”Eight million gods” in Japan people called higher power than human in nature in that way. Not only major creation gods like Izanami and Izanaki, people saw many different kind of gods in giant trees, in massive rocks and even in one leaf of grass in the field representing power and wonder of nature. People had respect and fear for those existance at the same time and those animistic feeling co-existing with nature formed Jomon period which did not have large scale war for over 10,000 years and also formed basic sense of Japanese culture.

After Jomon period in Japanese history, many cultures and religions have brought to Japan from continent, Buddhism was one of them. Buddhism had fused with animistic belief of Japan transformed from original philosophy of Gautama Buddha shaping original form adapted into Japanese culture. Ittobori is one of the way to create Buddhism statue, carving statue out from one tree trunk. It is the respect to power of nature charged in the material, so this way of creation is the deed of Buddhism at the same time it has aspect of animism. What important is prayer and respect for higher existence itself not to choose which god(or Buddha) to believe.

The purpose of “YAOYOROZ” project is to version up sense of animism and prayer that we have inherited from our ancestors, and made it into “shapes”. In each era, people has been directed their mind and finest technology to make prayer into shapes, like doki(pottery) and dogu(clay figure) to Buddhism statues. So it is necessity to create shapes which symbolize us living in modern society with contemporary technology like 3D printing for the future.