Our mission is to make high quality craft materials from Japan more accessible to the artists and crafters of the world, no matter where they live or what language(s) they speak. In doing so, we also hope to increase awareness of the many wonderful traditional crafting techniques found throughout Japan. Shugei (pronounced shoo-geh) is a Japanese word meaning handicraft. It is written in Japanese as 手芸, combining the character for hand (手) with the character for technique (芸).