Shift Japan

14 stories

Shift JapanJapanGENER8ION: Visions of 2034 Filmmaker Romain Gavras and music producer Surkin build worlds where music and image feed each other until you…

08.12

Shift JapanJapanEttore Sottsass: Design begins where magic begins The 1980s was an era of resistance against social conformity. Heightened consumerism, widespread use of person…

07.27

Shift JapanJapanHiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction With the advent of digital and smartphone technology, the essence of photography has plunged into a wholly art…

07.06

Shift JapanJapanSpencer Tunick Being a pebble on a beach of a million pebbles

06.08

Shift JapanJapanRon Mueck A dynamic sculptor who captures audiences with provocative and ambiguous pieces, from miniature to life-size, …

06.01

Shift JapanJapanDESIGNART TOKYO 2026 DESIGNART TOKYO, a well-established fall festival in Tokyo, celebrated its 10th anniversary will be held from …

03.16

Shift JapanJapanSPRING RISING Spring has arrived in Hakone, and what better way to celebrate the flowering season than with a day at Pola Mu…

03.16

Shift JapanJapanYBA & BEYOND: British Art in the 90s from the Tate Collection The late 1980s through the early 2000s was a tumultuous era in Britain, sparked by radical changes in the poli…

03.02

Shift JapanJapanSol LeWitt: Open Structure As the first solo exhibition of theoretical artist Sol LeWitt at a Japanese public art museum, “Sol LeWitt: Op…

02.04

Shift JapanJapanteamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi The Saadiyat Cultural District is Abu Dhabi’s ultimate, modern creative and intellectual quarter, shaped over …

01.20

Shift JapanJapanRoppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal. Mori Art Museum has launched the eighth edition of its Roppongi Crossing exhibition. “Roppongi Crossing 2025: …

01.19

Shift JapanJapanJam Session: The Ishibashi Foundation Collection × Yamashiro Chikako × Shiga Lieko – In the midst of Since 2020, Artizon Museum has been holding its Jam Session exhibitions annually. The sessions feature collabo…

2025.12.08

Shift JapanJapanDESIGNART TOKYO 2025 Since its founding in 2017, DESIGNART TOKYO has stood as one of the world’s most innovative cross-disciplinary…

2025.11.30

Shift JapanJapanYunoki Samiro: The Eternal Now Katazome, the craft of traditional Japanese stencil dyeing technique that uses rice paste as a resist to apply…

2025.11.17

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