Incense

Japanese incense and quiet objects — sandalwood, Kyoto blends and the holders to burn them in. A few minutes of stillness, at the end of a day or before a bowl of tea.

Japanese incense is not Indian incense with different packaging. These are solid, coreless sticks made from finely ground wood and binder, rather than a bamboo splint rolled in paste — so nothing burns except the incense itself. The scent is of the wood, and the smoke is a fraction of what you are used to. In a small flat that is the whole difference. I set the two side by side in Japanese vs Indian incense.

Two registers to know. Byakudan is plain sandalwood: dry, warm, almost austere, and the quietest thing I sell. Shoyeido Horikawa is a layered Kyoto blend from a house three centuries old. If you cannot choose from a description — and almost nobody can — the discovery set is the cheaper way to find out.

Scent and tea are not meant to compete: a bowl of matcha has its own aroma, and incense burning beside it flattens both. At home, light it, let it finish, then make the tea. How incense is handled in a formal gathering depends on the school and the occasion.

Everything ships from Tokyo. Import duties, if any, are paid on delivery.

Tomari (とまり) is an old word for a mooring — the place a boat ties up for the night. A bowl of tea is meant to be the same: a few minutes to put the day down. You do not need to know the rules to begin.

Who chose this

I choose everything here by hand, in Japan. I practice tea rather than simply selling the tools for it — I am not a tea master and I do not claim to be. I am a practitioner, which mostly means I have ruined enough bad whisks to know what a good one feels like in the first second of holding it.

Nothing is drop-shipped and nothing passes through a third warehouse. I pack each order in Tokyo and post it from Japan, ceramics double-boxed by hand. If something arrives broken, write within 7 days with photographs of the piece and the box, and I send a replacement or a refund; there is nothing to post back unless I ask. Who writes and chooses all this, and the longer version of why this shop exists.