Hirota Glass has been making glass in Tokyo since 1899. The workshop was founded at the point where European glassmaking, newly arrived in Japan, met Japanese design, and its archive of drawings and forms has stayed inside the company ever since. Pieces are hand-blown, and the workshop also practices Edo kiriko cutting.

The Heritage line is drawn from that archive. Forms that were in production a century ago are reissued rather than reinvented, so a motif is carried in the shape of the glass itself instead of applied to the surface. The soy sauce dispensers show it plainly: a hexagonal kikkō body, a four-lobed sakura base, a fluted kikumon base, each with a ground-glass stopper whose lip returns stray drops to the body.

Old forms, kept in circulation rather than kept in a case.