Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it on my Kindle. Later I turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!

  • By reconsidering everyday tools through the lens of our relationship with them, we can see a distinctly Japanese approach to design. For instance, a utensil premised on the abilities of those who use it. The best example is Japanese 箸 hashi, known in the West as chopsticks, which we use to eat. By expertly deploying two sticks identically tapered at one end, you can pick up anything from tiny grains of rice and beans to a large potato. This remarkably simple tool can be used to separate pieces of meat, pierce and divide soft foods, stir up miso soup, carry slippery wakame seaweed into our mouths, wrap nori around rice, and so many other things. Because we have been using them since childhood, we deftly and instinctively manage these two sticks every day.

  • In hashi, you can see a “design relationship” entirely different from the Western knife and fork. The modern knife and fork each have a handle, enlarged for easy grasping, and the contour of the handle is often a design feature. Compare this to hashi, which are designed without handles or indeed any indication of how to hold them. The design of hashi is not design that instructs us, “Use me this way.” Instead, hashi are essentially two sticks that somewhat indifferently suggest, “Use me however you want.” So I can imagine that hashi may flummox people from other countries who first encounter them. But once you figure them out, their high functionality as eating utensils makes them irreplaceable. The simplicity of two sticks motivates basic human potential along with our capacity for gestural elegance. In Japan, people never sought to make hashi more convenient. Thus, hashi did not evolve like the knife and fork did in the West, but essentially remained two sticks. They are distinguished from their Chinese and Korean counterparts by being made out of wood or bamboo instead of metal, and by the subtle adaptation of tapered tips to maximize their response to delicate human manipulation. Hashi also convey Japanese traditions when they are painstakingly lacquered or crafted from select timbers. In this way, everyday life reveals a Japanese approach to design, holding back at just enough in order to ace it.

  • Furoshiki is the square piece of fabric used to wrap and carry anything. Furoshiki can be wrapped in dozens of different ways to accommodate anything that needs bundling and can be folded up and tucked away when not in use. It is held back at the level of a single piece of fabric that the user is free to improvise with. Intentionally designed to have no handles or seams shaping it into a bag, it is always used in its original form. In our headlong rush to prioritize convenience, this tool might have already become obsolete. Nevertheless, remarkably, the furoshiki, bursting with the potential to stimulate human intelligence and adaptability, has managed to survive into a time when anything and everything can be delivered to our doors. It is the quintessence of just enough design that doesn’t overdo it. I hardly need to mention that because it is a simple square of fabric, the furoshiki’s graphic design potential is wide open. In our age of convenience, we constantly generate new forms for every possible situation, but because the design of this single piece of (in some ways inconvenient) cloth is so restrained, it serves as a nearly limitless canvas for self-expression.

  • Because the design of the bottle did not overtly assert itself, it subtly elicited the consumer’s desire to value it as an object and reuse it instead of getting rid of it after drinking the whisky. The advertising campaign was built on the efficient use of print media, eschewing massively expensive TV commercials. This allowed us to devote more of the budget to the product itself, making the elegant packaging possible. When people encounter a new product, they are usually attracted by its visual appeal. If they are interested, they take it in hand, pay for it, carry what they now own home, open the box, remove the cap, pour a drink, savor the music of ice on glass, then cork the bottle. If they realize that they can repurpose the bottle after the whisky is finished, they hold on to it. As we repeated these simulations, it occurred to me that what we had actually designed was the user’s experience. When we buy whisky, or any alcoholic beverage, we are also acquiring the pleasure of the moments we will spend with it. Working on this project taught me to think through what it means to design.

  • You will find most design embedded in the things we unconsciously interact with every day. Just as design can be deliberately obscured to remain invisible, design can also reveal the essence of things that are hard to comprehend, making them obvious to anyone. Because economic success has become the only measure of prosperity in contemporary society, we now perceive design as just a tool for making goods and services more conspicuous in order to sell them.

  • Let us consider the ラーメン ramen Japanese love so much. Think back on a tasty ramen shop. Was it as immaculate as a hair salon? Did you eat your ramen in a spot resembling a brand-new café in a poured concrete building while sitting on a chair designed to look “modern”? I hear that ramen shops are very popular these days in New York and Paris, and I have no idea what ramen shops look like in countries with very different food cultures, but at least in Japan, no one imagines that a beautiful, austere ramen shop will produce a mouthwatering bowl of noodles. The kind of joint that gets your mouth watering is in a wooden building, now weathered with time. The charcoal ink calligraphy on the white のれん noren, or doorway curtains, has faded from repeated washings, and the stubborn oil stains on the well-worn tables and chairs that defy scrupulous cleanings only heighten the shop’s appeal. The menu items, handwritten on strips of age-yellowed paper affixed to the walls—who knows when—appear to have been there forever. If a designer, fond of stripping everything down to its bare essence, were to attempt to renovate this kind of shop into something “modern,” all would be lost. Ramen shops have their own intrinsic standards that have nothing to do with Western fashions. Customers visit ramen shops, not for their conceptual beauty, but for the “sizzle” that appeals to the human instinct. Ditto for 居酒屋 izakaya, where people unwind at the end of a day over reasonably priced drinks and small plates all across Japan.

