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

Packaging of the World

Gotcha – Matcha Cafe Packaging

10.26

Gotcha is a matcha branding mockup collection featuring matcha cups, packaging, pouches, labels, menus, and beverage branding mockups in realistic café scenes.

Packaging Japan-inspired

Read at Packaging of the World ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Gotcha – Matcha Cafe Packaging

Related

Bowl’d — Customizable Salad Bar Packaging Packaging of the World

Traditional Japanese gilding techniques brighten contemporary interior design DesignWanted

What is PoloFest? The first-of-its-kind Ralph Lauren collectors’ festival lands in Japan Wallpaper*

Packaging Design: Candour Wine by Bedow Abduzeedo

Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Danone agree to change recycling claims on bottles Packaging Europe

DESIGNART TOKYO 2026 gives a former highway a new creative role DesignWanted