Obon, and the Journey Across the Sea

The Small Fires of Obon

In mid-August, Tokyo slows down. The cicadas grow louder, the heat presses close, and small lanterns begin to appear at doorways and family altars across the city. This is Obon — the days when, according to tradition, the spirits of our ancestors return home.

Even today, that welcome takes a small, whimsical shape: a cucumber fashioned into a horse, an eggplant fashioned into a cow, each propped up on four toothpick legs. The horse is fast, so the ancestors can hurry home; the cow is slow, so their departure lingers a little longer.

In Asakusa, Obon is quiet compared to the drums of summer's festivals. Families light a small fire at the entrance to guide their ancestors back — mukaebi, the welcoming flame — and light it again days later to send them off — okuribi, the farewell flame. Between these two small fires, for a few days, the living and those who came before them share the same home.

It is, at its heart, a festival about carrying something forward. Not inventing something new, but making sure what came before is not forgotten — that it finds its way, again, into the present.

Tezuri: Threads Drawn From a Fuller Life

This is a feeling we know well at HeWhoMe.Tokyo. Every pair of our shoes begins with a kimono that has already lived a full life — worn at a wedding, a coming-of-age ceremony, a family gathering, perhaps for decades before it ever reaches our workshop in Asakusa. Using a technique called tezuri — literally, "hand-pulling" — our artisans carefully draw the thread from these old textiles by hand, one pull at a time, so that the fabric's original character survives the transformation. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is erased. The kimono does not disappear; it simply continues, in a new shape, into a new season of its life.

In a small way, this is our own mukaebi and okuribi — welcoming the story a textile already carries, and sending it forward into the world once more.

Across the Sea, to Taipei

This August, that same spirit crossed the sea once again. From August 6th to 12th, HeWhoMe.Tokyo exhibited at Creative Expo Taiwan, held at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center — one of Asia's largest design and lifestyle trade shows, and our third country this year, following Saudi Arabia and France. We were invited as a success story of Tokyo's "Buy TOKYO" program, which first recognized us back in 2020. That year, of course, the world came to a standstill, and the international step we had planned had to wait. This summer, at last, we were able to take it.

Standing in Taipei, surrounded by our shoes made from kimono that once belonged to someone else's story, we found ourselves thinking again of Obon — of small fires lit to welcome what came before, and to send it, gently, onward. Asakusa's textiles, carried across the sea for the first time.

We will share more about how the exhibition unfolded — the conversations, the reactions, the small surprises — in our next letter, once we have had a little time to properly look back on it ourselves.

For now, as the lanterns come down in Asakusa and the city eases back into its ordinary rhythm, we simply wanted to share this season with you. As always, if anything about our shoes, our fabrics, or Asakusa itself makes you curious, please do not hesitate to reach out.

With warm regards from Tokyo, HeWhoMe.Tokyo