I’ve always felt I didn’t quite fit into the world I was born into. I was too sensitive, too observant, too “different.” People wanted me to be more decisive, tougher, more like them.

But my thoughts kept drifting elsewhere—to places where aesthetics, detail, and silence matter, where harmony isn’t a weakness but a strength.

In 1998, something small happened that became the beginning of this story. An anime tape and a few illustrations appeared in our home. I didn’t yet know they were from Japan; to be honest, I barely noticed them. A few years later, when I finally watched the tape and looked closely at the illustrations, I felt a calm I couldn’t name. Only later did I learn the word for what moved me: wabi-sabi—the idea that beauty lives in imperfection and transience.

That idea changed my life.

I was imperfect too—cracked, messy, never “enough.” Maybe the truth lives in those cracks. Maybe you don’t have to be perfect; you just have to be real.

For years I worked in places that burned me out: soulless objects, targets, deadlines—the chase for “something more” without knowing what “more” meant. Eventually burnout arrived—or maybe it was a kind of rescue. I stopped pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

I started importing small things from Japan—first for myself. Hand-forged scissors from Seki. Bowls with slightly uneven rims from Tokoname. A notebook stitched with irregular thread. Things someone had truly created, not just mass-produced.

I noticed these objects were changing me. They slowed me down. They taught me attentiveness. They brought silence between my thoughts.

Each one took me back to the beginning—a seed planted in 1998. The brand had no name yet, but it already lived in a way of seeing.

Today I’m building JAPAN-ITEMS because I know there are more people like me—people who, amid the world’s noise, seek meaning, quality, and aesthetics. Maybe you are one of them. If so, you’re in the right place.

JAPAN-ITEMS
items with soul • est. 1998
— Szymon Reducha, founder