The TSUNAGI portfolio is now live. It’s one place to gather everything I’ve built so far, along with what I’m thinking about right now.

At the top of the site there’s just one short line: “Inherit, curate, hone. Then connect it to the next generation.” It isn’t a phrase I picked because it sounds good — it’s literally the order I work in when I make something, so let me walk through it one word at a time.

Inherit

I don’t really feel the urge to invent something out of nothing. Apps, tools, and services that have been used for a long time have been chosen for a long time for some reason, and I want to look at that part properly first. Why is it good, and which part is actually doing the work. Not the surface shape, but pulling out only the part that works and carrying it forward — that’s the idea. Japan was originally a country of monozukuri, craftsmanship, and there should have been both the skill to make good things and a culture of passing them on, but lately that handing-down doesn’t seem to be working so well. Taking the good part of something good and passing it to the next generation — I find that quiet kind of inheriting more interesting than any flashy invention.

Curate

If you just pile on everything you’ve inherited, it usually ends up harder to use. So the next step is subtraction. Which features are really needed, whose work, and which task do I actually want to make lighter. Instead of adding “would be nice,” I cut down to “this is all you need.” TSUNAGI Design, an image tool I’m building, wasn’t aimed at being a feature-rich Canva replacement — it’s narrowed down to only the features I actually use day to day. I chose being able to use it without hesitation over having a lot of features.

Hone

The last part is how it feels to use. The thing I always measure against is the Japanese sword. A sword isn’t made strong by adding decoration; it’s a tool where you shave off what isn’t needed, shave again, and the cutting edge comes from what’s left. The reason this site has no rounded corners, no soft shadows, and no cute icons is basically that. Adding decoration is easy, but taking it away is surprisingly hard, and I want to do that harder part properly.

And then, connect

That covers the line at the top. Last, let me write about why I bothered to build this site at all. Honestly, at a glance the things lined up in the portfolio look scattered. Automated US stock trading, BMW E46 M3 maintenance and tuning, a tool for factory equipment maintenance, an image design app. As fields, they don’t line up at all. But from the side of the person making them, they’re all doing the same thing. Inherit what’s good, narrow it down to what’s needed, and hone how it feels. Only the subject is different; the core is exactly the same. Even across different fields there are shared points, and if you keep running through those shared points, deepening them, and giving them form, then — how do I put it — a consistency gradually starts to seep out. And I think that consistency itself, more than the technology or the features, is what reaches people as a work. Art, I suspect, is something that seeps out afterward like that. The place where I could show that best was a portfolio where the things I made sit next to the thinking behind them. That’s why I opened this site.

Three practices

At TSUNAGI, I divide this stance into three.

  • Make (TSUKURU) — products, and projects in development.
  • Tell (TSUTAERU) — things I think about while building. This article is one of them.
  • Connect (TSUNAGU) — design, development, and operations, for the people who need them.

Make, tell, connect. Hone what you’ve inherited, and pass it on again. I’ll keep repeating that, starting here.