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

Japan’s Jimi ‘Mundane’ Halloween Costumes of 2026

10.31

Happy Jimi Halloween to everyone who celebrates. It’s that wonderful time of year when our favorite Japanese festival, Jimi Halloween, is on full display.

Read at Spoon & Tamago ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Japan’s Jimi ‘Mundane’ Halloween Costumes of 2026

More from Spoon & Tamago on Hakken

JapanOrySnack: The Bar Where Bartenders Work From Home Spoon & Tamago

JapanWinners of Japan’s 2027 Packaging Design Awards Spoon & Tamago

JapanYuka Numata’s Haunting Sculptures of Children, Made from Fishing Line and Beads, Installed at Abandoned Elementary School Spoon & Tamago

JapanTadao Ando Designed & Donated a Floating Library that Delivers Books to Children Spoon & Tamago

JapanCandidates Announced for Suica Penguin’s Successor. A Public Vote Will Decide the Outcome Spoon & Tamago

JapanTokyo is Gearing Up for an Art-Filled Fall. And the Entire City is Here for It Spoon & Tamago