niime 百科

Encyclopedia of niime

One day at the end of the year, a special event was held at the Niime Residence to celebrate the advance release of Comfort Is Beautiful (published by Gentosha), the first book by Tamaki Niime, ahead of its official release on December 23.

The main speakers were Tamaki herself and me, Seiji Koshikawa, who served as the book’s editor.

Gathered around a low table in a spacious traditional Japanese room, we enjoyed an open and relaxed conversation. We shared stories about the three-year journey of creating this long-awaited “niime Book,” including the struggles that came with bringing it into the world. As the discussion unfolded, the audience eagerly joined in, turning it into a passionate exchange about one question: “What exactly is tamaki niime?”

Fujimoto: Thank you all for coming to celebrate the completion of Comfort Is Beautiful, written by Ms Tamaki, the founder of tamaki niime. Today, we’d like to talk together with all of you about this book, the ideas behind it, tamaki niime’s philosophy, and where we are today as a company. Our two main speakers are seated in front. First, I’d like to introduce the gentleman wearing the hat—Mr. Seiji Koshikawa.

Koshikawa: My name is Seiji Koshikawa. I run a bookstore called Hesomachi Bunko and a one-person publishing company called Hesonoo Publishing in downtown Nishiwaki, with activities centred in Nishiwaki and Taka. Thank you for having me.

Fujimoto: Mr Koshikawa has been involved in this project from the planning stage all the way to its completion, so we’d like him to join us for today’s discussion. And next to him is our representative, Ms Tamaki.

Tamaki: I’m Tamaki. Nice to meet you all.

Fujimoto: This may sound a bit formal… (laughs) Ms Tamaki came to Nishiwaki in 2009. By 2025, she had spent sixteen years here, and in 2026 the company celebrates its twentieth anniversary. This book, Comfort Is Beautiful, looks back on those twenty years while also sharing Tamaki’s vision for the future. Since each of you has a copy, please feel free to hold it in your hands as we talk. Well then, let’s begin.

Koshikawa: Rather than standing on a stage and talking at everyone, we’d much rather have an informal conversation. Please turn the pages together with us. We’d love to hear your thoughts about both the book and tamaki niime. Feel free to speak up at any time—that’s exactly what we hoped for when we planned this event.

Tamaki: So… Mr Omori, you’ve already read it, right?

Omori: Of course I have!

Tamaki: Then tell us what you thought.

Omori: Me first?

Tamaki: I’m curious how it felt for you, especially since you’ve been involved in this project from the very beginning.

Omori: That’s right. For the past four or five years I’ve been something like an advisor—though that sounds far grander than it really is. I’m from Nishiwaki myself, and while I now work for a very large company in Tokyo…

Koshikawa: One of Japan’s major advertising agencies.

Omori: Yes. You could say I work for a company that’s constantly pressing the accelerator of capitalism. Meanwhile, my hometown has gradually been losing people and becoming quieter. Ms Tamaki, who’s almost exactly my age, came here from Fukui just as I was leaving Nishiwaki for Tokyo. Watching her devote herself to this town, I couldn’t help but want to support her.

Koshikawa: Yes.

Omori: Everything written here is true—but it still isn’t all of tamaki niime. The more you try to explain Ms Tamaki in words, the farther you drift from who she really is. Still, this book opens the front door. Anyone who reads it can step into the entrance of Tamaki, the company, and the brand. But going beyond the entrance… into the deeper rooms… even upstairs… That’s much harder. The real Tamaki simply can’t be captured completely in words.

Tamaki: Indeed.

Omori: It’s an excellent book, but if I had to sum Tamaki up in a single word… Tamaki: One word? Go ahead! (laughs)

Omori: (laughs) It’s excitement. Ms Tamaki Niime is excitement herself.

Tamaki: I see.

Omori: The word that appears throughout this book is wakuwaku—that feeling of joyful anticipation. People often think the message is ‘Act before you think.’ But that’s not quite it. It’s not a choice between the body and the mind. Ms Tamaki lives through the heart.

Tamaki: Ummm…

Omori: No one can even point to where the heart really exists. Science talks about brain networks and all that, but that’s not the kind of heart I’m talking about. Ms Tamaki speaks from a place beyond logic. That’s why her ideas resist language.

Tamaki: Exactly. I can’t.

Omori: Wakuwaku and dokidoki usually go together. Dokidoki belongs to the heart that beats in your chest. But where does wakuwaku live? That’s the mystery. Reading this book reminded me that Ms Tamaki is always speaking from that invisible place. I said a very weird, difficult thing, I guess.