  • Toshiba released the first automatic rice cooker in 1955. Its simple, functional design was stripped down to essentials, but after that, as Japan’s “economic miracle” accelerated, we saw floral-patterned rice cookers or excessively round rice cookers, leading to today’s multifunctional rice cookers, many of which are unnecessarily heavy and concocted to suggest luxury. Surely there’s room in the market for a high-function rice cooker that doesn’t have some “image” tacked onto it, but they are hard to find. Simply put, there are very few designs that haven’t been designed.

  • Very few refrigerators promise an unassuming presence, and most have been adorned according to the self-serving rationales of manufacturers to promote their brand identity. A surprising number of manufacturers believe that, by definition, design means tinkering with ornamentation. Unfortunately, when talented in-house designers, who appreciate the essence of design, present brilliant designs that hardly look designed, they are disparaged. We certainly don’t want refrigerators to be less than they should be, but we also don’t want them to be any more than that. It’s just as important for objects to be discreet as it is for people. Except for when we’re getting food in and out of the fridge, we want it to quietly disappear. Depending on the kitchen, the refrigerator can just be built into a wall. Of course, a refrigerator is a machine that can malfunction, but as long as you’ve planned for its replacement, there should be no problem. This thought process is precisely the first step in design. Design isn’t just about adorning appearances. What we should really focus on is the fact that the fundamental design of a refrigerator is its function—chilling food, quietly, persistently, twenty-four hours a day.

  • The cinematic world of Brazil had an especially profound impact on me at the time. I decided to envision a lipstick that would appear in a movie. Resetting my brain this way, I found I could imagine totally fresh images. This was also when I began focusing on raw materials, just as advances in coating technology were increasingly hiding them from view. I wanted to use design to expand the potential of raw materials, and reflecting on the feel of the material led me to question whether lipstick tubes have to be vertical. When I realized that by taking advantage of aluminum’s soft and malleable qualities I could design a slender, rotating ellipse shaped like a capsule floating in space, I asked myself, “Why do lipstick tubes need to stand up?” By deliberately questioning ideas long taken for granted, I developed my process, as with Nikka Whisky Pure Malt, where I identified the logic behind meaningless concepts and eliminated them.

  • After decades of working in the field, I am convinced that the definition of design is the skill to bring people and things together. In other words, good design is devising smart connections.

  • Let us also consider the chairs we sit upon. They exist to accommodate the human act of sitting. A chair is what connects a person and the act of sitting. The variety of forms provides a range of comfortable poses, but each chair serves as the bridge between people and the act of taking a seat. As you can see, design brings together people and all things. Connecting people and things means coming up with a unique approach each time. Maintaining the flexibility to respond to every project with a fresh strategy requires a supple thought process, rather than a single signature style. But such a supple process is not immediately recognizable to a third party; it remains faceless. I imagine it’s comforting to have a unique style you can always return to like a homing instinct. Not having a specific place to return to can certainly cause anxiety. This is why people gravitate to a specific identity. They assume it will help establish their name. Nevertheless, it’s important to know that relying on a signature style means narrowing your options. To make an extreme case, if you declare you are a round person, you will only be offered round jobs. If you proclaim that you are a red person, you will only get red jobs. Life is as richly transient as nature. If you stubbornly refuse to change, to live your entire life as round or as red, that is your prerogative. But there is no point in being inflexible. Design is integral to every human activity and a part of everything. Should we really be teaching aspiring designers that their only option is to develop a personal style?

  • Some projects demand that you stick to a specific approach to get to the bottom of an issue. And when I start digging deep, I tend to get obsessed. Why is this done this way? What is going on here? I try to approach the essence of a project by delving into each question as it occurs to me. When we are obsessed by something that appeals to us, we throw ourselves into it, leaving our self behind. You can’t complete a job remaining obsessed without returning to an objective approach, but I think that becoming obsessed with something may be helpful to supple thinking. How can you possibly design anything without initially becoming obsessed with it? Even traffic signs, for example, require an investigation of what, where, and why. I imagine that the efficacy of a design based on an obsessive investigation will far surpass that of a design based on a less thorough approach—but only after you have removed all traces of you.

  • People in the design world like to say, “Design requires taste.” This not only sounds like there are two types of people, with and without taste, but also as if only special people come equipped with taste. But show me work that doesn’t involve taste. Is there anyone in this world who doesn’t have taste? I have always questioned this aphorism. Is it right for designers to sell themselves on taste, when taste is inherent in everyone? In Japan, even half a century ago, the profession of design was barely understood. My father also worked in graphic design, and when he presented clients with a bill, they would often point to the Design Fee line item and ask, “What is this for?” Let’s reframe the relationship between a designer and taste. Ideally, a designer is someone with the talent and acquired skills to deploy their taste, to transform what they sense into something useful to the world. Design doesn’t require unique professional skills, but it should cleave to a quotidian perception of the world. All the more reason why designers have a responsibility to translate their ideas into words that others can understand. Saying an idea is “sort of cool,” or assuming a client doesn’t need it all spelled out, is no longer acceptable. If you think about it, this is a wonderful development. Although there remain many misperceptions about design, now that society assumes design is a necessity, at least designers are no longer considered extraordinary beings.

