ひがしや - Sensibility Retail

As I was unpacking the library we shipped home from Tokyo, I rediscovered an old favorite about the Japanese confectionery shop, Higashiya.

It is a beautiful little book that conjures the shop’s unique sensibilities in pictures and words. 

A short essay by Higashiya’s founder Shinichiro Ogata (緒方 慎一郎) caught my attention for its ease and directness. 

Ogata-san grew up in a small town in Nagasaki (長崎).

He studied to be a interior designer and upon graduation, moved to post-bubble Tokyo to ply his trade. 

In the early days he often travelled to New York to look for inspiration, but each time he came back to Japan thinking what he had seen “all seemed kind of empty.”

It was through this searching he realized that, for him, experiencing new things in new places was not a way to draw inspiration. 

Instead, it was through old, traditional things that he found ideas that truly moved him. 

At that same time, he made another discovery: “I didn’t really know anything about Japan.”

From that point onward "making Japan” became a conviction for him. 

But why did he choose wagashi? 

Ogata-san loves Japanese sweets for their subtlety, seasonality, and the fond memories they hold - in his childhood, being passed from hand to hand, from maker to consumer.

More practically, when he tried to think of a wagashi-ya where he would want be a guest himself, he couldn’t come up with a single example.

From the first shop’s beginnings in Nakameguro (中目黒), Ogata-san used Higashiya as a stage for expression of his sensibilities. Everything was carefully produced - the sweets, the space, the packaging. 

Other shops followed in Ginza (銀座), in Aoyama(青山). Together they have become standards for craft-keeping and Japan-ness.

Higashiya is a sensibility in the form of a shop.