Tamaki: I understand. We totally understand what you mean, right?

Koshikawa: I see. ‘Heart’, isn’t it?

Omori: It belongs to the heart where wakuwaku live?

Participant: That should be the book’s promotional tagline.

Tamaki: Really. Should we make it now?

Koshikawa: When I got involved in creating the tamaki niime book, it was already underway. Mr Fujimoto had told me that a publisher was working on a book about Ms Tamaki. Gentosha is, of course, a truly major publishing company, and when it comes to business books, they have an outstanding reputation. So I naturally assumed the project would follow the standard business book format. I never really questioned the conventions of what a business book should be. A professional writer came to conduct interviews, including interviews with people around Ms Tamaki, and they interviewed me as well. The reporting process was very thorough, and I felt the writer was highly capable, so I was happy to participate in the interview. …How many years ago was it that the first draft came back?

Fujimoto: The project started in 2022, and that’s when the interviews were conducted, so I think it’s been about three years now.

Koshikawa: The manuscript was put together based on several interviews with Ms Tamaki, along with interviews with people around her. Even so, I felt it was still very much a first draft. I could see the direction it was heading and how it would be refined from there. As for the tamaki niime brand… although not on a regular schedule, I’ve been in charge of the Encyclopedia of niime web series for about six and a half years. Each time, I interview Ms Tamaki and members of the staff, then turn those conversations into written articles. As Omori mentioned earlier, though, one of the defining characteristics of tamaki niime is how elusive it is—it keeps evolving every single day. Because of that, I honestly felt it would be extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, to capture the essence of the brand through just a handful of interviews and present it in that way. That was my candid impression.

Tamaki: Why is that a problem for our company but not for everyone else?

Koshikawa: Because they can only grasp the surface. It’s like entering the front door without ever reaching the rooms inside.

Tamaki: Exactly.

Koshikawa: But some people just get it instantly. They intuitively grasp what it’s all about.

Tamaki: Intuitively, yes. There are people who simply feel, ‘This is wonderful.’ But putting that feeling into words—that’s the hard part.

Koshikawa: Ms Tamaki has been struggling with that challenge of putting it into words for a long time. What Omori said earlier—that he understands it with his heart rather than through words—really struck me. I thought it was fascinating, and honestly, beautiful. The way I see it, Ms Tamaki’s mind works incredibly fast, so fast that words simply can’t keep up with her thinking. And I also think she treasures the chaotic, unstructured nature of what’s going on in her mind. When she tries to express it in words, she may feel that it suddenly becomes flat or loses its richness. If someone were to faithfully translate Ms Tamaki’s thoughts and perceptions into language, it would take an extraordinary writer with exceptional literary talent…

Tamaki: It’s difficult, isn’t it?

Koshikawa: I think it would take someone with the talent of a truly gifted novelist to do it. Otherwise, it would be incredibly difficult. But then, in a way, it would become literature rather than anything else.

Omori: Yes, exactly. It would be literature.

Koshikawa: Not an explanatory or instructional kind of writing. Sorry, I’ve been talking for so long, but that’s why I felt that creating a business book about tamaki niime was extremely challenging. I believe the writer was doing an outstanding job and working very hard, but I still had the impression that it wasn’t easy. And there was also a period when the project more or less came to a standstill, wasn’t there?

Fujimoto: Yes. From the very beginning of the project, I was the main contact person. I worked directly with the writer, coordinating interviews and arranging appointments with people in Nishiwaki who were connected to the company. During that first year, the plan was moving forward with the expectation that, if all went well, the book could be published in about a year. However, as the interviews were transcribed and turned into written text, we ran into exactly the kind of issues we’ve been talking about today. It became very difficult to fully capture, in words, what the brand truly wants to achieve and what our founder is trying to express. I wouldn’t necessarily call it the biggest obstacle, but it was certainly the first major challenge we faced. We found ourselves asking, How can we possibly bring everything this company is about together into a single book? That question became increasingly difficult during the project’s first year.

Koshikawa: Mr Fujimoto struggled with it too.

Fujimoto: It wasn’t that anything the writer had written was wrong. But there were expressions where I thought, Ms Tamaki Niime would never say it like that. Since the book was going to be published as a work by Ms Tamaki—the founder and the face of this brand—we wanted to take full responsibility for every detail and make sure we were putting something truly authentic out into the world. The first edited manuscript came back, with everything written out in prose, but as a company we found ourselves wondering, How are we ever going to bring this to a satisfying conclusion? At that point, it felt like we’d reached a dead end, so we decided to step back for a while…

Tamaki: We basically went back to square one. We’d spent a whole year developing the concept.

