The bororo brand offers jewelry products that draw on the beauty of natural stones, attracting many fans. Where does the creator, Akiko Akachi, find her inspiration? The stone itself, she says. “The stone, to me, is a complete piece of art. I’m drawn to its natural form and the expression it has when it’s extracted from the ground. Cut gemstones are pretty, but they lose their fundamental shapes, so they’re a little boring. What I consider most important is to showcase the stone’s individuality. I want to make jewelry pieces that feel like you’re wearing freshly extracted gems.”

To Akachi, seeing the raw stones is extremely important. “Some of the extraction sites are dangerous or they can be in regions known for bandit attacks, but I’m adamant about seeing the raw stones, so I can’t help myself from going (laughs). The approach I value is this: wearing beauty that the earth itself produced. As long as I stick to this principle, I believe I can continue making jewelry pieces that I can be proud of.”

*Akachi travels the world in search of natural stones in their naturally extracted forms. Photo 1 was taken in Madagascar, where sapphire is mined (on the left is Akachi’s daughter). Photo 2 was taken at an extraction site in Colombia, where emerald is mined. Photo 3 features an earring from the ROUGH STONE series, which creates jewelry using the natural forms of raw stones.

“Before starting the brand, I spent two and a half years traveling the world to visit different mines and regions famous for their stones. So it’s hard to pick one trip out of all the places I’ve been, but…I think the most inspiring was Tibet, partly since that was where I visited most recently before the COVID-19 pandemic. It was always my dream to go to Mount Kailash, which is shaped like a crystal. I was also looking for crystals found in the Himalayas, so it was a trip full of purpose. I was 6,000 meters above the sea and the sedimentary rock layers were in plain sight. It was just one amazing sight after another.”

“The crystals I found were, of course, exceptional, but I was also captivated by the dynamic expressions created by the landscape. The uneven-looking earth in Photo 3 is probably half-melted permafrost. Like raw stones, I’m very attracted to these sorts of expressions that nature itself shows us.”

*Photos 1 and 2 were taken at the foot of Mount Kailash. Photo 3 is a location Akachi’s driver took her to while on the way to buying crystals.

“The key characteristic of my jewelry pieces is that they all have simple designs. The base metals have no excessive ornaments and everything is pared down to a minimum. That makes processing the stones very important. Takuma Gem Carving in Yamanashi handles the processing of bororo’s stones. Koji Takuma is a second-generation gem carver and a certified traditional craftsman who is extremely skilled and loves stones. He understands my desire to leave stones in their natural forms and processes them with that in mind.”

“Koji possesses a whole repertoire of processing techniques, but there’s one in particular that I believe only he can do so well in Japan. It’s called dozuri, which involves combining two different materials and polishing them together. You can see it most clearly in the classic ROCK series. The sense of “oneness” is something only Koji can bring out. The jewelry pieces are, of course, beautiful to look at, but they’re also so smooth that you can wear them completely stress-free.”

*Photo 1 features Koji Takuma and Photo 2 features Koji’s younger brother, Wataru, using the polishing machine. The members of Takuma Gem Carving modify the machines themselves so that they are easier to use. Both Koji and Wataru are certified traditional craftsmen and jewelry masters.

“The brand’s classic standard would be the ROCK series, which is created using the dozuri technique that I just mentioned. The rings, in particular, have become iconic jewelry pieces of our brand. Koji and I came up with the idea for this series in one of our conversations. I said I wanted to create large jewelry pieces and showed him a sketch of the ring I wanted to wear. He looked at it and proposed using the dozuri technique. That’s how the series was born.”

“I was insistent on making large jewelry because when the gemstones are big enough, you can gaze into them endlessly. There are whole worlds in there. You may think all stones look alike, but when you look closely, you can see different colors and inclusions inside, making each of them different and unique. With large gems, especially as rings, wearers can take a look inside the stone’s world anytime they want for however long as they want. That being said, I later received requests from customers to make smaller sizes (laughs). In any case, all stones are one-of-a-kind. Like a traditional sushi restaurant, I make jewelry when and if I can procure good stones. Since the jewelry pieces are all unique, I hope customers will enjoy those once-in-a-lifetime encounters.”

“I actually don’t have a regular schedule for offering new products. The brand offers several series and I make new pieces depending on what sort of stones I procure. But I do have a lot of ideas for jewelry I want to make. When I think I can make something work and the prototype turns out to be a success, I announce it as a new product. One such example is the ROUND series, which uses river stones instead of gemstones.”

“Chipped mountain rocks fall into the river and are rolled in the current until they acquire naturally rounded curves. I wanted to explore ways of wearing that sort of natural beauty. These pieces also use the dozuri polishing technique. The stone is cut in half and a fairly large gold plate is inserted between the two pieces. The gold is then polished to fit the curves of the stone. The stones were prone to cracking during this process, but Koji found ways to make it work and brought the products to completion. They may look simple, but a lot of fine work and diligent effort went into keeping the stones’ natural forms. The ROUND series features pieces made of river stones and crystals.”