Each year the Japan Commercial Environmental Design Association, JCD, asks its member designers to choose the best new products made for the spaces they design. Products pass a first round by members’ vote; in the second, each maker presents directly to the jury.

In the 19th Product of the Year, 2025, the Grand Prix went to Tomita’s Kozo VI, entry No. 2522. The jury’s report says that among many excellent products, Kozo VI won overwhelming support.

What the jury singled out was an innovation and a tradition at once. Washi has always been a delicate material, difficult for a designer to specify. By making patterned and painted washi non-combustible, Kozo VI can be used as a wallcovering in many kinds of space. And the making itself, the report notes, is traditional craft through and through: a deep commitment to washi, the artist’s brushwork, sheets assembled by hand, shibori and gathered folds.

The chair wrote that Japanese tradition and material were fused with technical innovation at a high level, and that meeting a product which took on the inheritance and evolution of traditional craft with such beauty was a joy for the jury.

For us it is recognition of the artisans of Inshu, in Tottori, who make every sheet, and of a collection that began in 1988 with a wish to bring washi to the wall. See the Kozo VI collection, or read the results on the JCD website (in Japanese).

Washi reached Japan from China in the early seventh century. Two hundred years later Japan had a way of forming paper that was its own, nagashizuki, and for 1,300 years the craft has been shaped by the country’s climate and by the wisdom of those who practised it.

Of the fibres used, kozo, the paper mulberry, is the thickest, longest and strongest, and it resists fading in the sun. It is cut in early winter once the leaves have fallen, and grows back the next year.

In 1923 Hikoshiro Tomita came up from Kyoto and opened a wholesale house in Kyobashi, Tokyo, dealing in the brocade used to mount hanging scrolls and in paper for fusuma. His son made fusuma and helped rebuild after the war.

The third generation looked outward. Shoichi Tomita played ice hockey for Japan at the 1960 Winter Olympics, saw how people lived abroad, and wanted Japan to see it too. In 1964 Tomita launched its first original wallcovering collection; by 1967 it was importing wallcoverings from around the world.

Then the traffic turned the other way. The Japan Collection went abroad in 1982; Kozo, Japan’s first washi wallcovering collection, followed in 1988; and Art Wall Legend in 2007. In 2016 Tomita came home to Kyobashi and opened tomita TOKYO. In 2023 it turned one hundred.

Read the full history.

Sliced, paulownia shows a soft and beautiful lustre. Thin sheets are laid together one by one to make the most of the natural grain, whose direction gives the wall dimension and a natural play of shade.

Kozo washi is made from the paper mulberry, the cherished gift of nature of Inshu. Its fibre, strong yet delicate, allows folding, crumpling and gradations of colour, and gives a layered sense of warmth.

Leaf is beaten to about a ten-thousandth of a millimetre, then laid by hand one sheet at a time, work so delicate that craftsmen sometimes hold their breath. Gold, silver, pewter and aluminium each have a deep shine of their own.

More on materials and craft, or see Art Wall Legend II.