  • Takayama, nestled in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture northwest of Tokyo, has been renowned for the wooden furniture handmade by shokunin craftsmen for centuries. The Takayama furniture workshop Kijiya asked me to design a wooden stool and released the Kamachi Stool in 2009; you can still custom-order it today. While designing it, I visited their studio and encountered a machine that can shape wood into a three-dimensional object based on 3D data from a scan. The only way to carve curves into wood had been to shave it by hand, but by that time, computers had started entering the world of furniture making. Today, this technology is taken for granted, but at the time, it was still unusual, especially in modest woodworking shops. Seeing the machine deeply inspired me. At the time, I was interested in bringing to life preexisting shapes, or formations created by nature, rather than dreaming up my own. Whatever forms my inadequate brain could conjure must already exist, somewhere in the world. Surely it was far more worthwhile to seek out a shape formed by the whims of nature and put it to use in people’s lives. This concept culminated in the logo that I designed for the Kyoto University of Art & Design in 2013. I created this symbol by releasing single drops of charcoal ink from a certain height onto paper and letting them burst however they wished. The process of letting hundreds of charcoal ink drops fall as they may and then selecting the best silhouette was akin to the world of 書 sho, charcoal ink calligraphy. That is to say, you don’t control the final outcome. Bleeds and blurs are integral to sho, and the final contours of the characters depend on the flow of charcoal ink seeping into the fibers of the 和紙 washi, handcrafted paper. What interested me at the time was design predicated on deferring to nature in the creative process. In this approach to design, the stance is not “I will devise the shape,” but rather “I am bestowed a shape.” It also reflects the Asian spiritual concept of 自然 shizen, nature, represented in Japanese by the two characters that mean “of itself, as it should be.”

  • I encountered the wood-shaping machine just as my interest in this approach was growing, and it occurred to me that this machine could create natural shapes out of wood. Heavy stones and lightweight wood. Geological strata in stones and rings in trees. The images merged in my head, and right then and there I asked the operator if the machine could shave wood based on 3D scans of stones. He said, “Yes, that’s possible.” My heart skipped several beats. I instantly envisioned children arranging wooden stones, playing with these child-safe toys. We went into production soon thereafter and started by gathering stones in nature and choosing the right ones. The surface of the wood, shaped like the real stones’ 3D data, was still a little rough. They needed to be buffed by human hands and then stained with a child-proof oil—in case children licked the stones—in order to keep them smooth. I created these wooden stones for youngsters to figure out on their own how to play with them. They come with no instructions. They can be arrayed into faces or piled up into towers. They’re light and safe, and the wooden grain on each stone is unique. Today, as more and more children play with digital devices, the need for such “primitive” toys that draw out the human imagination is only growing.

  • After Japan was defeated in World War II, when mass-produced goods and new cultures and ideas poured into the impoverished country from America, many Japanese unquestioningly associated them with images of a beguiling lifestyle. Through these goods, the very picture of abundance, Western design inevitably seeped into Japanese daily life, permeating it. Japanese people turned away from unadorned things to focus on the shiny packaging decorated with floral and other patterns, seeing in them a way forward into a bright future, in stark contrast to the harsh, dark, food-deprived years of war. There is no question that as Americanization rapidly made its way across Japan, there was a time when her citizens turned their collective gaze solely toward the decorative aspects of design. It is impossible to overestimate the shocking impact the vibrant colors of packaged goods imported from America had on Japanese people at the time. As a consequence, the Japanese public imperceptibly began equating design with decoration. In other words, they concluded that a floral pattern = “designed,” and unadorned = “not designed.” Of course, there is also a history, well documented in books and exhibition catalogs, of the product and graphic designers and architects of that era who, responding to this mistaken perception, diligently strove to highlight the essential meaning of design. In fact, the original goal of the design community that emerged in Japan in the early 1950s was to promote awareness about design. Nevertheless, the prioritization of Japan’s economic miracle engulfed the best intentions of this small group of dedicated individuals. Any serious examination of design was set aside as products flooded the country in an era of turbocharged prosperity, spurred on by a cornucopia of technological innovations.