Fujimoto: That’s right. It was around 2023 to 2024—about a year and a half, almost two years.

Tamaki: The bigger question was whether what I wanted to express could even be put into words. We kept wondering, Maybe it’s just impossible.

Fujimoto: We really agonised over it. Those two years gave me constant stomachaches from the stress.

Tamaki: (Laughs.) And poor Fujimoto was caught in the middle… The truth is, I don’t like existing frameworks or conventional ways of doing things. Whenever I see something that’s already been established in this world, my instinct is to challenge it. I always have a kind of antithesis to it. The moment I feel like I’m being forced into a predefined mould, I want to get out. It’s like being an animal locked in a cage. As soon as someone says, ‘This is the proper way things are done,’ or ‘If you fit it into this framework, it’ll look nice and neat,’ I immediately feel like I’m being shoved into a box! And when that happens, I start scrambling to escape. (Laughs.) That’s usually when some kind of incident happens. (Laughs.)

Koshikawa: An incident… (laughs wryly).

Tamaki: If someone else has already done it and there’s no excitement left in it, I just think, ‘No thanks.’ Maybe this project was close to that. If making a business book meant settling for the usual kind of business how-to guide full of standard tips, I’d just think, If I were the reader, this wouldn’t make me want to try anything at all. That’s the kind of book it was becoming… So when we started over, Koshikawa and I discussed one thing: let’s do it in a way that isn’t like anything that’s already out there.

Koshikawa: That’s right. Even though Mr Omori was incredibly busy, he gave us a lot of valuable suggestions on how to organise the book and really helped us throughout the process.

Tamaki: Yes.

Koshikawa: I was the one who enthusiastically volunteered to take it on. Ms Tamaki has always believed that there’s no fun in simply doing what’s already been done, right? I thought I had taken that into account, but looking back, I think I was still constrained by the assumption that it had to fit the format of a typical business book. As for Ms Tamaki’s way of speaking, I’d like to think I’ve absorbed it over the years. I’ve been responsible for the Encyclopedia of niime on the tamaki niime website for a long time, so I’ve been completely immersed in Ms Tamaki’s words. I thought I could translate things into what I call ‘Tamaki language.’ So I tried to incorporate the sense of playfulness and other ideas Mr Omori had suggested, as well as the deeper essence of tamaki niime, while also including the more factual, company-related information. Once I started putting all of that together, I realised it was going to be quite a challenge. Still, I worked out the overall structure, divided it into chapters, wrote a proposal, and submitted it. Fortunately, it was approved. Then I thought we needed at least a rough draft to work from, so I put together a few sample pages and showed them to Mr Fujimoto and Ms Tamaki… and they tore it apart. (laughs)

Tamaki: Yeah… I really gave you a hard time, didn’t I? (laughs)

Koshikawa: The first thing they told me was, ‘These aren’t my words!’ And I was left thinking, Now what do I do…? Then Ms Tamaki suggested, ‘Why don’t we just turn the Encyclopedia of niime into a book?’

Tamaki: That’s right. Originally, I felt that if people wanted to understand tamaki niime, all they had to do was read the Encyclopedia of niime. I even thought there wasn’t much need to make a book. But then the Encyclopedia of niime grew to more than a hundred installments.

Koshikawa: We were approaching the 120th instalment, so it wasn’t really an ‘encyclopedia of one hundred’ anymore. (laughs)

Tamaki: It had simply become too much to ask people to read it all. It was getting difficult to tell new employees, ‘Please make sure you’ve read the Encyclopedia of niime before you start work.’ I thought it would be helpful to have a condensed version—a summary that I could simply hand them and say, ‘Please read this before your first day.’ That’s the kind of book I hoped we could create.

Koshikawa: Exactly. Our original working title was Mass-Producing One-of-a-Kind Pieces.

Tamaki: Yes.

Koshikawa: That title captured one aspect of the tamaki niime brand. But when we tried to focus more specifically on the business side and use a title that was clear and easy to understand, I thought it might be nice to give it a bit of a twist while building on that original idea. I tried to bring everything together that way—but it just didn’t work. So… back to square one. (laughs)

Tamaki: Back to square one!

Koshikawa: And that’s when Ms Tamaki mentioned that page-a-day calendar from Shinshu…

Tamaki: Oh, it’s a calendar from Wazawaza!*

*(Wazawaza is a bakery and general goods shop located on a mountaintop in Mimakihara, Tomi City, Nagano Prefecture. Since it can only be reached by car, the shop’s name expresses gratitude to those who “go out of their way” to visit.)

