The Rabbit Hole: when the answer is not on Google

For the shikkui, we eventually found an old plaster-supply shop and a seventy-year-old owner who ordered 25kg bags of lime from the mainland. For the wood chips, the right supplier turned out to be a recycling centre in Furano, selling old ground-up stumps and logs. The useful answer was there, but it was not where we first expected to find it.

This is the part that is easy to underestimate. You have to understand exactly what you need before you can recognise the right answer. “Lime” is not specific enough. “Wood chips” is not specific enough. The details are the work.

The hydronic floor panels took us through overseas suppliers, freight forwarders, customs, and last-mile delivery. We ended up buying a system from China for roughly twenty percent of the retail price we were seeing in Japan. The price mattered, but so did learning how the whole route worked.

There is uncertainty in every part of this: supply chains, language, specifications, delivery, and whether the person you have reached actually understands the question. The temptation is to settle for something close. But if you settle on one part, you start settling on everything.

That is why these problems are exciting. Something begins as a vague need, an impractical idea, or a sentence that does not quite make sense. Then, slowly, it acquires a material, a supplier, a person who knows how to make it, and a next step.

We are drawn to people doing something new or different—not because every idea needs to become a business, but because the right person sometimes only needs a hand finding the path. We do not want to help a bad direction go further. We want to work with people who are trying to reach somewhere interesting.

Some useful work begins before anyone knows what to call it. Researching an unusual material, comparing ways to build something, finding a maker, investigating whether it can be produced in Japan, or working through the logistics can be the project before the project.

We are not promising that every idea will work. The better promise is that we will help you understand what would have to be true for it to work—and what to try next. Sometimes that means finding the right supplier. Sometimes it means changing the idea. Sometimes it means deciding not to spend the money. That clarity is useful too.

We call this first investigation The Rabbit Hole. It is a small, selective way to ask a better question before committing to a larger answer.