ART KOGEI

ART KOGEI is a room in a converted warehouse at Tennoz, on the waterfront in Shinagawa, showing the work of ten craftsmen from around Japan. The pieces are for sale, and what is on show changes during the run.

The ten work in five materials: ceramics, lacquer, glass, metal and dyed cloth. Six of them are based in Ishikawa, the prefecture whose towns have long made Kutani porcelain and Wajima lacquer, and the rest in Toyama, Kyoto and Kanagawa.

Among them is a lacquer maker who holds a name passed down through sixteen generations, and several who are at the start of their careers. The mix is deliberate: the point of the room is to put work of this kind in front of people who would not go looking for it.

The association behind it wants people who see the work in Tokyo to go and see where it is made. From the autumn of 2026 it plans private tours of two nights and three days, taking small groups to the workshops and the temples of the districts the pieces come from.

Once those tours are on sale, the room is to double as the place they are arranged, with an assistant that answers in several languages helping to put an itinerary together. The tours are aimed at foreign visitors and at buyers.

The district around it has been turned over to art over the past decade: warehouses along the canal converted into galleries and studios, with murals on the walls outside. The body that runs ART KOGEI was set up to develop that waterfront, and has been registered as a tourism organisation since 2024.