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

Yanko Design

Prolo Ring Lets You Click and Scroll Without a Mouse

10.22

There are days when you work on just your laptop. And then there are days when you have to switch between different devices and therefore also use different controllers.

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Prolo Ring Lets You Click and Scroll Without a Mouse

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Meet Draco, the 90mm smart telescope that wakes itself up to shoot the night while you sleep Yanko Design

The 5 Best Home Office Upgrades of October 2026 That Don’t Look Like Office Equipment Yanko Design

Houston’s Proposed O27 Skyscraper Turns Triangular Glass Into a Rippling Facade Yanko Design

A Stained-Glass Caution Sign You’ll Actually Stop to Admire Yanko Design

Lego’s new $160 Fast & Furious Dodge Charger takes family time very seriously Yanko Design

This $56 DIY space shuttle has gears, glowing engines, and zero subtlety Yanko Design