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*

What is PoloFest? The first-of-its-kind Ralph Lauren collectors’ festival lands in Japan

10.23

In 1976, Polo Ralph Lauren arrived in Tokyo, Japan, its first location opening within the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro.

Japan-inspired

Read at Wallpaper* ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

What is PoloFest? The first-of-its-kind Ralph Lauren collectors’ festival lands in Japan

Related

jean prouvé’s 1944 demountable house becomes japanese tea pavilion in paris Designboom

DESIGNART TOKYO 2026 gives a former highway a new creative role DesignWanted

Infiniti’s Head of Design, Taisuke Nakamura, on Shaping the 2027 QX80 Around Japanese Hospitality Surface

Infiniti Carries Kyoto’s Bamboo Forests Into the Design of the 2027 QX80 Design Milk

DESIGNART TOKYO 2026 celebrates 10th anniversary across the city Visual Atelier 8

Selbstbewusst als Kreative: Auftreten, verhandeln, Grenzen setzen PAGE online