  • With the phenomenon of marketing added to the picture, manufacturers rolled out products corresponding to consumers’ statistically proven desires and rushed headlong into indiscriminate selling. It is also true that even under such conditions, Japan created some innovative products, but their number was overwhelmed by the staggering consumption of mostly indistinguishable stuff, mass-produced solely for profit. The decorative approach typified by eye-catching floral patterns was also cleverly deployed for the sole purpose of boosting sales, reaching every remote corner of Japan. There is not a single object, nor a single human endeavor, that does not involve design. From the organization of information to the mechanisms of electoral representation, from the medical equipment upon which human life depends to computer interfaces, from city planning for disaster zones to the letters and numbers we read every day, from traffic lights to the sounds and lights emitted by our smartphones, everything has been designed. In this light, it appears to me that design is like water. Like water, it is sometimes visible, often invisible, but always essential to our lives. When someone hears the word design, they imagine a range of things that are cool or fashionable or sophisticated or かわいい kawaii, cute, or spare, but that is just one small aspect of design. Try envisioning design as water. Water is indispensable to human life, connecting us to our environments in visible and invisible ways. It can cause disasters like tsunamis (and so can design when it is uncalled for or when it tries to add nonexistent value), but it can also materialize as a rainbow, radiant in the light of the sun. Just as water makes every phenomenon possible, design is an essential component of every human endeavor.

  • Mizkan began producing rice vinegar more than two centuries ago, and their vinegars remain popular today. When they asked me to create a gift box of vinegar to commemorate their 210th anniversary, I hit upon the idea of a round-bottomed vinegar vessel that sits in a wooden base. The cover of the wooden gift box is inscribed with the company’s logo and the founder’s signature, reproduced in charcoal ink, to convey his enduring legacy. Long after the last drop of vinegar has been savored, the bottle can serve as a lovely vase. The bottle is shaped like a teardrop, but my original idea for it was a drop of water. Water, a liquid, gives birth to life, and vinegar can also be traced back to water. A bottle in the shape of a single drop of water would symbolize Mizkan’s approach to making vinegar as well as their gratitude to the natural environment. But a drop of water has a circular bottom; such a vessel cannot stand on its own. And if you flatten the bottom, you squander the appealing contour. That quandary led me to use wood to create a base for the round-bottomed vessel. This was a limited anniversary edition, so I deliberately proposed a shape that would have been too costly for their product lineup. Seventy percent of Japan’s landmass is forest, but because of an influx of cheap imported lumber, there is plenty of spare domestic wood. The idea to use Japanese wood for this project also emerged from my thought process. And wood is soft and gentle in contrast to inflexible glass, providing the perfect support. Ultimately, the package consisted of an unusual round-bottomed bottle nestled in a wooden stand. I designed the mouth of the bottle without a screw thread and made the wooden base a simple square so it can be reborn as a vase for flowers and plants after the vinegar has been consumed. I hoped my design would subliminally encourage people to want to use it to display flowers instead of throwing it away. Affordance is a design term for the properties of objects that show users how they can be used. When design is restrained to hodo-hodo, it can afford the user the desire to repurpose it.

  • Sundried sweet potatoes are the indigenous winter food of the Pacific coast of Ibaraki Prefecture. That’s where 80 percent of Japan’s sundried sweet potatoes are produced, following the ancient, laborious, handcrafted process, dependent on the climate and plentiful sunshine. The prefectural chamber of commerce asked me to develop products highlighting the benefits of sundried sweet potatoes, to revitalize their regional specialty. As I listened to their presentation, my thoughts turned to the Design Anatomy exhibit series I launched in 2001. I used those exhibits to dissect mass-produced consumer products we all take for granted, such as chewing gum, Instamatic cameras, and milk, from the perspective of design. I peeled back the surface layers of things we think we already know, to reveal just how little we know about them. As soon as I imagined investigating every aspect of sundried sweet potatoes, the idea for a school came to mind. Not a school with a schoolhouse, but a collective called a school, where we could investigate this artisanal delicacy, hold workshops, and, of course, develop products. The school would be a platform that could be used for anything. Besides, a school for grown-ups could be fun. And we would create a thick book about the anatomy of sundried sweet potatoes and sell that together with the actual product. The instant I had the idea to sell the book and the food together, I could visualize it: reading the book while eating sundried sweet potatoes with your fingers and learning about them. This product would appeal to all five senses; you could hear the sound of turning pages and smell the aroma while savoring the food.

  • We were analyzing everything from the sunlight pouring down from the universe to photosynthesis, from the dry sea breezes of winter to the local stratum, soil qualities, and water, from selective breeding and the history of sweet potatoes to the intestinal microbial activity in the human stomach, even the resulting human gas and waste. So we visited many laboratories. I no longer recall how many places we called upon, whisking to and fro, but the satisfactions of embarking on an unprecedented project through sweet potatoes felt like opening a door into the universe. We completed The Sundried Sweet Potato School, the hefty book packaged with sundried sweet potatoes, in 2010. Soon thereafter, following the Great East Japan Earthquake and nuclear power plant accident, we convened a symposium about radiation and sundried sweet potatoes in order to promote better understanding about the sun-drying process. Next, I proposed the idea of a celebration, and we soon launched the annual Sundried Sweet Potato Festival. Given the proliferation of sundried sweet potato production across Japan resulting from technological advances and product improvements, we hosted the World Sundried Sweet Potato Convention to promote Ibaraki as Japan’s production hub to the world. In 2019, thanks to the cooperation of many people, we even founded the Sundried Sweet Potato Shrine. My intention for this project was to cultivate the strengths of the local residents. Instead of providing all the ideas and making them happen, I invited residents to participate so they could feel the project belonged to them and, as much as possible, move things forward on their own. And now, I believe we have accomplished this. This is another project in which I felt it was important for me to keep a hodo-hodo distance, without getting overly involved.

