Kyoto, Japan
We design, build, and export Japanese ceremonial entertainment — live performance, ritual staging, and objects that carry a hidden mechanism. From Kyoto, in Japanese and English.
Illustration. Not a depiction of any actual shrine.
What we export
Taiko, dance, and ceremonial staging, scaled to the room you have.
The form does not change. The stage does.
Objects that carry a hidden mechanism, and open later.
Sites for shrines, temples, and museums — built to be handed over.
Illustration. Not a depiction of any actual shrine.
Why us
Most people who understand the tradition cannot build the machinery. Most people who can build it do not know the tradition. We do both, and we do not need to subcontract the part that matters.
Rooted
We run our own tour and workshop business in Kyoto and write its English editorial ourselves — thirty-three articles to date. We also run a Japanese-language review site covering immersive theatre and alternate reality games. We are inside the field we sell from, on our own money.
Engineered
Shopify order webhooks with HMAC verification and idempotency. NFC and servo unlock circuits with our own firmware. A generator that hides text inside printed stripe patterns. Branching narrative bots on LINE. Staged production deploys at ten, fifty, and a hundred percent with automatic rollback. We can be specific because we wrote it.
Message Coffee
A gift box ships with a printed code. The recipient scans it, tilts the phone to pour a cup, and a message surfaces in the steam. We built the whole chain — order intake, token issuing, printable codes, fulfilment. This is the closest existing thing to the shrine-side artifacts we make.
Our own tour and workshop business in Kyoto. We built the site, wrote all 33 English articles, and run the booking and staffing systems ourselves — including a custom analytics tool we use to decide what to change.
A Japanese-language review site covering immersive theatre and alternate reality games. We plan, build, and run it ourselves. Watching this field closely is what informs how we design experiences.
See it work
These are the same techniques that go into the physical objects. Try them.
May this year pass without harm.
A reproduction of the treatment applied to an amulet pouch.
Come back again.
Move slowly left and right
Who we work with
You have a client who wants a Japan-themed evening and a date that cannot move. You need one contact in Japan who can specify the piece, contract the performers, ship the gear, and stand in your venue on the night. We work to your production schedule and hand you a technical rider your crew can read.
You want a resident cultural programme that guests remember, not a lobby performance they walk past. That usually means a smaller, closer piece — and often a room gift that opens into something. We design the two together, because they are the same experience.
You need a set piece that runs many times a day, survives your operations team, and is authentic enough to withstand a Japanese visitor. That is a staging and engineering problem as much as a cultural one. We build the devices as well as the show.
You need the material handled correctly — sources cited, tradition marked as tradition, nothing invented to fill a gap. That is how we work on shrine projects in Japan, and it does not change when the work travels.
Before you ask
Yes, with lead time. Performer scheduling and visas are the long pole, not the production. Tell us the date and we will tell you honestly whether it is reachable. If it is not, we will say so rather than take the deposit.
English or Japanese, throughout — briefs, contracts, technical documents, and on site.
Cross-border work has too many variables for a list price, so we do not publish one. We quote against a defined scope, separating our fee from pass-through costs — travel, freight, local hire, manufacturing — so you can see which is which.
Settled in writing before we start: the staging design, the footage, the photographs, and any second use. We do not leave rights vague and sort them out afterwards.
Small. We work as a studio with a network of performers and makers, and we would rather tell you that than imply a scale we do not have. It also means the people you brief are the people who build it.
Even a rough brief is enough to start. We will tell you what is possible, what is not, and what it would take — before either of us spends money.