Small dolls, and the places they live.
The design work began in 1999. The first una arrived three and a half years later.
What we made
I wanted to do what una couldn't.
Around 2005, I started thinking about building una a house. A house hollowed out of a tree stump. I asked factories in Japan and abroad, but it simply couldn't be done. The biggest obstacle was size. una stands 24 cm tall. A house for una would have to be at least 32 cm high, and neither the factories of the time nor our own skills could produce that.
una had other problems too. Quality varied a great deal from factory to factory. And it was hard to customize.
So I resolved to make the doll that una couldn't be. I started prototyping right away, but it took more than a year before a prototype was finished.
The first thing I noticed was where the eyes look.
A flat face, with sleep eyes built in that open and close. Without anyone intending it, the gaze ended up turned slightly outward.
The theme was "home," so I designed the gaze to turn slightly inward. Change the angle of the eyes, and the doll's whole character changes.
What made me feel "this doll belongs outdoors" was that gaze. It had a particular air, as if looking at something far away.
The doll I was about to make had a theme: home. So I designed its gaze to turn slightly inward. The angle of the eyes made it "a doll looking at something close," and that was when the idea of lino came into view.
This doll lives carefully, in a very small world. Surely each one has a job. Not outward-bound stories like una's, but stories that turn inward: daily life, and the ties between one lino and another. Those were the stories I would have to write.
Every lino has one job. The line didn't come first. It came out of the angle of the eyes.
It was the same with una: before I make something, I don't know what I'm making. But if you keep correcting, "no, not this," "not this either," until you're sick of it, the finished form suddenly appears. Wondering when it would come, I made corrections every single day.
With lino, the finished form came after more than a year.
By the time the lino prototype was done, the company had no money left.
Producing it in a factory was out of reach. So lino went on sale as a handmade doll.
Happily, a great many people ordered. But opinions were divided. The things we had to fix were durability, consistent quality, and production speed.
Making resin dolls by hand takes an enormous amount of time. Sculpting the master, casting, selling, inspecting, shipping. Customers waited months after ordering. Dolls broke in transit. Or arrived with limbs so loose you couldn't play with them. To solve these things, I made lino in ABS.
The lino we are preparing to re-release now is this ABS lino.
One with a toothache. One who goes to weather school. One who sews. One who keeps a café. One who dances. One from the circus.
What lino was meant to be was "a doll, plus a house."
A size with real presence as a doll, and that sits most naturally inside a house. That was 16 centimeters.
But the "house" part turned out to be very hard. It was made of MDF, a material close to wood, and the weight, the size, and the shipping costs ran far beyond what we expected. We could no longer keep producing the house.
The lino project, begun in 2006, was about four years old. In 2010, a company proposed a special-edition lino, and we made a model called "Hide & Seek." It was displayed for a while in a toy shop's showcase in Tokyo, to be made to order. One order came in.
When I heard that result, I decided to end the lino project.
About lino → lino of the little house (日本語)
A dollhouse of small houses you can stack up, line up, and lay out in any shape you like.
The lineup
The story of the four rooms → a winter morning
Picture books photographed with the real dolls, outdoors and on small sets. In "The Forest's Lost Things," the shop is built inside a red box. "The Door to the Stories" is the entrance to all four.
Read all four → The Door to the Stories
Today, the world continues on screen.
A little theatre is staging "una and the Wondrous Star."
You can visit huna's room of ice, suna's summit, and DUNA's boundary.
All those years, the una and lino stock stayed in a warehouse under contract, but I had no plans to re-release them. I wasn't doing much as moof. I had other work, and it was hard to find the time.
Then someone I'd come to know through that other work spoke to me.
"I'd like to give my grandchild a doll for their birthday."
So for the first time in years, I took a una out of its storage box, cleaned it, trimmed its hair, dressed it, put it in a box, and handed it over. I heard that they were delighted, grandparent and grandchild both.
In those days I had been too busy to read my email. When I finally looked, there were message after message from people searching for una and lino.
So I decided to re-release una, a little at a time.
They had been kept in their boxes all along, but these are dolls more than twenty years old. Their condition varies. They have no clothes. Then I met someone new who could make doll clothes, and at a very slow pace, re-release became possible.
Once I actually began, orders came not only from Japan but from customers in many countries. So in February 2026 I moved to Shopify, and I continue selling una dolls, a little at a time.
Boxes that hadn't been opened in nearly twenty years held happy surprises too: suna and DUNA that I hadn't been able to find back then.
I want to get dolls to as many people as I can, but the number I can make in a day is small. And how many una and lino remain, I won't know until they have been inspected.
I hadn't been thinking of re-releasing lino. But when I gave a few away to mark the Shopify opening, people wrote back asking, happily, for a re-release. Checking their condition to be sure, the ABS lino turned out to be in good shape, with no problems found. I am now preparing so that lino can be re-released.
Reading una's stories again after all this time, I feel that then as now, the world is wide, and our hands are still very small.
If that's so, then I'll do as the unas do, and put everything I have into what I can.
moof