Koshikawa: Mr Fujimoto passed it on to me. It was meant as a reference—sort of a ‘something like this’ example.

Tamaki: It’s mostly photographs, with a short phrase underneath each one.

Koshikawa: That’s right. Each photo and its accompanying words make up a single page for one day.

Tamaki: It’s a page-a-day calendar, with some kind of message for each day. I remember saying, ‘Why don’t we do something like this?’

Koshikawa: Yes, exactly. Then I thought, Well, we already have plenty of beautiful photographs—Mr Hashimoto’s work, along with images taken by many other photographers, all preserved in our archives. So I figured we could select memorable quotes from Ms Tamaki and build the book around them. I thought, This has to be it. This is probably the only way to do it. To be honest, though, I wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about the idea. Or rather, I felt a bit uncertain. Still, I decided to give it a try. We already had a huge stockpile of text from the Encyclopedia of niime. All of the back issues are still available online, so I hope people will take a look. The thing is, Ms Tamaki isn’t someone who normally expresses herself through words.

Tamaki: That’s right.

Koshikawa: So most of the time, I was the one asking questions or prompting the conversation, and there were also a lot of exchanges involving Mr Sakai. There actually weren’t many instances where Ms Tamaki was speaking entirely on her own. So I wasn’t sure whether it would work. Still, I decided to experiment by reorganising the material. The words themselves were wonderful. Ms Tamaki has said so many beautiful things—there are countless inspiring quotes. But rather than making it into something like a page-a-day calendar consisting only of short quotes, I felt it needed more substantial writing. So, as a trial, I selected some of Ms Tamaki’s words and connected them together. And when I did… I was deeply moved.

Tamaki: You thought, Hey, this actually works!

Koshikawa: Exactly! I thought, This really works! Even though I was stitching together fragments of her words, they came together as complete, powerful writing. It was simple, direct, and full of strength. I remember thinking, These words really resonate. So I put together about ten sample pages and showed them to Ms Tamaki—not exactly as a formal presentation, but just to see what she thought. And when we talked about it, she said something like, Our staff don’t really read long passages anyway. (laughs)

Tamaki: Because I don’t read them.(laughs)

Koshikawa: Right. So the message was basically, No long texts.

Tamaki: Actually, I wanted even less text. I asked Mr Koshikawa to cut it down to about one-fifth of what it was. I kept telling him, Please make it as short as possible, but somehow it ended up with even more text! (laughs)

Koshikawa: That’s true. But I stood my ground. I kept saying, Please let me keep this. This part has to stay. It just won’t work without it.

Tamaki: (Opening the book to a page with a photograph and only a small amount of text.) This is about as much text as I can manage to read. So I told him, Keep it to about this much.

Koshikawa: That’s true. But this page, for example—it’s exactly the same as in my very first draft. It hasn’t changed at all.

Tamaki: By the way, how long have we been doing the Encyclopedia of niime now? About six or seven years?

Koshikawa: Yes, that’s right. Around six or seven years.

Tamaki: Since it’s all based on what I was saying at the time, we didn’t rerecord anything for this book, did we?

Koshikawa: No, not at all.

Tamaki: It’s all been woven together just as it was. The thoughts and feelings from each moment are presented exactly as they were.

Koshikawa: Well, I did make a few minor adjustments. If there were any factual inconsistencies, I had to correct those.

Tamaki: By the way, this photo was taken by me. (She shows a heartwarming picture of a baby goat cuddling with its mother.) Isn’t it lovely? I highly recommend this one. (Turning the page.) I took this one too, just after I bought my camera. It’s a photo of one of our staff members and their child. It was taken not long after we moved into our current lab. I wanted to capture the idea of a child growing up watching their parent’s back—learning from the way they live. Isn’t it nice? That child stopped by here earlier today, and now he’s as tall as his father.

Koshikawa: He’s the baseball kid, isn’t he?

Tamaki: Yes, the baseball kid! That’s right. Looking through these photos, you really feel the passage of time. There are so many moments captured here.

Koshikawa: This is a bit of a side story, but I know the editor-in-chief of a publishing company called Two Virgins. He’s edited several books by Tadanori Yokoo and is probably the person Yokoo trusts most in the publishing industry right now. When I was in Tokyo, he told me they wanted to create a large-format art book featuring Yokoo’s work. He said they were thinking of having Yokoo design the cover himself, with gold foil stamping on solid black fabric. They hadn’t decided where to source the fabric yet. As we were chatting, someone said, Mr Koshikawa, why don’t we use Banshu-ori fabric? I thought that sounded like a fantastic idea, so I came to Ms Tamaki and asked if she would help.

