replica – A question of inheritance

The Shizuoka Daruma, once produced in Shizuoka City, embodied regional memory through the fusion of papier-mâché craftsmanship, local belief, and artisans’ manual labour. Today, only a single workshop continues the tradition. This project seeks to reconstruct its fading form from the perspective of product design.

The original prototype, finished in gofun (traditional shell-based pigment), was 3D-scanned and reinterpreted using locally sourced Japanese cypress, CNC-machined and subsequently decorated. By layering tradition with contemporary technology, the work presents a vision of inheritance in which forestry resources and craft, hand and machine, past and future, individual and region intersect.

Rather than merely reproducing or exhibiting the Daruma, this project serves as a response to taking on the act of inheritance by one’s own hands — presenting the process itself as an open, ongoing practice.