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

Student Project | Oyster Islands, Living Seas

October 9

Winner of an Honourable Mention in the 2026 WLA Student Awards in the Graduate category A Coastal Resilience Strategy through Oyster Reef Restoration Bohai Bay exemplifies the global coastal crisis…

Read at World Landscape Architecture ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Student Project | Oyster Islands, Living Seas

More from World Landscape Architecture on Hakken

City of Childhood | Mérida, Spain World Landscape Architecture

Uralla Racecourse Lagoon ecological restoration stage 2 planting completed World Landscape Architecture

Waterside Park | PORT World Landscape Architecture

Carpio-Sanguinette Park & Heron Pond Opens in Denver World Landscape Architecture

Benjakitti Forest Park | Arsomsilp Community and Environmental Architect + TURENSCAPE World Landscape Architecture

Redstone Coke Ovens | bluegreen World Landscape Architecture