Tamaki: For the fabric, that is.

Omori: That art book sells for ¥110,000, tax included, doesn’t it?

Tamaki: Yes. It’s ¥110,000 including tax, and only 300 copies were produced.

Fujimoto: Please feel free to open it and take a look inside.

Koshikawa: Mr Yokoo was genuinely delighted with it. And the tamaki niime-designed fabric used for the cover is completely one of a kind.

Tamaki: The stripe pattern is different on every single copy. If you’d like, we’ll leave it over there afterwards, so please have a look.

Koshikawa: The reason I brought this up is that when you think of Tadanori Yokoo, you think of his Y-Junction series, which originated in Nishiwaki. To coincide with his birthday, Two Virgins published these two books about the Y-Junction series. (Holding up My Y-Junction and Me and the Y-Junction.) They’re incredibly playful in their design.

Tamaki: It’s all about the way they’re presented.

Koshikawa: Exactly. Normally, you wouldn’t place text right up against the edge of the page like this, and the same image appears over and over again.

Tamaki: It’s almost excessive. (laughs) But seeing that made us think, you know, this kind of approach works too.

Koshikawa: Right. We realised, why not just have fun with it?

Tamaki: We thought it would be better if we did. We didn’t want to be constrained by the conventions of a typical business book.

Koshikawa: As Ms Tamaki and I kept talking, we came to feel that… rather than meticulously crafting every last detail…

Tamaki: …we could keep it rough.

Koshikawa: Exactly. We thought, Why not just make it a little rough around the edges?

Tamaki: And that’s what makes it exciting.

Koshikawa: Exactly. That’s where tamaki niime really comes through. When I wanted to spread Ms Tamaki’s words across a two-page spread, I realised that the amount of text varied from page to page. So I thought, Why not have fun with the layout too? I wanted to arrange her words across the spread as if I were drawing a picture. Sometimes the headlines and catchphrases run horizontally, sometimes vertically—anything goes. I tried to let the layout reflect the personality of each piece of writing, almost as if I were creating an illustration. So yes, I was given a lot of freedom with the book’s interior design.

Tamaki: I’m really glad. I was honestly nervous, wondering whether the publisher would approve it.

Koshikawa: I was thinking, Are they really going to say yes to this? (laughs)

Tamaki: There were a few minor revisions, but overall they were completely on board. I’m so happy it worked out. I’m truly delighted that we were able to create such a comfortable book.

Koshikawa: Yes.

Tamaki: I really hope everyone will read it. Earlier today, someone told me that after reading this book, they wanted to make Nishiwaki a better place. They even said they wanted their daughter to read it too. Hearing that made me think… if this book can inspire people to reflect on how they want to live, then it will have done something meaningful.

Koshikawa: At the beginning of the book, there’s a colour section titled ‘The Seven Principles of tamaki niime.’ I was the one who suggested the title Comfort Is Beautiful, and those seven principles became the themes for each chapter. To be honest, though, that structure came afterwards. In addition to material from the Encyclopedia of niime, there are also new passages that Ms Tamaki created especially for this book. I first selected the parts that best captured the essence of tamaki niime. Rather than planning everything logically from the start, I simply asked myself, Which of these seven principles does this belong with? It was almost like assembling one of Ms Tamaki’s favourite puzzles.

Tamaki: Yes, exactly. It was all very intuitive.

Koshikawa: I worked without really knowing what the finished book would look like. I honestly didn’t know how it would come together until it was complete. But I was confident because Ms Tamaki’s words have a unique power of their own. In the middle of the book, I included ‘The History of tamaki niime,’ telling the story of Ms Tamaki’s life and how she arrived where she is today. Chronologically, the book isn’t perfectly linear, but I tried to create a gentle flow of ideas from beginning to end. That was entirely based on my intuition. In the end, the process of making this book itself became very much like the way tamaki niime creates its products.

Tamaki: Yes. So rather than explaining too much, I’d like people to read it with their hearts and simply experience it.

Koshikawa: I agree. I’ve probably explained far too much already… (laughs)

Tamaki: (laughs) Well, since I’m not someone who’s good at putting things into words, I created this book hoping that more people would read it and connect with what I’m trying to express on an intuitive level. Since Mr Omori is here today, along with some of the respected leaders from this region, and because I think many of you care deeply about the future of Nishiwaki—and, more broadly, about making Japan a better place—I hope we can take this opportunity to have a meaningful conversation together.

〈To be continued in Part 2 of this lively discussion〉

Original Japanese text by Seiji Koshikawa.
English translation by Adam & Michiko Whipple.