  • The essence of design is to thoroughly understand a project and communicate it as straightforwardly as possible. That’s what design is. If it’s beautiful, design it beautifully. If it’s compelling, design it to be compelling. If it’s spare, keep the design spare. If you always hold fast to this unaffected approach, design can also serve as a litmus test for product development. In other words, if something designed with integrity doesn’t lead to a strong product, you should reexamine its premise. In the spring of 2005, I was asked to design four series of ads for the fashion brand PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE, to be featured in All Nippon Airways’ in-flight magazine, Tsubasa Global Wings. By the time we had our first meeting, I already had the key word everyday in mind. PLEATS PLEASE was born of Issey Miyake’s intention to reinterpret fashion as an everyday product. You could say Miyake was pushing his own envelope, the culmination of his experiences designing for countless Paris Fashion Weeks, the epitome of fashion as the extraordinary. I got right to work borrowing some PLEATS PLEASE clothes and handling them. They don’t wrinkle when you fold them. They’re easy to store and wash, and rolled up into little balls, handy to carry. In addition to their functionality, the exquisite alchemy of the fabric and the pleating treatment complement the contours of the human body. Plus, they’re nearly weightless. I immediately understood that they embodied a multitude of prerequisites especially appealing to women. Everyday, easy, mobile, scrunched-up. The words started circling my brain. They comprise the very definition of convenience. There is a convenience store on the first floor of my office’s building, so I entered it in my head. What was I looking for? In these situations, I don’t physically go to a convenience store. It’s only in my brain that a universal image exists that I can share with others. Then I came across the bento boxes. The four key words all applied. And you can see inside the transparent covers. Inside these cases, you could show off the beautiful colors—just like a tasty pasta bento. I submitted other proposals, but this idea won out. When we actually searched for the perfect plastic bento case, it proved elusive. So these images are composites of close-ups.

  • When I design an artist’s book, I start by immersing myself in their art. Artists’ books are better when there’s no trace of me in them. How thoroughly can I erase myself? How much of the artist’s intentions can I draw out? These are my primary concerns whenever I’m asked to design a book featuring another artist’s work. Of course, it’s different when I’m asked to collaborate with an artist on their book. It’s important to understand this crucial difference. Am I participating as a designer or as an artist? This difference doesn’t seem to matter to some designers, but it matters to me. For an artist, a book is part of their art. Which is why, ideally, an artist should view their own work objectively when making a book of their own art. But they turn to designers because they can’t. In other words, the designer should stick to being a translator. What’s important is for the designer to understand the artist’s intent—what the artist wants to communicate through the medium of a book—and elicit from the artist aspects of their work that they themselves aren’t aware of. Just as there are many ways for an interpreter to interpret the same word, every designer will interpret an artist in their own way. That is how a designer can express their individuality. Individuality should reside in a designer’s approach, not in the work itself. The best artists’ books reveal what the designer has elicited from the artist and leave it at that.

  • Japanese breweries began selling sake in 1.8-liter handblown returnable glass bottles called 一升瓶 isshōbin, which are slightly larger than a magnum of wine, in 1897, and sake has been associated with isshōbin ever since. An isshōbin is heavy, but the ritual of holding its neck in one hand while raising its bottom with the other to pour sake is enshrined in Japanese sake culture, one of its pleasures. Likewise, the much older tradition of pouring each other sake from 徳利 tokkuri, carafes, into おちょこ ochoko, small sake cups, while hardly convenient, is a ritual of respect and hospitality. It is an important form of communication passed down over the ages as tradition. As life becomes more convenient, many things are lost without our realizing it. In the case of the isshōbin, it isn’t just the physical sensation of holding it that is gone. As sake is sold in smaller, lighter bottles that are easy to pour from, we no longer engage in the rite of pouring for one another. Sake bottles become easier to carry and are recyclable, but they are not returnable, and the job of cleaning isshōbin dies out. The distributors’ task of reclaiming isshōbin ceases to exist. The job of hand-pasting labels onto isshōbin passes into oblivion. Jobs are lost, along with the balance inherent in specialized labor. Japan’s sake culture, intertwined with people’s lives and fostered over centuries, is crumbling without our even noticing. Convenience is destroying our entire society. What does it mean to savor sake? Isn’t it time for us to consider that it’s more than the taste in your mouth, that it’s also inherent in the vessels, ceramics, tables, and spaces we consume it in? When I was asked to design a vessel for a sake brewery, I became obsessed with the deeper meaning of the humble isshōbin.

