From London to Tokyo: The Background Behind Rimeh Garden
- Rimeh Garden
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Rimeh Garden did not begin as a business plan or a neatly defined brand concept. It began much earlier, in conversation. In friendship. In a shared habit of lingering on ideas longer than most people probably would.
Before Rimeh Garden took shape in Tokyo, two of the people behind it were students in London, both Japanese, both studying at Central Saint Martins near King’s Cross. At the time, there was no clear intention to build a jewelry brand together. What existed instead was a friendship shaped by curiosity. We spoke constantly, and not always about things that led anywhere practical. Philosophy, anthropology, religion, mythology, ideology, culture, and the strange ways human beings build meaning around themselves. Those conversations moved freely, often into subjects many people would rather avoid. That was part of what made them valuable.
We were interested not only in what people believed, but in how belief itself shaped the way people lived. As young students in London, we were surrounded by different ways of thinking, different cultural assumptions, different moral frameworks, and different ideas of selfhood. The city sharpened that awareness. It made visible how deeply culture and ideology could affect everyday life, from behaviour and taste to ambition, identity, and even what people thought happiness should look like.
A Friendship Built on Curiosity
We talked about Western philosophy from the Greeks onward. We talked about mythology and religion. We talked about Eastern thought, from Buddhism to Taoism. Sometimes the conversations were serious. Sometimes they were strangely playful. We remember talking about whether immortality might ever be achievable, and if so, to what extent that would even be desirable. At other times, we found ourselves wondering whether monotheism was, in some strange way, more compelling than polytheism, or whether the opposite was true.
These were not conversations aimed at winning arguments. They were not about proving who was right. What mattered was that we were open, flexible, and unusually unafraid of uncertainty. We did not feel the need to lock ourselves into one ideology or one final answer. We were more interested in observing, questioning, and exploring ideas without judgment.
That openness shaped the friendship, and it has remained true to this day. Even now, a random phone call can turn into a deep discussion about the most unexpected subject. In some ways, we are still the same people we were then. Still curious. Still slightly obsessive. Still, in the best sense, a bit nerdy.
Different Disciplines, Shared Thinking
After university, our paths moved in different directions. One moved further into the fashion industry. Another moved toward sound design. Later, the team itself would begin with only three people: two designers and one person specialising in production and logistics. The disciplines were different, but the pattern of thinking remained surprisingly consistent.
What connected us was never the idea that we all had to arrive at the same conclusion. It was the opposite. We enjoyed not knowing. We enjoyed sitting with contradiction. We enjoyed the fact that the world resisted being made fully coherent. There was something generative in that uncertainty.
Looking back, this had a quiet but lasting effect on the way Rimeh Garden eventually came into being. The brand was not built out of a fixed doctrine. It came from people who had spent years circling questions of meaning, impermanence, identity, belief, and how to remain human in a world that often rewards speed over reflection.
Returning to Tokyo
When we reconnected in Tokyo, the idea of building something together began to take a clearer form. By then, what mattered to us was no longer only design in the narrow sense. We were more interested in what kind of project could hold the things we had been thinking about for years.
Rimeh Garden emerged from that point.
It took shape not simply as a design project, but as a place where those older conversations could find another form. The ideas of personal sanctuary and Eutopia felt especially important. We were drawn to the possibility of an interior space that remained intact despite the noise of the world. Not perfection, not escape, but a quieter and more grounded condition. A way of being that acknowledges flaws and uncertainty, yet still allows room for care, balance, and small forms of happiness.
We were also drawn to the value of little things. To the idea that life does not become meaningful only through grand achievement or permanent certainty. Sometimes meaning appears in attention, in slowness, in affection, in objects that stay close, and in moments that might seem minor from the outside but carry private weight.
Why This Became Rimeh Garden
Perhaps Rimeh Garden could only have happened because we had always been comfortable with the unfinished nature of the world. We were never interested in absolute certainty. We were more interested in how people continue anyway. How they search, fail, try again, occasionally succeed, and somehow still find moments worth keeping.
That way of thinking remains central to the brand. We do not believe happiness is only something waiting at the end of perfect self-improvement. In many cases, the more human experience is the happiness found in the act of pursuing, trying, failing, learning, and occasionally getting something right. There is meaning in the movement itself.
This is one reason the brand values sanctuary, slowness, and self-acceptance. Rimeh Garden is not interested in becoming a tool for performance or another surface through which people seek approval. It is more interested in helping protect a sense of self from all the noise. In staying close to what feels real. In making space for thought, care, and personal meaning.
Still Kids in Design
For all the philosophical language that sometimes surrounds these ideas, there is also something simpler at the core of it. We have always let our minds wander. We are serious about making, but we also remain playful in the way we think. We still feel, in many ways, like kids in design. That has always mattered, and it still does.
There is a kind of openness in that. A refusal to let cynicism harden everything. A willingness to keep asking questions, keep learning, keep unlearning, and keep following curiosity even when it does not lead somewhere immediately useful. That attitude shaped the friendship. It shaped the project. And it continues to shape Rimeh Garden now.
The Background That Still Matters
The background behind Rimeh Garden is not just that it moved from London to Tokyo. It is that a long friendship built on curiosity, openness, and shared questioning eventually found form in a project. A project shaped by design, but also by conversation. By uncertainty. By cultural observation. By philosophy. By the beauty of impermanence. By the belief that even in a fast and unstable world, a quieter kind of happiness remains possible.
That background still matters because it continues to inform how we make, how we think, and what we value. It is present in the brand’s attraction to jewelry as something intimate and lasting. It is present in the idea of personal sanctuary. And it is present in the belief that objects can carry more than surface, especially when they are made with care and chosen with feeling.
Rimeh Garden was shaped between London and Tokyo. But more than that, it was shaped by years of asking questions and remaining open long enough for a way of making to emerge.
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Yoko Ozawa
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