Tina Koyama grew up acutely aware of mortality. Not in a morbid way, she is careful to say, but in the way that makes you ask what actually endures. It is a question she has been sitting with since childhood, and it is, in the most direct sense, why POJ Studio – of Pieces of Japan – exists.
Tina Koyama's life with Japanese craft
Koyama was raised in Switzerland, the daughter of a Swiss architect and a Japanese mother who worked as a craft buyer. She remembers her mother as a woman who, because the family didn't live in Japan, made a conscious effort to bring its influence into daily life. Food was part of it. Language was part of it: Japanese was spoken at home, a decision that would prove professionally decisive later on.
Periodically, there were visits to Japan, which meant visits to workshops. One of those visits – to a bamboo weaver and his wife – never quite left Koyama. The craftsman mentioned, quietly, that he had no successor. She was young and didn't fully register the weight of it. She recently learned he had closed his workshop and died. 'Looking back,' she says, 'it was a glimpse into a world that was already beginning to disappear.'
Koyama went on to study visual communication at the Zurich University of the Arts – historically the place to study design in Switzerland, with roots going back to the Bauhaus – before heading to Tokyo, then eventually to Silicon Valley, where she spent six years at Twitter, leading UX and international design strategy. It was an unlikely detour.
It was also, it turns out, the making of her. 'I don't think I would have had the courage to start POJ Studio if I hadn't lived there,' she says. The scale of ambition she absorbed in the Bay Area, combined with a creeping unease at watching billions of dollars flow into apps while centuries-old craft traditions quietly collapsed for want of a sustainable income model – a contrast that eventually became impossible to ignore.
Pieces of Japan: a fortunate beginning
Ainu noren hand-stitching
POJ Studio launched in April 2020 out of a Kyoto machiya, with a single product: a kintsugi kit made with real urushi lacquer, at a time when authentic versions were almost impossible to find. The timing was fortunate as people in lockdown suddenly had the hours required for a slow, demanding repair process. Of course, the thinking behind it was anything but accidental. Koyama had gone looking for the kit after her mother took up kintsugi, and found almost nothing made to proper traditional standards. She cold-called Takuya Tsutsumi, a fourth-generation urushi lacquer refiner. He is now, she says, like family.
That is broadly how POJ works: deep, long-term relationships with artisan families whose practices span generations, developed through trust, word of mouth, and Koyama's own fluency – cultural as much as linguistic – in a world that does not open easily to outsiders.
Preserving craft traditions
Shigaraki pottery making
The studio now works with more than 20 craft traditions across Japan, from the Tahara family's sashimono woodworking (nail-free, glue-free joinery, practised since 1877, now producing a modular storage system with POJ) to Masao Kiyoe, a former steel construction worker who retrained after a workplace accident and has spent 47 years natural-dyeing indigo textiles from a workshop on the path up to Kiyomizu Temple. His son Junichi now works alongside him.
Then there is the Ainu noren (or divider, featuring designs of the indigenous Ainu community), hand-stitched in Hokkaido by members of the Kayano family – POJ’s most politically charged collaboration, and deliberately so. 'It feels important,' Koyama says, 'to highlight a culture that predates modern Japanese identity.'
Given the nature of the craft, products are never seasonal and besides, rotating collections would undermine the stable income stream that is the whole point of POJ. Everything ships to over 160 countries, with the US the largest market.
For Koyama, these are busy times. She talks about building 'craft villages’ – ecosystems, not just shops – where younger people can actually envision a life, a family, a future. To that end, a woodworking school has opened in Keihoku; and a pottery residency is planned for Shigaraki in early 2027. A foundation is also in the works.
Clearly, Koyama is playing a very long game. 'The idea of sustainability, for me, isn't only environmental or economic,' she says. 'It's about continuity across generations.' That, ultimately, is her answer to mortality: build something that outlasts you.