wazawaza #001 IKUSA
Each piece is individually numbered and accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity.
About wazawaza
In collaboration with Japanese manga artists, wazawaza creates strictly limited pieces, built on Japanese craftsmanship.
Vision
wazawaza was not founded simply to sell fine things. It exists to offer something rarer — a dream, and an ideal, given form.
The culture that lives in Japan and nowhere else. The skill of ateliers so precise that their work resembles cut jewels. The power of manga, which colors imagined worlds at will and stirs the imagination without limit.
Into each piece, wazawaza pours the finest of Japanese craft and sensibility — so that, one day, it may reach you as something made for you alone: the quiet certainty that this was made for me.
Our dream is a simple one: that the craft and sensibility we hold so dear are seen for what they are truly worth, and reach the people who genuinely want them. And our ideal is this — that we give those wishes a form that can be held, and that what we make is loved deeply, for a long time to come.
wazawaza was founded to reach such hopes across the world, and to give rise to a deep and shared sense of fulfillment.
wazawaza will always make very few things, and place them in few hands. This first edition is the beginning of that circle — the few we hope to come to know, to trust, and to keep making for.
IKUSA
The first work from wazawaza brings into three dimensions an entirely original design by Inio Asano — one of Japan's most celebrated manga artists, and a character designer of the first rank. At nearly 140 centimeters, her presence is meant to be felt in person.
IKUSA regards the malaise of our age with a cool, unflinching eye. She does not flee the weariness of the times, nor is she driven by anger. Holding to the resolve to stand and fight, even alone, should it come to that — and guarding her own identity by her own hand — she goes on living, today, in her corner of the world.
The moment Asano's design reached us, a single drawing gave rise to an endless story in our minds. To give this many-layered character a living, breathing form, and to carry her out into the world, our team came together. It is our wish that IKUSA find her place with those who long for her, and be loved there for years to come.
When did I first come to you about this — about a year ago?
Right around a year ago. Though when you think about it, that was pretty fast, for me.
Fast meaning it got realized quickly after you drew the design?
Yeah.
I see. Does it usually take longer?
Yeah. That's what I'd assumed.
Then I suppose we did right by you.
Speed matters. And let's be honest — this was the kind of project where you wonder if it can really be done at all.
(laughs) True.
It's like, “Wait, we're actually doing this?” And then, “Wait, it's already finished?”
Right. But the more I thought about it, the more it struck me as a project that simply makes sense. You have the Japanese manga artist — a figure the rest of the world genuinely respects — and then there was meeting you in particular: an artist who can pack real authorship into the design of a single image. On top of that, you put the skills of one of Japan's finest ateliers to work. And then you give the piece its value by delivering it only to the people who truly want it. It's a value-optimization project on every level. And yet — at the time it really did feel like, can this actually be done?
This is the kind of thing you can't pull off unless both sides share the same conviction. You and I trade notes regularly, and at some point the conversation turned to looking outward, overseas. That basic, shared conviction is what got the project started. Looking back, the timing was excellent — we'd both been thinking along the same lines.
Right.
My manga sells a lot overseas these days — in some cases the numbers are actually higher there. Still, I'm a Japanese manga artist, so I do my business in Japan, and when you work in Japan, you only ever get seen as a manga artist. But I actually do a lot more than that. I design characters; I think up stories, of course. It's just that unless it all comes out as manga in the end, no one will accept it. It was right around the time I'd been thinking, “I can actually do so much more than this.”
Right, right.
When you brought me this project, I said I had no intention of handling the planning or the concept, but if it was design, I could start right away. Up to now most of my design work had been for manga, but I can do other things too. So I said, “Let me give it a shot” — and the design I drew right then, you went and turned into the actual piece, just like that.
We did. What let us move so fast this time was that zero-to-one illustration. For wazawaza, I'd been thinking the source illustration could be as simple as possible. Here's why: the catchiness and character of your design matter, obviously — but the real value is in how you bring it into three dimensions. In other words, wazawaza is essentially a 3D-realization project. It's a project for showing off the three-dimensional craft that Japanese ateliers have spent years refining. Seen that way, this illustration wasn't just “good enough” — it was exactly right.
Since the goal is to let the modeling craft shine, the original design is actually better off simple — pared down to where you couldn't strip away one more thing.
That's what I thought, and I had a feeling that instinct was correct. If you over-spec it at the illustration stage — if the designer hands over a full 360-degree model, front, side, top, bottom — then the very thing this project is about, the skill and know-how and appeal of the Japanese atelier, gets stripped away. You really do just turn them into a vendor.
Exactly. Normally, when you draw a design, you do at least three views — front, side, back. But this time I only drew it from the front. The lines of my art are distinctive seen from the side, so I'd wondered if it would hold up — and it held up beautifully.
