What is “Younobi”

These are the words of Muneyoshi Yanagi, the father of the folk art movement. Muneyoshi Yanagi taught that function “must not only indicate material properties, but must also have a psychological function. It is possible to seek only functionality in “things. However, what is truly useful in life is something that satisfies both the needs of the body and the mind. The true functionality of a product is when it is both easy to use and beautiful to look at.

About Muneyoshi Yanagi

Mingei is a term named by Muneyoshi Yanagi and others in 1925. Muneyoshi Yanagi, who advocated a unique “aesthetic of things” that is close to daily life, established the Japan Folk Art Museum in 1936 and became its first director, wishing to share folk art and its aesthetics with as many people as possible. The Japan Folk Art Museum still exists in Komaba, Tokyo, as a base for disseminating the aesthetics of folk art.

About this website

We strongly sympathize with and respect Yanagi Muneyoshi’s philosophy of “Younobi” and have chosen it as the title of our website. While our lives are rapidly becoming more convenient these days, there seems to be a growing trend toward reevaluating and appreciating warm and beautiful things made by artists. In an information environment where the world is becoming more homogenized with globalization, there is a motivation to reexamine one’s own life, and unique and beautiful objects and spaces are being created where technology and warmth coexist. In the midst of such a swell of the times, I hope to convey useful and emotional things, especially from Japan.

Request for Donations

We have prepared a donation program in order to keep the site running as long as possible without advertisements. Although this non-profit website started as an extension of our hobby, it has grown into a website that receives several hundred hits per month thanks to all of you who read it. We realize that it costs money to run the site, so we would like to operate the site as a “donation” type site in order to make it sustainable. We would like to use the money you donate to cover the annual server management fees, and we accept small donations of as little as 100 yen, so we would appreciate it if you could support us with an amount that you can comfortably pay.

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＊Translated with DeepL.com