KOSHIRAERUKoshiraeru.llc
KOSHIRAERUKoshiraeru.llc
A journey somewhere between planning and not planning. A certain person is there, a certain place is there, and something happens.
In the expectation of that something, we work at making stories.
Ube grew up as part of the Seto Inland Sea industrial belt, and it has long nurtured public art. Taking those two threads as our material, we made a neighbourhood bookshop with the grain of a craft town. We choose books that bring a gentle realisation, and hope you will read them in a tearoom where your own time can stretch out.
We also run Kufusha Book Apartment, a shared bookshop that residents help to build. It has become a place where different people connect loosely.
Yokyo Ichiba began as a "sideshow" — with the local festival as the main act, and our market as a way to enjoy the road towards it. The word ichiba carries a wish of ours: that a marketplace might also become a commons. We wanted to widen the liveliness of the festival, and to pass on the ties made at the market whenever a new festival begins to sprout. With that in mind we started in the autumn of 2024.
The stalls are small ones, run by the makers and shopkeepers themselves. We invite each of them with care, valuing how their way of living shows through as much as what they sell. Since the spring of 2026 we have also held Bungei Ichiba, a market of books and printed matter, on the same day.
We reconnect the people, the doings and the places of a region. Starting from the form of a medium, we listen to the voices of those who live here and tie people, matters and places back together.
Our editing and design work is not limited to making books. It extends to the design of spaces and environments, and to shaping the context of a company or an activity.
See our editorial work →Nurturing a shop, and drawing up plans that cultivate a region. Both extend from the same work of building the fabric of daily life.
From business planning and budgets through measuring the existing space, drawings and interior design, signage and fixtures, direction on site during construction, and support after opening.
We connect the voices we gather through interviews, and the logistics we have learned from running markets, to regional plans and pilot projects. We also follow available public funding as a matter of routine.
A selection of our projects, including ones still under way. Our role differs each time, following what is being made.
06 ─ ABOUT
When you travel, the encounters and the gifts particular to a place make the heart dance. They are not the product of development alone, but of customs that have been kept, dialects that have been handed down, cultures that have been cultivated — a grace, we think, that dwells in us.
Among the things falling out of use there are things worth keeping, ones that touch something in us, and surely they hold something beyond mere usefulness. Lighting up that something, and cherishing it across generations, is the whole of what we do.
Masaki Negoro, Representative
Even if your idea for a shop is still vague, or you would like to take part in the market, or you are writing about us. You are also welcome to simply drop by Kufusha.