TOMOSU | Sake in a Paper Lantern

Tomosu (灯す) is Japanese for “to light a lamp”.

Outside almost every sake bar in Japan hangs a red paper lantern, a chōchin. It tells you sake is being poured inside. When I started looking at sake packaging, I kept coming back to that lantern. It’s the one object everybody already connects with sake, so I made the lantern the pack.

The bottle stands in a black lacquer plinth, and a washi paper lantern sits over it like a cloche. Lift the lantern by its cord and the bottle is standing there. When the sake is finished, you drop an LED tealight into the well in the plinth, put the lantern back on, and the empty pack becomes a lamp. I wanted the box to have a second life that people would pick for themselves, without a “please reuse me” line printed on the back.

Three grades, three hours of one night

Every lantern shows the same brewery lane: whitewashed kura walls with namako tiles, the cedar ball hanging over the brewery gate, the canal and its small bridge. Each grade is a different hour of the same night.

I. Dusk (red), Junmai
II. Moon (white), Junmai Ginjo
III. Snow (indigo), Junmai Daiginjo

The scenes follow the shin-hanga woodblock style. When the tealight is on, the light comes through the washi and the whole lane glows.

The bottle

I designed the bottle after the pack, as a lantern in glass. It’s a natsume-shaped oval in satin-frosted glass with fifteen raised hoops, like the ribs of the chōchin. The hoops open at the front for a slim washi name strip and at the back for the legal label. The black lacquer cap with the gold crest and silk cord is the lantern’s top ring in miniature, and the black band at the foot is its bottom ring. Once the bottle was final, I went back and refitted the lantern and the plinth around it.

Print and structure

The lantern body is printed flat and applied in twelve gores, so the artwork is pre-warped to wrap the curve without stretching. There are dielines for the lantern, the lacquer rings and plinth, the back strips, omikuji neck tags with a serving temperature guide for each grade, and the shipping carton. The type is Shippori Mincho and Yuji Syuku, with vermilion seals and gold foil on black lacquer.

The mockups are 3D renders built from the actual print files.

Tomosu is a self-initiated concept. 720 ml.