Life with glasses

Akayamachō, Koshigaya-shi, Saitama. The interse  ction of Shin-Koshigaya Station on the Tobu Isesaki Line and Minami-Shin-Koshigaya Station on the JR Musashino Line offers an intriguing mixture of urbanity and nostalgia. At one corner is an entrance to an old-fashioned shopping arcade marked “Fuji Shopping.” Next to the sign for the arcade we find Entoan, the workshop of shoemakers Yoshihiro Sakurai and Chiaki Tomisawa.
This husband and wife team were both raised nearby. As a boy, Yoshihiro often visited the candy store right next door to their current workshop. The

It was in his 3rd year at college that the idea of becoming shoe craftsman came to Sakurai. He heard the job-seeking buzz of his fellow students, but when he tried to imagine his own post-college future he realized, “if I join a company just to get a job, I’ll never be able to stay with it long term unless I truly love the work.” As he thought about what it was he wanted to do, what he loved, the idea of shoes came to mind. “I played soccer in elementary school. Remember cleats? I would come home after soccer practice and sit in the entryway polishing my cleats. Somehow I really loved those times. As an adult I looked back on all that and realized I’m actually a sneaker fan, and I love polishing my leather shoes…Oh…I like shoes! I realized I wanted to live a shoe-centered life.”
After graduation, Sakurai began studying shoemaking at the Esperanza Institute of Footwear Design and Technique, which at the time was in Tokyo. While a student there he started working part-time at a shoe repair shop, then joined full time after graduation. He finally opened his own business in earnest at the Craftsman’s Workshop in the Asakusa Startup Incubator. He and his future wife Chiaki Tomizawa met while still at the school, during the planning of a joint show between his shoemaking school and the Tokyo Fashion College in Shibuya where Chiaki studied. They found out they'd been close neighbors as kids, and hit it off

For both Sakurai and Tomizawa, eyeglasses are indispensable for work and life. Both wear glasses they purchased at Kaneko Optical. Sakurai’s relationship with eyeglasses began in middle school. He remembers well his first pair of glasses. “I guess I’d call them diamond-shaped. They were a little strange – not the kind a typical 7th grader would pick (laughs). They were Paul Smiths.” He still has them by the way. Not just those glasses, but other things he’s kept for a long time are each associated with some episode, some personal attachment. “That’s why I can’t just toss them out,” says Sakurai. 

In September 2014, more than 15 years after he began his eyewear journey in middle school, Yoshihiro discovered Kaneko Optical. “Of course I had heard of them, and was interested, but to be honest I thought “they’re expensive!” (laughs). I thought they were quite out of my reach, but one day when I was wandering around a local mall called Laketown, I walked by the Kaneko Optical store. I went in, though I didn’t intend to buy anything. My eyes fixed on a pair of glasses with a simple design. As I looked at them I began to want them…” The glasses he’d picked up were from the Vintage series – fine metal frames, with no nose pad on the bridge, clean lines free of any excess. “When the shape is this simple, the material becomes more important. The more I held them in my hand, the more I touched them, the better the feeling I got. Right then I was looking for an outfit I could wear to our wedding reception. I bought them without thinking twice.”
Meanwhile in 2016 Ms. Tomizawa found her own favorite pair of glasses at the same store where her husband had found his Kanekos. “Unlike my husband, I didn’t start wearing glasses until I was 23 or 24. He gave me his old glasses, I had the lenses changed, and that’s what I’d been wearing since. Some time had gone by and I’d started to think about getting my own pair, but I definitely don’t have a face suited for glasses, so no matter which glasses I tried on at a bunch of different stores, nothing looked good on me…(laughs). But the pair I finally found at Kaneko Optical suited me perfectly. I jumped on them. I don’t know what it is – I couldn’t find a good pair at any other store, but Kaneko had lots of glasses that worked for me.” 
Yoshihiro and Chiaki are both leather craftsmen. They can discern the quality of a material by touch. “If it’s leather, we can tell. Based on the feel, the surface appearance, the smell, we know right away if this is a material we can use, and what kind of leather or what kind of bag it could complement. Of course we don't have that detailed knowledge of materials in eyeglasses, but we trust our senses in that instant when pick something

Craftsman-made shoes and craftsman-made glasses….both require many production processes and don’t tolerate shortcuts. Lots of “extra” steps and what might seem like extended detours go into the careful construction needed for a long useful product life. Considered in this light, the two categories have surprisingly much in common. 
“Our shoes aren’t completed just because the leave our workshop – they have to be worn daily, shined from time to time, occasionally repaired…that’s what forms the relationship between wearer and object. And that’s what completes the product.” Yoshihiro Sakurai and Chiaki Tomizawa’s philosophy as shoemakers and Kaneko Optical’s approach to making products share the same spirit. 
Both want customers to use their products for many years and form a