YABOROJI
The Wakuworks office and activity hub is in Yaboroji, Western Tokyo, where we have renovated and utilized the land of the Honda family. The Hondas have lived Yaboroji since the Edo period, when the area was simply called Yaho Village. However, in recent decades the Honda family land and houses were vacant, and had fallen into disrepair.
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In 2009, we moved in and began researching the history of the land and the family upon it. We formed a plan to renovate the environment and restore the Honda family home, gardens, and forest. We uncovered and restored a storehouse, a well, a porch, a tea room, a transom, and clay walls. We also removed the outer fencing and ensured the area was connected to surrounding alleys and paths leading to nearby rice fields in the Satoyama of Taniho and the thickets of Musashino: an organic connection between the Honda land and the lands which sustained them and the community as a whole.
Over the course of our renovations, we continued to learn about the life, culture and history of Yaho Village, and we ensured in our work that we valued the human-scale space and neighborhood character that still pervades the place. We began referring to our work as `Yabology'.
Now, Yaboroji is not only the Wakuworks office. It is also a hub for the community. On the Honda's land we host a nursery school and other childcare support, an art gallery, a hair salon, and a workshop/ kitchen space for ourselves and the community to use, to cook, sew, and build. The Wakuworks office functions as a place open to all.
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We are both proud and humbled to live and work in this traditional environment and way of life: a bridge between past and future, and with a Japanese spirit throughout.
Please come and visit us!
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We are both proud and humbled to live and work in this traditional environment and way of life: a bridge between past and future, and with a Japanese spirit throughout.
Please come and visit us!
