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

Yanko Design

NUO Pairs a Rocking Knife With a Board That Actually Guides It

10.31

A pile of fresh herbs has a way of becoming a much larger project once the chopping starts. Leaves spread across the board, little pieces escape the blade, and suddenly you’re gathering everything…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

NUO Pairs a Rocking Knife With a Board That Actually Guides It

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

Jojo’s Headphone Concept Adjusts Like a Yo-Yo, Without Sliders Yanko Design

A Refugee City Plan Refuses to Treat Shelter as Enough Yanko Design

HighLow Chair Flips Its Backrest Into a Leaning Support for Standing Meetings Yanko Design

HAY’s Posto Table Lamp Joins Three Aluminum Parts With Two Hidden Screws Yanko Design

The 5 Best LEGO Sets of October 2026 Yanko Design

AULA’s Neos 75 keyboard has a tiny hi-fi deck bolted to the side Yanko Design