  • Nearly every convenience conceived in the modern era is inextricably linked to economic activity and exploited for individual profit. I would go so far as to say that we are surrounded by conveniences delivered to us by businesses. Proponents may argue that providing conveniences is a benevolent human endeavor that delivers services through things. However, their fundamental goal is to keep raising year-over-year sales numbers, and generally such logic is nothing but a fig leaf for making money. Our society is now driven by the human instinct to seek convenience fused with our measure of prosperity, now biased in favor of economic over cultural wealth. And underpinning this is the narcissism epitomizing individualism, born of a twisted interpretation of democracy and freedom, rather than an objective public discourse. Most people, while sensing that something is awry, prefer to not pursue this, afraid that deliberately questioning the myriad conveniences—which are intentionally installed everywhere we venture and that now stain our bodies and our spirits—might be misconstrued as condemning civilization, the economy, or even human endeavor itself. It is no easy task to stop and reexamine the full significance of convenience. But there is one good approach: Use the human body as the standard. What happens to human beings if they gorge on conveniences in order to avoid physical movement? The logic is simple, the answer obvious. When the body withers, it begins to die. To survive, the body must retain the flexibility to adapt to changes in its environment. Reexamining convenience through the benchmark of the physical bodies that shape us as humans may bring its future into perspective. Taking a good look around, we can see that we have designed most modern conveniences to avoid moving our bodies. We are surrounded by conveniences designed for that. Flip a switch to make anything happen. A trip to the convenience store lets us one-stop-shop for basics. Stepping onto an elevator or escalator requires much less effort than climbing the stairs. Leave it to machines to clean our homes, our clothes, even our dirty dishes. Once humans started walking on two legs and our brains developed and acquired critical thinking, we also figured out how to take things easy. As thinking human beings, we are destined to engage our minds in the service of daily life. Faster. Easier to eat. Simpler. Warmer. We have been bestowed with a splendid talent to utilize our intelligence to improve our existence. But the irony of modern society is that using that gift to pursue convenience has taken a serious toll on our bodies. What is the current state of the modern human body? Obesity, diabetes, and hypertension top an endless list of modern ailments, rising in inverse proportion to our decreasing physical activity. If we continue to disengage from physical activity, it will no longer be possible for our physical evolution to keep pace with the dizzying speed of increasing convenience. It would be one thing if our society were built on slower, deliberate, long-term change, but the ferocious speed of modern convenience is not premised on the natural pace of human evolution. We have no choice but to reconsider the very idea of convenience, based on how critical it is that we move our bodies.

  • One year after Nikka Pure Malt proved successful, the Nikka Whisky Distilling Company launched From the Barrel, a 51.4 proof whisky with a robust character. What bottle would best suit a big, rich whisky? I wanted it to be a little spirit. Rich foods are more appealing in small portions. The intensely flavored 塩辛 shiokara, fermented seafood, which pairs so well with sake, looks delectable because it’s served in tiny bowls. It’s possible that full-flavored foods are served on small plates because we can’t digest them in large amounts, but it’s just as likely that our memories of those small portions trigger our brains to water our mouths whenever we see something rich served in a small vessel. The natural climate and mores of specific regions give rise to their food cultures. This subtle sensibility is exceedingly Japanese. Powerful flavors come in small portions. Adhering to the metaphor of a little spirit, I designed a square, short-necked bottle. From the front, square bottles appear smaller than round bottles of equal volume. I designed a very short bottle cap, in the height then used for medicine bottles. This was before such caps were used for alcohol or perfumes. We left it unprinted to preserve its aluminum texture. The neck was so short it made pouring challenging and had never been mass-produced before. To persuade the client, I explained how the challenge of pouring sake from a tokkuri into a tiny ochoko fostered interpersonal connections. When the whisky first went on the market, we included a booklet the same size as the box, detailing an erudite history of the whisky. Whisky designed to be savored by the palate and the brain alike”

  • Whenever I hear someone declare that “adding value” is what matters most, I find myself scrutinizing the speaker’s face. This concept means adding an external value to something. I believe that, in fact, Japanese craftsmanship began to decline as soon as the idea that value can be added to something took hold. Is value really something that can be slapped on like a label? If you pick up a stone from the street and use it as a paperweight for the papers on your desk, that stone has become valuable to you, but have you actually added to the value of the stone? Herein lies the perilous sorcery of words. The stone remains a stone, even when it’s placed on your desk; it just happened to be the right size for you to pick up from the street and use as a paperweight to keep your papers from scattering in a breeze. You have not added value to the stone. Instead, you have discovered a value in your relationship to the stone that was always inherent in the stone. It goes without saying that adding something is the opposite of discovering something. Have you simply projected your convenience onto an object? Or have you summoned a purpose for the object by considering it for what it is? When someone has the ability to draw out inherent potential, we say they are talented, including, of course, people who can draw on their own potential. But it’s impossible to accurately assess the value of something that you simply slap value onto, without clearly seeing it for what it is. We do not call those people who thoughtlessly add value to something talented.

