that came to me was chowa.

In Japanese, chowa means harmony. But I have never understood it simply as a state of perfect balance. To me, it also describes the pursuit of harmony—the continuous process of understanding different forces, adjusting them, and finding a way for them to coexist.

It is something we can practice every day.

Between old and new.

Individual and collective.

Beauty and utility.

Tradition and progress.

Ambition and restraint.

Harmony is not passive. It requires attention.

I decided I wanted to build a company around that idea.

I just didn’t know what the company would make.

During New Year in Japan, in January 2023, I walked into an esteemed kiribako store near Ginza in Tokyo.

At the time, I was searching for packaging for whatever CHOWA’s first product might eventually become. I still had no product, but almost immediately I knew that I wanted to use these boxes.

There were hundreds of sizes in the store.

I was handed a small document explaining the history of kiribako, and I became obsessed.

Kiribako are boxes traditionally made from kiri, or paulownia wood. I had encountered them before. In high school, I practiced Urasenke tea ceremony, where these boxes quietly appear around precious tea bowls, utensils, and cultural objects.

But I had never really looked at the box itself.

Once I did, an entire world appeared.

I began learning about the material, the craftspeople, the history of the box, its relationship with tea ceremony and other cultural traditions, its connection to important moments in Japanese history, even the symbolism associated with kiri in Japan.

I learned about the remarkable properties of the wood and the responsible way the material has traditionally been used.

And I kept returning to one thought:

How had something this extraordinary remained so invisible?

That question eventually became much bigger than the box.

Because the more I studied kiribako, the more I realized that I had accidentally found the physical embodiment of the idea I had been searching for.

I had found CHOWA.

Kiribako is quiet.

Its construction is precise without announcing its precision. Its material is beautiful without requiring decoration. It exists to protect something else.

It is often standing beside the protagonist rather than becoming the protagonist itself.

And yet craftspeople have spent generations perfecting it.

There was something incredibly moving to me about that.

In a culture increasingly organized around visibility, here was a craft built around service.

In a world constantly asking for our attention, here was an object that had survived for centuries without demanding it.

That contrast became central to CHOWA.

The harmony I was searching for existed somewhere between these two worlds: between the velocity of contemporary New York and the patience of Japanese craft; between an attention economy obsessed with what can be immediately seen and traditions built by people willing to dedicate their lives to details most people will never notice.

CHOWA would live in that tension.

Not by preserving tradition behind glass.

And not by taking traditional craft and decorating it until it became fashionable.

But by asking how something with centuries of intelligence behind it could participate meaningfully in contemporary life.

Packaging became one of the first places where this philosophy became tangible.

Modern luxury packaging has become extraordinarily sophisticated at creating a moment.

The resistance of a lid. The sound of paper being removed. The perfectly controlled reveal of a new object.

Think about opening an iPhone.

The box separates with just enough friction that the opening is delayed. Your expectation builds before the product is revealed. Every detail has been engineered around that brief moment of anticipation.

It is brilliant.

But CHOWA asks a different question:

What happens to the box next?

That question sounds almost embarrassingly simple.

But it exposes something strange about contemporary consumer culture.

Extraordinary amounts of material, engineering, money, and creativity are spent creating packaging whose greatest moment is also often its final meaningful moment.

Once the object is removed, the packaging has completed its assignment.

Even a beautiful luxury box becomes strangely empty.

There are exceptions, of course. A watch costing $120,000 may arrive in an elaborate wooden presentation case. But those boxes often exist primarily to reinforce the value of the product inside them. Glossy finishes, metallic hinges, substantial weight—the box participates in creating an impression of expense.

Kiribako is something different.

It is premium, but humble.

Beautiful, but utilitarian.

Packaging, but permanent.

At CHOWA we began using the phrase permanent packaging.

We believe the life of a package does not have to end when something is unboxed or gifted. A box can continue living alongside the object it protects.

It can age.

It can travel.

It can accumulate meaning.

The protagonist may be removed and returned hundreds of times, while the box remains its supporting character.

Suddenly, a centuries-old Japanese craft offered a remarkably contemporary answer to a modern problem.

And that, to me symbolizes CHOWA brand.

Not nostalgia.

Not preservation for preservation’s sake.

Harmony between what has already been understood and what the present urgently needs.

The deeper I went into the world of kiribako, the more I became fascinated by the people behind it.

Because somewhere in Japan there is a person who has spent an extraordinary portion of their life becoming excellent at making a box.

Someone else has dedicated their life to a particular joint.

Someone understands exactly how a certain piece of wood should feel in their hand.

Someone notices a difference most of us would never know existed.

And they show up tomorrow and do it again.

There is something almost radical about that kind of dedication today.

We live inside an economy of attention.

The things that rise fastest are frequently the things that can communicate themselves fastest. A celebrity can introduce an idea to millions of people overnight. A three-minute video can transform something obscure into a global obsession. A brand can manufacture a mythology and distribute it faster than we can investigate whether the mythology is true.

Visibility has slowly become confused with value.

Noise with importance.

Recognition with excellence.

And somewhere outside that spotlight, somebody is still doing the work.

That person became enormously important to me.

CHOWA is driven by people who have dedicated their lives to their own version of box making.

Any pursuit in which someone has decided that something deserves to be done extraordinarily well even when the world is not necessarily paying attention.

Those are the people I want CHOWA to find.

