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

Surface

Inside the Chez Sotheby’s Private Paris Selling Exhibition

10.20

Photo credit: Alexis Armanet. Production of Scenography: Iviu Torre. A singular artistic, cultural, and culinary convergence, timed with and in close proximity to Art Basel Paris, the Chez Sotheby's…

Read at Surface ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Inside the Chez Sotheby’s Private Paris Selling Exhibition

More from Surface on Hakken

Los Angeles Design Week/end 2026, Behind Open Doors Surface

Rothschild-Owned Brueghel Sells for $6.5M at Frieze London, and Other News. Surface

Angela China Challenges Color Theory In Her Latest Work, ‘Pink Sky’ Surface

Art Week NYC Expands Beyond Galleries With a Museum Lineup, and Other News. Surface

Sarah Zapata Combines Brutalist Cubic Forms and Andean Textiles Surface

Designing Delicious: Le Grand Café Surface