It did, didn't it.
The way they read it and digested it — that comes from real skill, real experience. They barely touched the silhouette. The face, they didn't change at all. They adjusted the arch of the body, but beyond that there was nothing to fix. That was remarkable.
This is a project that uses Japanese craft and sensibility to turn an ideal in two dimensions into a perfect three dimensions. So, to put it the other way around, the message was: don't worry about whether it's feasible — just draw the most appealing character you want to draw right now, completely without restraint.
Right. When we were first talking loosely about how to approach the design, you were also careful about not loading it with meaning.
Exactly, exactly.
Normally, when you design a character, you can't really start until you've been given some list of the character's personal traits. But here, that was left entirely to me. And I just drew, without deciding anything about who this character was. So it was a slightly unusual approach.
What I told you in that first conversation was: I want it simple and pared down, but I'd like you to be conscious of an angle on the present — that faint, constant sense of strain we all live with now, the feeling that everyone's searching for something, that the truth is unclear. The particular heaviness of our era.
I understood, of course, that this wasn't just a cute character — and that the slight hint of poison you can read in the look, the calibration of that, was being left to me. The other big thing: there are plenty of people besides manga artists who can design characters. My reason for being the one to do it is to make a design only a manga artist could make.
Yes, yes, yes — that's exactly it.
So with this product, the eyebrows, the furrow between the brows — those are pure manga signs. Because I'm a manga artist, I'm in a sense allowed to use them. I use them all the time anyway. So I deliberately leaned into that. That's exactly why I'm the one designing it.
Exactly. A kind of traditional Japanese manga-style expression. When an artist does this, people go, “Oh, doing something a bit manga-ish this time, are we?”
It does get read that way — but in my case, it's just that I'm someone who does it all the time. I'm just working as usual. That said, it's a very distinctive form of expression — a sign, in a way. Whether it's there or not makes all the difference.
It really does.
You could express a genuinely angry face through the sculpting, sure — but here you deliberately deform it instead. On paper I drew it quite simply, but once it became a physical piece, the shoes especially were built out in real detail, and the nail bat has tons of detail — and yet the contents of the face are a sign. That imbalance is what makes it interesting, I think. I'm someone who can control that, so it really is just me working as usual.
You explained the nose to me, too. It's that — well, not quite — Fujiko Fujio kind of thing.
I've always loved the old styles of Fujiko Fujio and Fujio Akatsuka. If you ask, “What even is that nose?” — well, this is it, basically. It's a nose that's been used traditionally in manga for ages. But there's a certain charm to it. Almost no one in contemporary manga draws that nose anymore. This time it was the nose and the eyebrows, but bringing in manga-style expression — what we call manpu, manga signs — is the most minimal core concept of this project.
And we're going to turn it into a series. We're already into the next 3D piece.
Adding more characters might be tricky. Precisely because I drew the simplest one first, you can't have it end up the plainest when, say, three of them are lined up together. But I'd love it if we could make it a series.
wazawaza is an experimental project, but the position of the Japanese manga artist, and the position of the Japanese atelier — each has an ability you won't find anywhere else in the world, and the rest of the world is paying attention to exactly that. That, I think, is the position Japan occupies in this present moment. You layer all of it together, have it valued optimally, and place it firmly in the hands of the one person who wants it most. The fact that there's not an ounce of waste in that — that's what I like.
Right. And the most interesting thing about this project is that there's no story. When you deliver content, you almost always have to carry it on something narrative, dress it up, before it finally registers with anyone. This time, deliberately not doing that is what I find most interesting.
Right.
I'm a manga artist, after all, so I default to thinking story-first. But the truth is, I'm not all that interested in story myself — if anything, I've thought about story because I had to, in order to have something to draw. In that sense, getting to draw freely here is a lot of fun. Attach a story and the world gets boxed in, too; that decisiveness is genuinely new. I don't see anything else like it. I find it really interesting.
Although, if it had been anyone but you, I might have asked them to start from the backstory.
Is that so.
With the single-image designs you draw, I've always felt that kind of information is already in there. Your characters are already carrying a story at the drawing stage. That's what I find alternative about them. IKUSA, too, clearly seems to be carrying something — like she's irritated about something, or she's about to make a statement. That alone is enough, isn't it.
Maybe so. That's why, for instance, there's a highlight color in her hair. The fact that it's there means there's a reason. Just having that detail is enough — I don't explain anything beyond it.
She's holding a bat with nails in it to begin with, so she's clearly thinking something. That's plenty.
Yeah.
This is our momentous first piece. wazawaza will keep working hard to make the ideals and dreams of users around the world come true. We look forward to continuing on. Thank you.
Thank you.
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