Takayuki Hosoi, you’re making children’s clothes with a personal touch, hand-drawing them one by one. Please let us know how you started in this business?

I was ‘the child who most loved his grandmother in all the world’ since my early childhood and my grandmother, who passed away several years ago, used to draw ‘Haiga’ therefore I had more chance to see colors and painting tools than most other people. It may have unwittingly attributed to my liking for drawing. After about a year after my grandmother’s death, I brought took the books on ‘Haiga’ my grandmother treasured when she was alive, and I taught myself how to draw. The books my grandmother treasured are now in tatters as I read them almost every day.

Today, I have many varieties of design for the clothes as I now work in collaboration with a calligrapher whom I met after starting this work. When I first started making hand-drawn T- shirts, the only textbook I used for reference were my grandmothers’. I remember the patterns I had were more suited for elderly people, like eggplants pictures or ferns.

Why have you come to deal with children’s clothes?

Of course, my grandmother’s influence was a primary factor, but I wasn’t particularly stuck in “Japanese style” only as such. However, I was sick of T-shirts with illegible English writing on them. I couldn’t value printed T- shirts we see everywhere. There T-shirts no longer appeal to me, and I wanted to offer items which I feel I see the value of.

Fundamentally, I am only looking at items that represent my own values, so there is no sense to me of only dealing in ‘sellable items’ or ‘items which are in fashion’. What I think is beautiful and what I can recognize as of intrinsic value happens to be the Japanese style. In fact, some items are not particularly Japanese style at all.

Is there a message you want to deliver through your items?

I think each article of clothing should have a unique character just like each person has. Often customers tell me that their children have become unafraid of going to the nursery or the T- shirts gave the opportunity for mothers to talk to each other at the routine health checkups. These items of clothing are very strong in character therefore mothers use them as a talking point. I am glad if children and their parents enjoy wearing my clothes.

It would be nice if these items lead people to enjoy everyday life. Finally, please let us know of your future plans.

At the moment, we are only dealing with hand-drawn T- shirts and occasionally we make hand drawn bags, but in the near future, we would like to deal with ‘denim’ and ‘pottery’, too.

Now I have 3 workshops, one in Kyoto, one in Otsu and one in Himeji, but ideally, I would like to have my main workshop somewhere where there is a natural water well and lots of clean air. Trivial though it might seem, I’m very fussy about the water and air. Also, I would like to learn more about dyeing. To fuse ‘dyeing’ and ‘hand-drawing’ is one objective.