Japanese Culture Through the Lens of Traditional Crafts

What is culture? And what does it mean to preserve it?

While we often appreciate and seek to preserve cultures that have been cultivated over long histories, it is a rare opportunity to reflect on what truly shapes culture—and how culture, in turn, shapes us.

The speaker, Mr. Tokunaga, has spent 2 years on a project visiting 68 traditional artisans across Kyoto, interviewing each craftsperson and developing the Red List of Kyoto’s Traditional Crafts. Through this journey, he has continually asked himself these very questions and will now share the insights that have emerged.

We invite you to join this talk as a chance for all of us to reflect on and reconnect with culture and perhaps to see Japanese culture from a fresh and different perspective.

Free admission. Register below.

TOKUNAGA Yuki

Mr. Tokunaga is the founder of the Culpedia, an organization dedicated to fostering cultural exchange and preserving traditional arts. He is also a collaborative researcher at the Open Lab for Emergent Strategy Research (ROLES) at the Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo.

Through Culpedia, he leads cultural initiatives including research into Kyotoʼs Red List of traditional crafts and the creation of paintings by translating Japanese stories for international artists unfamiliar with those tales. He has lectured on Japanese and global culture in over 10 countries worldwide and has visited more than 80 countries in total.

Striving to act not just as a linguistic interpreter but as an “interpreter of values,” Mr. Tokunaga continues to champion meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and cultural preservation efforts.