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

NOSIGNER

Notice of New Year Holiday Closing

December 25, 2025

NOSIGNER will be closed for the New Year holiday during the following period:Holiday Period: Saturday, December 27, 2025...

お知らせ

Read at NOSIGNER ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Notice of New Year Holiday Closing

More from NOSIGNER on Hakken

Eisuke Tachikawa, founder of NOSIGNER, delivered a Special Lecture on “Evolutional Creativity” to Minerva University Students NOSIGNER

Eisuke Tachikawa Delivers Keynote at the “Leadership Summit 2025” in Bangladesh NOSIGNER

NOSIGNER Founder Eisuke Tachikawa Conducts “Evolutional Creativity” Workshop at Shiga Prefecture’s Shiga 2100 Future Vision Forum NOSIGNER

Eisuke Tachikawa Delivers Keynote at the International Design Conference 2025 in the Philippines NOSIGNER

Eisuke Tachikawa, Founder of NOSIGNER, Contributes an Article on “Design for Disaster Preparedness” to DESIGN PROTECT No. 147 NOSIGNER

NOSIGNER Leads the Creative Direction and Design for Kansai Electric Power’s New Banking Service “CQ BANK” NOSIGNER