A thousand years
of Japanese craft.

I'd been reading about kogei (the Japanese word for traditional crafts) and couldn't find a good English-language reference that treated it as more than a gift-shop tourism page. The 236 government-designated crafts have a thousand years of history behind them, specific regional origins, and named artisans. Most of them have zero searchable presence outside Japanese-language sources.

So I built the reference I wanted. The structure was the interesting part: organise by region, by category, by technique, by artisan, without it turning into a wiki or a marketplace. It's deliberately a reference site, not a store.

Content-first, structured data underneath. Every craft has its region, its history, its notable artisans. The AI-assisted research pipeline let me scale the cataloging work without turning it into generic listicle content.

Visual design leans into the aesthetic: wabi-sabi, not SaaS-slick. A site about Japanese craft shouldn't look like every other 2024 startup landing page.