  • P.G.C.D. was envisioned as simple, high-quality skin care, intended to return to the basics of facial cleansing and moisturizing. The three core products are daytime and nighttime soaps and a lotion. I joined the project as the designer during the development phase. The company’s decision to market exclusively through mail order opened up possibilities not available for products sold in stores. When products are sold in stores, distribution costs, retail margins, labor costs, retail publicity, and enormous advertising costs must be added on top of the price of the product. There are no such costs in mail order, which allows for a lot of high-quality materials to be used to make the products. Plus, more care and effort can go into the packaging, the medium that customers will directly touch. These products are targeted at consumers who have a wealth of experience with other skin care brands. Thus, the products are positioned as the final destination after trying many others. The concept is to reconsider the male-conscious approach to makeup that covers as much of a woman’s face as possible, to reveal that if a woman maintains the health of her skin, she is most beautiful in her natural state. I designed the logo, soap, bottle, and packaging, as well as the graphics for the user instructions, business cards, letterhead, and magazine ads when P.G.C.D. first went on the market. Although it is a simple skin care system, the quality of each item had to anticipate the expectations of customers already accustomed to a range of high-end products. I was especially conscious of the feel of each item as a direct appeal to the consumer’s sense of touch. Through our senses of sight and touch, packaging can evoke memories. We all touch things from when we are babies, and we unconsciously remember those sensations. And when we touch something, we may also recall a similar feeling. We use the English word silky not to refer to silk but to describe the touch of something that feels just like silk. A sommelier is someone with a talent for conjuring seductive similes to detail flavors and aromas. When I’m designing for touch, I can’t use words like a wine steward, but I want people to recall a pleasing sensation from the past and to savor the unique sensations of the product. The packaging for P.G.C.D.’s Coffret boxed set, which launched the brand, combines the qualities of delicate papers, the texture of a soft cloth, and the feel of cold glass to reawaken a range of memories in the mind of the user.

  • Structure and surface are terms from the field of architecture, but they both involve design, so you could say one is structural design, and the other, surface design. Structure involves designing the pillar and planar structures and other functional mechanisms required to physically erect a building. Surface involves the texture and colors of its exterior, as well as doors, windows, walls, and all the elements a building requires after its structure has been enclosed. Graphic design doesn’t generally reference structure and surface. Compared to three-dimensional architectural constructions that must be built to physically stand the test of time, two-dimensional graphic design is not burdened by concerns about wear and tear. Designs printed on paper may wither and crumble, and the colors may fade, but they will not endanger human lives. Nevertheless, I believe that many aspects of graphic design warrant an awareness of both structure and surface. Just as architecture must consider the passage of time in the natural elements, graphic design should consider the passage of time in human memory. How do people remember logos and product designs, and how do their memories evolve with time? When you don’t see something for a while, that memory is stored in the brain, seemingly forgotten. But if you can recall it when you see it again, it means that memory survives. Yet when you are asked to make a drawing of even something you are familiar with, it’s not so easy. Individuals’ drawing skills may vary, but it is also proof of the unreliability of memory. However frequently consumers are exposed to logos and packaging, they must be easy to remember and designed to compensate for the fragility of human memory. When designing logos or products, the goal is not a more or less beautiful design, but rather a design inspired by an entirely original structure that will increase its chances of surviving in human memory. This requires simplicity. The human brain is certainly capable of retaining complexity, but inside a store, where customers are bombarded with information, the chances of complexity surviving are greatly diminished. The structure of the Meiji おいしい牛乳 Oishii Gyunyu, Tasty Milk, carton is a blue cap atop a white body with the product name in chunky font vertically aligned in the traditional Japanese style. For Lotte’s XYLITOL chewing gum packaging, the logo and product name in white are set against a bright green background. These structures are both exceedingly simple, and although the information provided in smaller fonts has evolved over time, the basic formats have remained unchanged for decades. This is why the components of these designs have survived in people’s memories as unique. Approaching graphic design as the two distinct layers of structure and surface is also useful in branding. This approach can surely play a role in promoting Japan to the world. A structure founded on a clear concept can support a range of designs. In other words, a lineup of fascinating content is insufficient to convey the authentic Japan rooted in its history. We must begin by creating a robust conceptual foundation against which a rich array of intriguing visuals can be displayed, in order to convey the depth and uniqueness of Japan.

