"Each piece of jewelry is created by the whole team."

I work as the manager of Nozomi Project. The thing I find most fun about this work is how each piece of jewelry is created by the whole team.  Every staff member has her unique strengths. What one person can do in a short amount of time is truly limited compared to the infinite possibilities that are opened when the women, each with differing skills, cooperate and work as a team.

I think it is a wonderful thing that we are able to build relationships with people all throughout the world. In these past five years, we have been blessed with many encounters, through our jewelry as well as through volunteers who came to us from all over the world. I personally enjoy interacting with our customers in person, through sales events overseas and at American military bases in Japan.

Yuko's Story:

In April of 2012, there was a transfer student in my son’s fourth grade class. In this town where its residents were all trying to move out and students had to be picked up from temporary housing, I could not believe there would be a transfer student. The family that had moved in was the Takamotos. That was how I met Sue. It was not long before my son became friends with their kids and the two of us mothers became friends.

One day, while Sue and I were drinking tea, she asked me what I thought about an idea she had for creating a jewelry business out of the broken shards of pottery in the disaster debris. The company I was working for before the tsunami no longer existed. I decided to support her idea, seeing this as her response to the lack of jobs in this area. I promised her I would help her make samples and that’s how we began making jewelry. My hobby is interior design, so I never thought I would be doing what I am doing today as the manager of Nozomi Project.