Objects That Define Japanese Design
Six things that explain a hundred years of restraint.
Restraint is the word people reach for and it is not quite right. Japanese design is not restrained in the sense of holding back; it is edited, which is a far more aggressive act. Somebody decided what the object was for, removed everything that did not serve that, and then spent an unreasonable amount of time on whatever remained. You see it most clearly in things that cost almost nothing. Any country’s expensive objects are well made — that tells you about its rich people. It is the four-hundred-yen objects that tell you about its designers. Here are six we keep returning to. We cannot sell you any of them, and they explain most of what we can. None of them are in a museum shop in Tokyo, either. Four are in supermarkets.
The Kikkoman soy sauce dispenser, designed by Kenji Ekuan in 1961, is the one we think about most. Ekuan trained as a Buddhist priest before he trained as a designer, and he spent three years and something like a hundred prototypes on a 150 millilitre glass bottle. The entire problem was the spout. Soy sauce is thin, it runs, and every bottle before this one dribbled down the side and left a ring on the table. The answer is a narrow lip with a specific inward curve that breaks the flow cleanly the instant you tilt the bottle back. Four hundred million have been made. It has never been redesigned. It costs less than a cup of coffee, it is in the permanent collection at MoMA, and Ekuan said afterwards that the point was to let a family put the bottle straight onto the table instead of decanting it. The prototypes are in the Kikkoman archive and about thirty of them differ from one another only at the lip, in increments you would need a gauge to measure.
The Hakusan G-type soy pot — Masahiro Mori, 1958 — solves the same problem in porcelain and is, if anything, more severe. Mori worked at a factory in Hasami, in Nagasaki, which had been making everyday ware for four hundred years, and his brief was mass production: he was designing for machines and for people who would never think about it. The G-type is a squat teardrop with a handle you hold between two fingers and a spout that stops when you stop. It won the first Good Design Award Japan ever gave. It is still made in the same town, it costs about two thousand yen, and if you set it beside almost any European equivalent the European one looks like it is trying to tell you something. Mori designed close to a hundred production pieces and refused, throughout, to sign any of them, on the grounds that a factory object has no single author and pretending otherwise is a marketing decision.
Sori Yanagi made the Butterfly Stool in 1954 from two identical pieces of moulded plywood and one brass rod, and it looks like a torii gate, which he always denied doing deliberately. His method matters more than the stool. Yanagi did not draw. He made plaster models with his hands, dozens of them, and chose between them by holding them. His father founded the mingei folk-craft movement, and Sori spent his career somewhere between that and industrial design — he also did a stainless kettle, a motorcycle and the pedestrian bridges for the Tokyo Olympics. The kettle is the one to own. Eight thousand yen, in production since 1994, and the handle sits at exactly the angle that keeps your knuckles out of the steam. He is the reason we look for makers who still make models. The stool was in production, discontinued, and reissued, which happens to almost every honest object once the accountants have had a turn.
Magewappa is the oldest thing on this list and the least designed, which is why it belongs on it. Cedar is steamed, bent around a form into a cylinder, and stitched shut with cherry bark. Odate, in Akita, has done this since the seventeenth century, originally because the domain was poor, had a great deal of cedar, and needed something to sell. The lunch boxes work because unlacquered cedar absorbs moisture, which stops rice going wet and sour on a warm day — a technical solution that predates the vocabulary for it by three hundred years. They cost between eight and thirty thousand yen, they cannot go anywhere near a dishwasher, and there are perhaps thirty people left who can stitch one properly. The cherry-bark stitch is the tell. Machine-made imitations use a plastic band coloured to look like bark, and it sits proud of the surface instead of flush with it.
Then the ones nobody writes about. The Kokuyo Campus notebook, the standard Japanese student notebook since 1975, sold in a paper band you are meant to throw away. The Uni Kuru Toga pencil, whose mechanism rotates the lead a fraction with every stroke so the point never goes wedge-shaped — a genuinely new idea, in 2008, about a pencil. And the masu, the square cedar cup that was a rice measure for six hundred years before anybody drank sake out of one, and which still smells like a sawmill when you fill it. None of the three was designed to be admired. All three are better resolved than most of what is in a design museum. You can buy all three within a hundred metres of most stations in Japan, for less than the price of a sandwich at the airport.
The thread running through them is not minimalism, which is a look, and which Japan sells enthusiastically to people who want the look. It is that the problem was taken seriously by somebody who assumed the object would be used every day for thirty years. When we are standing in a workshop trying to decide, that is the only question we know how to ask: what was the problem, and did they actually solve it. Most of the time the answer is no and we leave with nothing. When it is yes you can usually feel it in the hand before anyone explains it, which is the whole trick and is not, as far as we can tell, teachable. It is also why we come home from some trips with nothing, and why the Nishijin day in Kyoto — five hours, forty workshops, no purchases — was one of the more useful days we have had.
