A Notch Is the Most Honest Word in Packaging
At six in the morning, half-awake, I open the refrigerator and read a carton with my thumb before my eyes are open enough to read the label — a habit picked up years ago, kept because it turns out to be the correct way to open Japanese milk.
The top edge of every milk carton sold in this country carries a small cut, a kirikomi, notched into the cardboard so a customer who cannot see, or cannot see well, can tell milk from juice and juice from soy milk by touch alone, in the dark, without asking anyone. Dairy makers agreed on the shape decades ago and have kept agreeing on it since, carton after carton, brand after brand, without exception and without a credit line.
I have sat in enough client meetings to know how rare that kind of agreement is. A logo wants a court case if a competitor gets close to its curve. A ribbon on a rice-cracker bag wants to be photographed. The notch wants only to be found by a hand that isn't looking at it, which is a much harder brief than any brand guideline I've ever drafted, and a much better one.
This is the argument I keep making, carton by carton: the real graphic culture of this country is rarely the pretty can on the eye-level shelf. It's the fold that survives a delivery truck, the seal that tells you if someone opened the box before you did, the cut corner that does its one job for a stranger it will never meet. Visiting designers photograph the ribbons and the rice-bag type and fly home certain they've found the lesson. They've found the souvenir.
The lesson sat in a committee once, working out what a person without sight actually needs from a box of milk, then cutting a shape into cardboard and asking every dairy in the country to keep cutting it, forever, for free, unbranded, unawarded, unposted.
I still don't turn the kitchen light on before six. I find the notch with my thumb, tip the carton toward the glass, and pour. Somewhere in every fridge in the country, a piece of cardboard is doing the same small, correct, invisible thing in the dark.
Ren Arakawa grew up on the Adachi bank of the Arakawa and spent five years drawing identities in a Ginza studio before deciding that writing about type was more fun than kerning it. Ren reads Tokyo as a typeset page — station signs, rice bags, receipts — and edits Hakken from a desk above a Kanda print shop.