Today, in London and around the world, we are seeing a wide range of Japanese goods and things, such as sushi, manga, karate and design.
I am proudly Japanese and my wish is to bring the beauty of our unique culture to the world. With this wish in mind, YUZU CONSULTING was launched in 2023.
YUZU CONSULTING accommodates the desire to learn about and experience Japanese culture and gastronomy in all forms. From individual consulting, lessons, workshops and parties, corporate training and events to accompanied wellness retreats to off-the-beaten-path in Japan, we offer a unique and unforgettable experience encompassing authentic Japanese expertise.
Regarding the name YUZU CONSULTING, yuzu is a citrus fruit that has been loved in Japan since ancient times and can be said to be "the spiritual home of the Japanese". For more than a thousand years, the Japanese have enjoyed yuzu by sight, scent, taste and touch.
Born and raised by parents who loved Japanese and world gastronomy and the tea ceremony, I have always enjoyed yuzu. As well as the juice, the Japanese use the peel as a Japanese confectionery and sometimes grate the peel to enjoy the aroma and to add colour to their plates. Rather than being consumed only as a fruit, the yuzu is an indispensable accent to enhance dishes, as a condiment, sauce, confectionery or drink.
It also has all kinds of healing properties, which the Japanese enjoy and incorporate into their daily life. Since ancient times, there has been a Japanese tradition of yuzu baths, in which yuzu is floated in the wooden bathtub on the winter solstice. Every year on the winter solstice, my parents prepared a yuzu bath for me. Nowadays, yuzu is used not only in yuzu baths, but also in aromatherapy and cosmetics. Yuzu is such a citrus fruit for the Japanese that when they hear the word "yuzu" and see yuzu, they feel relaxed and healed!
Similar to the way that the Japanese enjoy every single of morsel of the yuzu fruit, my hope is that others can also be inspired by the way that the Japanese interpret things and view life. This is how we decided to name our services YUZU CONSULTING.
Kumi K. Yanagida, Founder of YUZU CONSULTING
After completing her undergraduate and master degrees from university in the UK, Kumi spent more than a decade working for global US and Japanese companies including Nissan Motor and Goldman Sachs with experience in leading numerous international projects such as leadership learning and development programmes in Europe, Africa, the U.S., Asia and Japan.
She studied Social Anthropology and obtained her M.A. in Social Anthropology from SOAS, University of London, with a focus on Japanese Ethnography. Before moving to the business world, she worked as an assistant director at a TV documentary production company which specialised in Japanese traditional arts, culture, temples and a living national treasure. Kumi has since engaged herself in non-profit work as an advisor, she realised a power of creative activity which unites business enterprises, non-profit organisations, and people in communities into one. Having an opportunity to move back to London with her family, she realised that sharing Japanese cultural values with the rest of others could become one of solutions for various cross border issues including environmental issues and the creation of the world with inclusion and diversity. This has led her to create YUZU CONSULTING, a Japanese culture, art and gastronomy workshop and consultation.
At Russell Reynolds, Kumi worked closely with multinationals headquartered in the US, Europe and Japan across various industries to build best-in-class leadership teams. Therefore, Kumi is capable of providing programmes for various levels of employees including senior leadership and executives and across sectors. Certified Coach.
Kumi was born and grew up in Tokyo with her mother who mastered Japanese tea ceremony, Chadoh, flower arrangement, Kadoh, Japanese harp, Koto, and Japanese and French cooking from well known chefs. Her father was from Hiroshima, which is surrounded by mountains and sea and rich in both seafood and mountain food. He was a prominent eastern medical doctor and a master of Japanese calligraphy, Shodoh. Her parents were both passionate about gourmet cooking and Kumi remembers well that whenever they went to one of the best restaurants in the world, they always talked with the main chef and once they went back home, they reproduced what they had and learned from their experience. Her parents were known for their hosting of formal Japanese tea ceremonies at their own Chashitsu, a special Japanese tea ceremony house. Kumi’s strong pride of her culture comes from her childhood steeped in these traditions.
When I have been on various school tours of senior schools for my children, I often see the students’ GCSE or A-level art pieces featuring Japan. Japanese influences have been prevalent in British culture for a long time, with Royal Shakespeare even producing the successful play My Neighbour Totoro, based on the Japanese animated feature film. My goal is for people to learn about our unique culture and rich heritage through intellectual but fun and interactive activities. I hope that the workshop will be a wonderful opportunity for people to experience and understand about the real Japan. Learning Japanese culture could become seeds of global solutions and lead to amazing future business ideas like what Steve Jobs did!
Logo Design
We, YUZU CONSULTING, would like to convey Japanese culture and Japanese sensibilities to people around the world through experience. The yuzu of YUZU CONSULTING is not the citrus fruit yuzu as a substance, but the yuzu is an image symbolising the delicacy and sensitivity of the Japanese.
Based on this idea, the logo design was designed to project the yuzu (view of Japan) of everyone who experiences the unique offerings through YUZU CONSULTING. The yuzu is not directly depicted in the logo, but is instead represented as a blank space. You could also see the design as a Y shaped empty vessel. It contains nothing, but this is not to be seen as nothing but rather, it is seen as a space that encourages free imagination, which can be utilised to enrich the formation of perceptions and communication much further.
The theme of emptiness runs deep in Japanese culture such as Tanka and Haiku, Rikyu’s tea room, Japanese paintings (e.g. Hasegawa Tohaku's Shorin-zu Byobu), the Karesansui dry landscape gardens (e.g. the rock garden at Ryoanji), Japanese architecture such as the shrine, Japanese calligraphy and Ikebana flower arrangement- all can be said to have the beauty of emptiness.
The empty centre of architecture, empty spaces in paintings and calligraphy and a minimum of words in Haiku and Tanka poetry play their roles not by transmitting meaning, but by being a 'vessel' that solemnly accepts people's thoughts.
We would like you to enjoy unlimited creativity and imagination and find infinite possibilities through YUZU CONSULTING.
Web & Logo Design: saiki design
Photo credit: Ehime Prefectural Government