発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo

← Hakken Archive

Booooooom

2026 Booooooom Illustration Awards: Call to Submit

October 1

Calling all illustrators! The Booooooom Illustration Awards are back and submissions are officially open!

Illustration

Read at Booooooom ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

2026 Booooooom Illustration Awards: Call to Submit

Related

Layered Interiors with Hand-Painted Murals in a London Family Home The Nordroom

Sandy Christ crafts fuzzy, out-of-focus illustrations that make you embrace ambiguity It's Nice That

Rui Pu makes graphic illustrations that are direct, a little weird and sure to bring a grin to your face Creative Boom

The Daily Heller: Animals Are Diverse But Not All Are Created Equal PRINT

Louise French quit London, cycled the Andes, and came home an illustrator who gets things done Creative Boom

How Fishwife’s illustrated branding made tinned fish cool Creative Review