With a desire to spread Japanese tea culture, Takahashi Kogei is a company that specializes in coating lacquerware with urethane paint. Their main business consists of painting teaware and boxes for storing figurines used for festivals, but in recent years they have also started to develop their own products. Compared to using lacquer, urethane coatings have a wider range of expression, especially in terms of its lustre and richness of color. This high degree of freedom allows Takahashi Kogei to reproduce exactly the design as requested by the client.

Leveraging their deep experience of working on different kinds of implements used for sado (Japanese tea ceremony), Takahashi Kogei has designed and developed their own line of teaware called the “Ippukubox”. Created in response to requests from people who wanted to enjoy tea easily at home without worrying about the etiquette of sado, this is a product that simplifies the tea-making process, allowing users to focus on simply enjoying tea – making tea culture a more familiar presence in our daily lives.

Founded in 1925, Takahashi Kogei originally started out with building kakumono, which are rectangular-shaped lacquerware. (These include stacked boxes, square trays, and other items made by pasting wood together.) However, along the way, they started doing spray painting, and now have pivoted to become a workshop that works primarily with chemical paints.

In 2018, Ryosei Takahashi took the helm at Takahashi Kogei, which at the time was mainly doing work that was subcontracted by wholesalers. Wanting to diversify, the open-minded Takahashi decided that he wanted his own original product to sell directly to customers and began to tap into his expertise with tea utensils.

In 2020, Takahashi Kogei launched what became their flagship product – the Ippukubox. Ever since, they have been actively promoting tea culture in Japan by organizing workshops on making and drinking tea, as well as conducting online sado sessions with practitioners of tea ceremony. Thanks to these activities, the painting house has been approached directly by shops that sympathize with its mission and have even received orders for their products.

In the future, Takahashi would like to make things closer to our daily lives, regardless of whether it is through woodworking or painting. His goal is to focus on work that has a deeper meaning and can bring comfort to our everyday way of life.

The Ippukubox was created with the desire to make tea culture more accessible to people around the world. Each box contains one of the following: a chawan (tea bowl), chasen (tea whisk), a chashaku (tea spoon), and a natsume (tea canister). The set is designed to make it easy for people to enjoy Japanese tea at home.