寛具 (かんぐ) or 'Kangu' in roman letters is a word created by Takaokaya specifically to describe the essence of our product. The kanji character 寛 was taken from the word 寛ぎ（くつろぎ - kutsurogi）which means, 'to feel relax' or 'to feel at ease'. A feeling that we wish is felt by our customers when using ...

For our meditation cushions, Matuso-san and I decided to do a small photoshoot session with Takaokaya's president's daughters to promote the new product release. We had an image in mind on what we would like the photos to look like, the problem was how can make that image into reality. We had som...

In the past month, Takaokaya has been releasing several new products, specifically buckwheat filled products. This has been an interesting learning experience because Takaokaya has not produced a buckwheat based product before.  For this reason, we here in Takaokaya has also been gathering some i...

  Recently, with Matsuo-san and I receiving several requests in regards to cushions for meditation, it got both of us thinking, what are the benefits of meditation that so many people are practicing it. That got me into researching and writing today's blog post, dedicated to some of the benefits ...

Do you know how the zabuton created or was born?Zabuton are traditional Japanese cushions with nearly 1000 years of history. There are different stories for it, originally, zabuton was a kind of seat to indicated high status, and were only used by people such as the emperor and members of the imp...

One of Takaokaya's Japanese traditional fabric collections "Hikizome". Hikizome (lit ‘pull dye’, 引き染め) is a traditional Japanese dye technique in which fabric is stretched tight, water is applied and then dye is applied by hand with a brush. Painting the dye into the wet fabric causes it to blur....