Today, it sometimes feels as though the protagonist is the only person who matters.

The designer whose name appears on the building.

The artist whose name appears beside the work.

The celebrity.

The brand.

But almost everything meaningful in our lives exists because of an enormous invisible architecture of human dedication.

People grow the materials.

People sharpen the tools.

People maintain the machines.

People spend decades learning how something should be made.

Culture is not sustained only by its most famous representatives.

It survives because thousands of people whose names most of us will never know decide that something is worth carrying forward.

Japan taught me this very clearly.

A humble wooden box can sit beside an extraordinary tea bowl without being considered culturally insignificant. The maker of the bowl matters. But so does the person who makes what protects it. And the maker of the bowl signs the box...(It is called Hakogaki)

There is respect for the ecosystem surrounding excellence.

That is one of the ideas from Japanese culture that I wanted CHOWA to communicate to the world.

Excellence deserves recognition even when it is quiet.

Or maybe especially when it is quiet.

I have no interest in building a brand that talks beautifully about craft while behaving exactly like every other consumer company behind the scenes.

There is already enough of that.

Craft has become fashionable language.

Heritage has become fashionable language.

Sustainability has become fashionable language.

Storytelling itself has become a commodity.

We refuse to participate in that superficially.

If CHOWA tells you something was made by a craftsperson, we should know who that person is.

If we talk about a material, we should understand where it came from.

If we celebrate a process, we should be willing to show you the process.

You should be able to follow the object backward—from our hands, through the workshop, through the factory, through the material, to the people responsible for making it possible.

We are not interested in craft-washing.

And we are not interested in becoming an organization sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned room issuing instructions to craftspeople while borrowing their stories for marketing.

We have to participate.

We have to listen.

We have to make things together.

We have to know their faces and names.

This philosophy inevitably makes things slower.

Sometimes more difficult.

Sometimes more expensive.

Sometimes commercially inconvenient.

That is fine.

There are decisions at CHOWA that cannot be solved by asking which option produces the highest margin.

The mission comes first.

There is no compromise on that.

Try us.

Offer us money. Offer us influence. Offer us power. Send us a killer. Make the easier path irresistible.

We will still choose the mission.

We are fearless because CHOWA does not stand alone. Behind it are generations of craftspeople, workshops, knowledge, and communities that kept showing up long before anyone was paying attention.

We carry that responsibility with us.

And we do not intend to betray it.

For the last decade, the attention economy has become extraordinarily powerful.

But I don’t believe people have stopped caring about substance.

I think many people are exhausted.

They are becoming better at recognizing manufactured authenticity. They are questioning invented heritage and vague claims about craftsmanship. They are becoming suspicious when every company describes itself with the same language of purpose, sustainability, community, and care.

Eventually, words lose their power when they are separated from action.

And I find that optimistic.

Because underneath all of this, the real things still exist.

The workshops still exist.

The knowledge still exists.

The makers still exist.

The people who refused to abandon their standards are still working.

For decades, many traditional craft communities in Japan have lived through declining demand, aging workforces, and enormous changes in consumer behavior. Some continued working despite having very little evidence that the wider world would suddenly begin caring again.

I have immense gratitude for them.

They preserved something for people they had never met.

Including us.

When CHOWA started working with kiribako, demand for these boxes had fallen dramatically from previous generations.

The Fukuyama region, one of the important centers of kiribako production, once had dozens of box factories. Today only a small number remain.

Our partner factory, Akebono Kougei, is among them.

They survived difficult periods because people there continued believing that the craft had value and that new possibilities could still exist for it.

That belief fuels CHOWA.

When I see generations of knowledge surviving inside a workshop despite everything the market has told them, it makes our own challenges feel very small.

Their courage gives us courage.

Their pride gives us responsibility.

And somewhere along the way, I felt that CHOWA had made a promise to them:

We will never let your dedication go unnoticed.

Not only their dedication.

Anyone’s.

The box became a symbol for every person doing important work outside the spotlight.

And that is why I now know CHOWA’s mission can never really be completed.

There will always be another person to discover.

Another tradition.

Another workshop.

Another overlooked object.

Another culture whose deepest story has been flattened into its most recognizable image.

Another person doing extraordinary work while the world is looking somewhere else.

We intend to find them.

CHOWA started with a box, but it was never meant to remain a box company.

The box gave us a philosophy.

It taught us how we want to make objects, how we want to design spaces, how we want to work with craftspeople, how we want to tell stories, and ultimately what kind of company we want to become.

Every expression of CHOWA should come from the same question:

Can we bring two worlds into a more meaningful relationship without diminishing either one?

Tradition and contemporary life.

Japan and New York.

Maker and audience.

Commerce and responsibility.

Object and story.

Ambition and humility.

That pursuit is CHOWA.

I don’t expect us to achieve perfect harmony. That would almost contradict the point.

The pursuit itself matters.

We will continue making mistakes, learning, meeting people, traveling, building, listening, and discovering things whose value we did not understand before.

But there is one thing on which we will not compromise.

We will always go back to the source.

To the person actually doing the work.

To the material.

To the workshop.

To the truth of how something came into existence.

If the world becomes noisier, we will listen more carefully.

If superficiality becomes easier, we will go deeper.

If meaningful work becomes harder to see, we will work harder to make it visible.

And if the market tells us that nobody cares, we will keep going anyway.

Because somewhere, somebody is still making the box.

And we want them to know that we see them.