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

Wallpaper*

Casa Caban Hayama offers a design-led coastal escape outside Tokyo

September 25

Just an hour by car or train from central Tokyo, Casa Caban Hayama is a seaside hideaway with sweeping views across Sagami Bay towards Mount Fuji.

Japan-inspired

Read at Wallpaper* ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Casa Caban Hayama offers a design-led coastal escape outside Tokyo

Related

scars left by bears ripple through these japanese cedar surfboards Designboom

Was Unternehmen beim Thema Typo unterschätzen PAGE online

Karimoku turns Tokyo showroom into "imaginary Japanese inn" Dezeen

I IN contrasts concrete architecture with bright colours in Andersson Bell Tokyo store Dezeen Interiors

Matchacha Japanese Tea Studio Visual System and Branding Abduzeedo

Lost in Translation? A Designer’s Guide to Japanese Type PRINT