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Japan now

日本の今 · What's on view, what the Japanese-language press is covering, and this week's Japanese web — in English

On view

Japanese web this week from Responsive Web Design JP and MUUUUU

The wire AXIS and Japan Design Net, translated

How Japan designs in 2026 from Japanese studios' own trend reports

Sources

Fetched every three hours, linked to the original

About

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

It's Nice That

Mestiza Studio built this play cafe brand like a game, fusing aesthetics to appeal to all ages

September 24

The brand for Canica combines constructivist geometry with expressive illustration, creating a visual world that’s fun but not too childish.

Read at It's Nice That ↗

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