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

PAGE online

Wie ein Film 100 Jahre Kommunikation verbindet

October 13

HAICA X PAGE Publikumspreis: »Turn of time« von Manuela Palencia Promptr GmbH in der Kategorie »Commercial«. Die PAGE-Community kann bis zum 10. November 2026 abstimmen!

Read at PAGE online ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Wie ein Film 100 Jahre Kommunikation verbindet

More from PAGE online on Hakken

Agenturporträt: EIGA PAGE online

Design braucht deine Perspektive: Sei dabei bei »Make It Make Sense« PAGE online

LinkedIn für Kreative: sichtbar werden, Vertrauen aufbauen, Kund:innen gewinnen PAGE online

Die Zukunft der Marke bleibt menschlich PAGE online

Genauso muss es sein! Karl Anders branded HEARTCORE ST. PAULI! PAGE online

Webinar: KI-Agenten verstehen und praktisch einsetzen PAGE online