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

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Week 43, 2026 — Japan-inspired

Week 43, 2026. Japan-inspired was the signal of the week.

One letter a week, starting soon.

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Week 43, 2026 — Japan-inspired

Stories that week

Mistakes, chaos and meditation: inside the mind of Bráulio Amado It's Nice That

Hono’s label branding for Temper cider animates the last rally of the 2008 Wimbledon final It's Nice That

Core77 Weekly Roundup (10-19-26 to 10-23-26) Core77

A Clever Design for Waste-Reducing Bottles Core77

A Spherical Computer Monitor Pays Homage to a 1970 JVC Design Core77

A Transforming Mid-Century Chair, and Fun Knoll Facts Core77

Toyota Releases Video of Wheelchair-Alternative Mobility Concepts in Action Core77

Designing Play: How Ekoplay Turns Learning Into a Hands-On Experience Core77

Work Sharp's Diminutive, Flexible Knife Sharpener Core77

An Electric Motorcycle Concept with Modular, Scalable Power Core77

The Simple, Beautiful Interface on Braun's 1960s Portable Heater Core77

A Creative, Low-Tech Way to Cantilever a Movable Lamp Core77