Chikako Perez describes the brand’s incense as an invisible art. TOKYO KODO brings Japanese incense-making together with perfumery learned in Grasse, southern France. At its centre are Chikako, who moved from textile design into fragrance, and Geoffrey Perez, whose background is in fragrance raw materials. Their work considers how a scent behaves after it is lit, rather than simply transferring a perfume formula into incense.
Brand facts
- Family-business roots: Nakahori, founded in 1935
- Name inherited and brand reworked: 2014
- Principal makers: Chikako Perez and Geoffrey Perez
- Official website: https://tokyokodo.online/
The people and the brand’s beginnings
From an incense-wholesaling family to textile design
Nakahori began in 1935 as a wholesaler of incense for temples, delivering incense from Tochigi to temples in the Tokyo region by bicycle.
A member of the family’s third generation, Chikako did not initially intend to join the business. She studied textile design and worked with fabric patterns. After the 2011 earthquake, she reconsidered her work. Seeking a direction distinct from the traditional incense handled by her sister, she studied perfumery in Grasse in 2012.
Reworking the name and developing a partnership
After graduating, she worked at a local fragrance company and experimented with her own scents in its laboratory after hours. There she met Geoffrey, a Grasse native with thirteen years of experience in a fragrance company’s raw-materials department.
In 2014, Chikako took over the TOKYO KODO name used by the family business and reworked the brand. In an interview with KUON, she recalled Geoffrey joining around 2018. The founding of the family business and the formation of today’s brand are therefore distinct stages.
How the fragrances are developed
Adjusting perfume to the process of burning
Combining fragrance with incense powder changes its character; lighting it may remove volatile components. In a conversation published by zen minded, Geoffrey discussed the difficulty of keeping a lemon impression through combustion. Chikako explained that she tests fragrance after mixing it into the incense base and adjusts it again. LOVE CARROT took about two years of experimentation.
The work therefore extends beyond smelling a liquid blend to considering how it spreads through a room after ignition.
Colour and knowledge of materials
Chikako finds connections between combining colours and adjusting fragrance. Her account of sensing several colours in carrot seed’s smell reflects that earlier design experience.
The brand aims to use natural fragrance materials wherever possible, selects materials in Grasse and blends its own fragrances. This describes a working preference, not a claim that every product contains only natural fragrance ingredients.
Three subjects in the First Collection
LOVE CARROT began with carrot seed oil that Chikako encountered in Grasse. It brings an earthy carrot impression together with an osmanthus-like floral aspect and the milky woodiness of Indian sandalwood.
MURMURE DE LA FORET draws on trees around the home where she lived with her grandfather; MIMOSA takes spring in southern France as its subject. One turns towards personal memory, the other towards plants and a season. The relationship between Japan and France appears through these different starting points rather than through a single fixed fragrance style.
Aromatic woods, art and craft
The Classic Series revisits sandalwood and agarwood through a contemporary approach, while the Arts & Crafts Series develops collaborations with artists.
For the First Collection, painter Ryoko Kuroshima used layered media to express changes in fragrance and smoke, and Kamo Pottery made the incense holders. The image surrounding a scent and the object used to burn it are considered alongside the formula itself.
