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

Dezeen Interiors

Rotterdam's Echo is a Tokyo-inspired listening bar inside the brutalist Groot Handelsgebouw

10.30

Creative director Jeﬀ Hoogendijk, DJ and producer Khalil Ryahi and architect Paul Cournet have teamed up to open a listening bar in Rotterdam , featuring a bar made from shipping crates and ombré…

Japan-inspired

Read at Dezeen Interiors ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Rotterdam's Echo is a Tokyo-inspired listening bar inside the brutalist Groot Handelsgebouw

Related

Ten c’s capsule collection with cult Japanese label Comoli is made for fabric obsessives Wallpaper*

Mimi Kakushi Brings Japanese Glamour to Miami Beach Design Milk

The House of Suntory and Surface Celebrate Hibiki Japanese Harmony’s Chiso Bottle Collaboration Surface

Behind the hose at Tokyo Fire Department’s elite Hyper Rescue 8 unit Monocle

Toho Bank, 1991 Logo Histories

MU Architecture creates a Japanese-inspired family home in Montreal Icon