  • I was asked to develop the package design and create a name for rice grown in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost large island. In the rest of Japan, rice grown in Hokkaido used to have a negative image as cheap and unappetizing, but after learning that recent developments in selective breeding now produce rice rivaling the very best grown on the mainland, I tasted it. I found it quite delicious. Our quest was to see how far we could raise the image of Hokkaido rice. I had always wondered how package designs for rice, so essential to our lives and the natural environment of Japan, wound up with infantile manga-type characters or tasteless illustrations, so “un-Japanese.” My team and I determined we would develop an entirely new approach. We considered a range of names in various designs, but the client chose the one pictured. We had proposed naming the rice 八十八 Hachijū-hachi, Eighty-Eight, but that was already trademarked, so we named it 八十九 Hachijū-ku, Eighty-Nine. 米 Kome, the kanji for rice, is composed of the characters for “eighty-eight,” 八十八, from the legend that eighty-eight steps are involved in producing rice. I think the name Eighty-Nine, conveying that this rice is produced with one extra step, makes for a better story than Eighty-Eight, and is ultimately the better name. The final design is nothing more than that name rendered in a large, distinctive font that’s instantly recognizable. In the midst of so many multicolored, flamboyant designs, I think this unaffected packaging in muted colors feels quintessentially Japanese, with its own contrasting presence.

  • I took up surfing when I was twenty-seven. There were times I got hurt, times when I hurt other surfers because I was clumsy, and times when my board got swept up in a big wave and crashed on my head, nearly knocking me unconscious. But come Saturday, I always set off for the beach. When a typhoon is approaching, I’ll often get caught in a big wave and can’t reach the surface as I flounder and struggle, my face clearing the water just before I run out of breath, only to be swallowed up in the next gigantic wave. Whenever that happens, I start seeing stars and fear I may not make it this time. Perhaps only surfers can understand the impulse that takes me right back to the surf after surviving another close call. I grew to treasure surfing to an outrageous degree. Eventually, I learned to ride a stable board upright, and on windless days when the water is quiet and a wave my height approaches, the thrill of anticipation overwhelms me. You see, I can intuit which wave is perfect for me. When the wave conditions are good, larger waves come in sets. I train my focus on one of the rhythmically arriving waves and get ready to ride it. At takeoff, I start paddling, and when the water lifts the rear of the board and just as I’m about to slide straight down to the bottom of the wave, my body reacts, and with hardly time to think about putting my right or left foot forward, I rise up on the board, barely engaging my conscious brain, and I’m riding the slope of the wave. The moment I’m standing on water on the verge of that glide, I experience an incomparable sense of 無 mu, nothingness. Unless I free my mind of thoughts and focus purely on that moment, I’ll fall to the bottom of the hollow wave, be assaulted by a tower of water, and wipe out with my board. But whenever I catch a wave, my entire body thrills to the power of fusing with a force of nature. As we age, accumulating experience, human beings tend toward arrogance. We want to resolve things in our heads. But that doesn’t work when you’re up against nature. In the face of its relentless power, there’s no time for logical thinking. Surfing makes it crystal clear, to a laughable degree, just how powerless I really am. The weak yield the waves to the strong. If surfers half my age are better at negotiating nature, the waves belong to them. This unassailable logic gives me great pleasure. No human power can push back a wave, and when good waves are scarce, you have no choice but to wait. Enjoy surrendering to the rhythms of nature. Instead of putting yourself first, examine your environment and train your body to react to whatever comes your way. This is exactly how I approach design.

  • When someone asks me my job title, I tell them I’m a graphic designer. I really don’t care about titles, but society insists on categorizing people. In Japanese, the word 解る wakaru, to understand, derives from the word 分ける wakeru, to separate. You separate in order to convince yourself that you understand. This is also why Japan’s Decimal Classification exists: because countries and governments feel less threatened when they divide things up into categories. Separating things doesn’t actually help you understand them any better, but people want to do it anyway. That being said, it’s exhausting to fight this impulse all the time, so when someone asks me my title, I have no hesitation responding, “Graphic designer.” Some people change their title as they take on different kinds of work, and some people claim two or three titles, but that doesn’t appeal to me. I just don’t trust it. Having thought it over, I decided to accept that using a title is a way to convey your skills to someone. Namely, I use “graphic designer” as my title because I have the skills of a graphic designer. There is no rule that says expertise in graphic design can only be applied to graphic design. You can use those skills for anything. The reason I gravitated to diverse projects in the first place is because my interests go well beyond two-dimensional print media, to encompass three-dimensional media, space, sounds, and taste. But more importantly, I hoped to shatter preconceptions about graphic design and expand its scope. When people see that “a graphic designer can do that!” it helps broaden the expectations of a graphic designer’s potential. If you surmise everything, from letters to visual and moving images, from three-dimensional projects to all that is visible, even rendering the invisible visible, then a mountain of work awaits you. If you believe that all the information we receive from our visual sense is material for graphic design, then, however the world may change, there will always be work to do.

  • No matter how I logically analyze it, I simply love using my hands to draw. These days every task winds up as data, but I still draw every single line without aid of a computer, and I sketch out all my ideas by hand. Sometimes I use that hand-drawn quality in the final result. I am not denying the digital. But we are blessed with human bodies that cannot be traded in for machines, so why not put them to work?