Our Tokyo Shop Reopened in June 2021
Text by Tokuko Ochiai
After we closed Walnut Tokyo in 2020, we were touched to know just how important the shop was to so many people. With their encouragement, earlier this summer we found an opportunity to reopen our shop in Minami Aoyama. This is the second relocation in Tokyo, and we believe this is the best version of Walnut Tokyo yet.
We have made our growing line of original amirisu yarns a feature of the new shop. We have an entire wall covered in skeins of Trek, Hike, Wanderlust Linen, and Parade. Trek and Hike debuted after the previous shop closed, so we are particularly excited to be able to have a space where people in the Tokyo area can see finally these yarns in person.
As another treat for customers in the area, we make sure to display the newest arrivals from around the world in our Tokyo shop first. It's a place where you can find that new yarn or product you just saw on your feed yesterday. We ask those planning a visit to keep in mind that the lineup of recent arrivals changes frequently since we are always making room for something new.
In addition to maintaining a selection of yarns from popular brands, we are now able to offer more fabrics and crafting tools than ever before. A collection of finished samples should provide inspiration for your next knitting or sewing project, too.
The limited lesson space was always a challenge in our previous location, but this time we were able to make a dedicated lesson area and add more variety to our classes. Along with our general knitting classes, we’ve added workshops in needle felting, spinning, fair isle, and sewing. We hope this new dedicated space will make Walnut Tokyo more fun and comfortable for everyone, whether they come to shop, take a lesson, or both!
We first opened a store in Tokyo in 2015. Back then we would open up our lesson space, a converted apartment room, as a store on days when lessons weren’t offered. It was a tiny room that could barely hold four people. It was also in a tricky location, but somehow people from all around the world managed to find us and knock on our door. We decided to move to a larger space where we could open the shop fulltime in 2018. There were days when more English was spoken in our shop than Japanese. Now three years later we have opened our new shop, but the world has not returned to what it was. We find ourselves feeling nostalgic for the days when Walnut Tokyo was buzzing with many languages and people from all over.
We believe that those days will return in time and when they do, we look forward to welcoming knitters and makers from around the globe to the new Walnut Tokyo.
Address: 3-8-5 Minami Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo
All Photo by Masahiro Shimazaki