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

Spoon & TamagoJapan

FamilyMart and Sumo Legend Chiyonofuji is the Celebrity Collab We Didn’t Know We Needed

08.25

FamilyMart’s in-house apparel label Convenience Wear is stepping into the world of sumo with a new limited-edition collaboration celebrating legendary yokozuna Chiyonofuji.

Read at Spoon & Tamago ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

FamilyMart and Sumo Legend Chiyonofuji is the Celebrity Collab We Didn’t Know We Needed

More from Spoon & Tamago on Hakken

JapanArtist Hiro Sugiyama Recreates Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’ With 750,000 Dahlias Spoon & Tamago

Japan福岡発の文具&雑貨メーカー HIGHTIDE がフラッグシップストアを渋谷にオープン Hypebeast JP Design

Japan「ほしいものが、ほしいわ。」は何を問うていたのか。雑誌『広告批評』を読む：上平崇仁「デザイン古書探訪」#3 Designing

JapanIKEA と Xbox がゲーミング家具コレクションを予告 Hypebeast JP Design

JapanLEGO® x Nike Air Force 1 の発売情報が解禁 Hypebeast JP Design

Japan法、市場、規範の手前で——“アーキテクチャ”から余白と更新を生み出すデザイン Designing