Yumi Inoue left Amakusa after high school and didn’t come back for fifteen years. When she finally returned, she took a job in local tourism and started asking questions about what people actually made here. Someone mentioned Amakusa porcelain stone. She’d never heard of it.
The material has a stark whiteness and serious strength. Inoue had a background in calligraphy and this idea to make shirts entirely by herself. Making shirts meant making buttons. She asked the Kamamoto pottery studio if she could use their gas kiln. They said yes.
The real work turned out to be consistency. She forms each button by hand, and clay responds to everything—humidity, temperature, the time of year. She learned to anticipate how much each piece would shrink or swell in the kiln, adjusting the raw size accordingly. This took years to figure out.
Then there’s the painting. She uses weasel hair brushes, never synthetic. The same design might need a different brush depending on the day’s weather. Import restrictions after the pandemic made these brushes increasingly hard to find. A few makers remain in Kyoto, but they’re all working from the same shrinking supply.
Her patterns come from living on an island where you can’t escape the ocean. The water never looks the same twice, and that constant variation gets worked into the designs on white ceramic.
In 2018, SEUVAS heard about a button maker working alone on Amakusa and knew they had to reach out. Other brands had contacted Inoue before, but they wanted volume and speed that didn’t match her process. SEUVAS understood her pace. They started collaborating before she even had her own kiln, back when she was borrowing time at Kamamoto.
Inoue doesn’t sell online. She thinks you can’t judge the material from a screen—the whiteness, the weight, how light moves across the surface. She wants people to hold the buttons themselves and decide what they’re worth.
The work continues. Form by hand, check the weather, choose the brush, fire the kiln. Each button comes out different depending on conditions. She wouldn’t have it any other way.