The Woman Who Made Crayons out of Rice and Vegetables
Born in the snowscapes of Tohoku, this is the story of “Vegetable Crayons”
by Hiroyuki Motoori
In Northern Japan, an entrepreneur is hard at work making crayons out of vegetables grown in Aomori Prefecture. But while normal crayons, obviously, are named after their colors, her “Vegetable Crayons” (O-Yasai Kureyon) are named after the vegetables used to make them. Plus, to ensure product safety, Vegetable Crayons get their wax not from industrial products but from rice oil. These crayons are an agricultural phenomenon from beginning to end.
But how did such a naturalistic project come into being?
The “mother” of Vegetable Crayons is Aomori native Naoko Kimura. After graduating from a prefectural vocational school, Kimura-san went to work for a local design company. Later on, she left the company to become a freelance designer, and in 2012 she started making vegetable crayons.
Gazing at the snow, she thought “I want to draw the world with vegetables”
“In Winter the entire landscape of Aomori gets covered with snow for months. Once, about three years ago, I was looking at the snow and I thought, ‘if I could draw this color with vegetables, it would be beautiful.’ That was how I first got the idea for vegetable crayons — I figured, if you’re going to draw the colors of nature, why not use natural products to draw them? On top of that, I decided I wanted to use vegetable crayons to promote Aomori’s delicious vegetables all over Japan.”
Her next step was to open an office for her design company — in a refurbished movie theater near Aomori Station. In a single room, which had been a ticket office for the theater as recently as 2012, Kimura-san began production on the first line of Vegetable Crayons.
“I’ve loved stationery for as long as I can remember,” Kimura-san explains, but this was her first experience making crayons. More than anything, the project was going to have to rely on her own ingenuity.
“At first, I didn’t even know how to get the shape right,” she says. She started from scratch in every area of the production process, roasting cross-sectioned vegetable slices on a hot plate and mixing them with wax in a mortar. “Whatever the result was, it wasn’t shaped like a crayon,” she says, thinking back on her inauspicious beginnings.
A Chance Meeting and a Turning Point
As she went around asking locals for advice and investigating alternative methods for making her vegetable crayons, Kimura-san soon discovered an opportunity for major progress. That opportunity emerged when she made contact with Tōichi Stationery. An established crayon maker in Aichi Prefecture known for its high-quality products, the company makes and sells its crayons from a combination of materials, including about 40% honeybee wax. When Kimura-san told them about her Vegetable Crayons, they immediately offered to help out.
“I guess I was focusing too much on vegetables, because I’d always just assumed the vegetable oil would hold everything together.” A Tōichi representative named Mizutani suggested she combine rice oil with wax extracted from rice bran instead.
“Japanese people have an intimate relationship with rice and vegetables, so I thought drawing with those materials would give people a good feeling too. I decided to go ahead with it.”
Around the same time, she received an added boost from the Azuma Agricultural Processing Association, which agreed to grind fine vegetable powders for her from abandoned vegetables, and to let her use the powders as color for her Vegetable Crayons.
“At the time, I had no idea how much waste there was in the agriculture industry,” Kimura-san says. “But when I started actually making the crayons and asking farmers for help, I learned a lot about how vegetables are actually produced. When I found out how many of them end up getting thrown away, it was really shocking. If I could, I decided it would be best to use discarded vegetables to make my crayons.”
Completing the First Run
For her trial run, Kimura-san carefully selected twenty vegetables colors.
“No matter what you try to do about it, most vegetables are green, so I had to choose every crayon very carefully to create a good balance of colors.”
In January 2014, she completed “vegetabo,” her first line of Vegetable Crayon products. It included ten colors: spinach; cabbage; onion; pumpkin; corn; yam; chili pepper; crimson glory vine (yamabudō); chestnut; and bamboo charcoal.
That March she began accepting orders, but demand turned out to be much higher than she had expected.
“I hadn’t made many crayons for our first run, and we sold out in about a week.” In response, Kimura-san hurriedly started preparing the second line of Vegetable Crayons. Released in May, this line also had ten colors: spinach; mustard green; butterbur; yam; carrot; pumpkin; apple; crimson glory; chestnut; and black soybean.
Her Vegetable Crayons took off quickly, and before long Kimura-san was getting requests for newspaper interviews and TV appearances. In November, barely nine months after her initial launch, she released “Season 3” of Vegetable Crayons to rave reviews. This time, the lineup consisted of cabbage, onion, burdock, corn, carrot, apple, black currant, purple yam, adzuki (red) bean, and black soybean.
Harvest Time and the Heart of the Artist
How does Kimura-san decide which vegetables to use in her crayons? She has this to say about her section process:
“I choose vegetables that are appropriate for the season and that feel good when I draw with them.” She describes her process as an attempt to match “The Spirit of the Harvest” with “The Heart of the Artist.”
“I’m happiest when I see people actually using the crayons and having a good time with them,” Kimura-san says. As a result of her popularity, she’s been doing “coloring workshops” in different regions, helping children learn the names of vegetables as they draw with the crayons. Her goal, she says, is to deepen people’s sense of connectedness with the vegetables in their life.
First sprouting in the Tohoku snowfields, Vegetable Crayons may be on the verge of coloring in landscapes all over Japan.
(Translation: Michael Craig)
Originally published at ignition.co.
