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

Elle Decor

Bored of Your Bathroom? Try One of These Four Design Trends

October 16

From monastic minimalism to juicy orange tones, here are a few big ideas for the bathroom.

Read at Elle Decor ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Bored of Your Bathroom? Try One of These Four Design Trends

More from Elle Decor on Hakken

The One Thing Daisy Edgar-Jones Wishes She Had Stolen from the Sense and Sensibility Set Elle Decor

Vhernier's New High Jewelry Collection Evokes Milan's Sleek Cityscape Elle Decor

Every 2027 Color of the Year Announced So Far Elle Decor

Benjamin Moore Just Revealed Its 2027 Color Trends Palette Elle Decor

Benjamin Moore Just Revealed Its 2027 Color of the Year and It Nods to Tradition Elle Decor

Apple Debuts Apple HomeView, a New Device for the Home Elle Decor