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

World Landscape Architecture

Peru Reconstruction Programme: Natural Infrastructure Technical Guidance Series | ANIN + UKDT

10.19

Winner of an Outstanding Award in the 2026 WLA Awards – Concept | Analysis and Planning category The Natural Infrastructure (NAI) Technical Guidance Series is a six-part, landscape-led initiative…

Read at World Landscape Architecture ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Peru Reconstruction Programme: Natural Infrastructure Technical Guidance Series | ANIN + UKDT

More from World Landscape Architecture on Hakken

Grand Junction Park and Plaza | DAVID RUBIN Land Collective World Landscape Architecture

Central Yards | PWP Landscape Architecture + URBIS Limited + Henderson Land Development Company Limited World Landscape Architecture

D-PREP International School | Landscape Tectonix World Landscape Architecture

The Right Life | Deeproots Design World Landscape Architecture

Student Project | Topography of Aqua-Succession World Landscape Architecture

The Pearl Innovation District Integrates Medical Innovation, History, and Public Life World Landscape Architecture