Review of Japanese Culture and Society

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One of the strongest reactions to industrialization is reflected in the ideas and achievements of the Japanese Mingei, or folkcraft, movement, which gathered momentum in the 1920s. Just as the English designer William Morris, together with his Arts and Crafts followers, had demonstrated a dislike of anonymous, mechanized mass manufacture and revived medieval craftsmanship in the last decades of the nineteenth century, so the Japanese philosopher and art critic Soetsu Yanagi, together with potters Shoji Hamada and Kawai Kanjiro, sought a return to traditional Japanese craftwork. In his 1927 book Kogei no Michi (The Way of Crafts), Yanagi discusses the rich heritage that crafts embody and the importance of sustaining their production in a modern context.

The promoters of Mingei valued functionality above all else. Their museum—The Japan Folk Crafts Museum—opened in Tokyo in 1936. In it, historical and modern examples of traditional Japanese crafts are displayed for the public to see. These ceramics, textiles, baskets, and lacquered and wooden items are not meant to be viewed as art objects; they are presented as simple, functional objects created to facilitate daily life. Objects such as bamboo whisks (chasen) and ladles (hishaku), both used in the tea ceremony, fall into that category. They demonstrate that natural materials may be transformed into simple, useful objects through skilled craftsmanship.

Shoji Hamada played a key role in the Mingei movement. He studied at Tokyo's Advanced Technical College, and following his graduation in 1916 he became acquainted with the English potter Bernard Leach, who was spending time in Japan. Hamada subsequently traveled to England and spent three years working with Leach in his hometown of St. Ives, in Cornwall. The Japanese potter's simply decorated glazed pots and bowls successfully combine Japanese tradition with a sense of contemporaneity based in an understanding of the continuing relevance of craft to modern life. Another potter working in Japan in this period, Kitaoji Rosanjin, combined pottery with calligraphy, woodwork, lacquer, and painting (and was a renowned restaurateur, as well). Many of his ceramics were destroyed by the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, after which he created some [End Page 114] of the classic pots of the century. His pieces adhere to the principle of wabi—the rustic, understated beauty inspired by the world of nature that underpins traditional Japanese crafts. Through the contribution of the textile craftsman Kichinosuke Tonomura (who set up the Kurashiki Museum of Folkcraft in 1948), weaving also came to play an important role in the Mingei movement, and by the end of the 1930s a powerful modern Japanese craft movement embracing a range of media had been established. Just as in the West the ethic and aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts movement underpinned the work of designers at the Bauhaus school in the 1920s—which, in turn, was the basis for subsequent full-fledged architectural and design modernism—so Japan's early-twentieth-century craft revival established a strong foundation for the technology-led modern design movement that emerged some decades later.

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Japanese and western architects and designers did not work in ignorance of each other. Soon after encountering Japanese art and design, westerners began to borrow heavily from it. In turn-of-the-century Europe, the French and Belgian Art Nouveau movement was heavily influenced by japonisme. In the United Kingdom, designer Christopher Dresser drew inspiration from the asymmetry and decoration of Japanese artifacts. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright admired the lines, structure, and underlying philosophy of the interior of the Japanese house, and he incorporated them into his designs. In the early 1920s Wright built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which would be another victim of the 1923 earthquake.

Also along with the numerous Japanese students who traveled outside their country to be educated in the West, young Japanese architects came to Europe and the United States to study and work alongside modern masters. Junzo Sakakura and Kunio Maekawa both spent time in the studio of French modernist architect Le Corbusier. Sakakura went on to create a pavilion for the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale that combined elements of eastern and western architecture in a single building. In 1933 German modernist architect Bruno Taut was invited to Japan by the Japan Architects Association, and he ended up spending three years there. Le Corbusier's collaborator, Charlotte Pernand, lived in Japan between 1940 and 1943. Her task was to advise the Japanese Ministry for Trade and Industry on Industrial art and suggest which Japanese goods would appeal most to western markets.

By the early 1940s the two-way traffic of designers and design objects between Japan and the West had become significant, and an industrial, economic, and aesthetic infrastructure had been created for the realization of Japan's own modern design movement. The devastation the country experienced in World War II and the necessary reconstruction after its surrender in 1945 slowed its development, but by 1950 Japan was poised to engage fully with the modern world, both technologically and culturally. [End Page 115]

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In the 1950s Japanese manufacturers had to create home markets for their goods before attempting to address the challenge of overseas sales. To that end, in 1955 Toshiba created an electric rice cooker, which rapidly became an essential item for newlyweds. As the number of servants in Japanese homes continued to decline, the demand for electric and electronic gadgets grew apace. In 1960 Sharp offered Japanese consumers the first color television set. It is a bulky wooden object with Detroit styling applied to its metal control panel. Two years later Sharp launched a domestic microwave oven, another crudely designed object. Advanced technology alone was enough to engage consumers.

The presence of the American army on Japanese soil in the 1950s stimulated a strong program of Americanization, and many of the first products to be manufactured-transistor radios, automobiles, motorbikes, and tape recorders—owe much to the idiom of streamlining. The fascia of Sony's little TR-55 Transistor Radio of 1955, for example, has a Detroit look to it, as does the Toyota RS Crown automobile of the same year. Likewise, Tokyo's famous bullet train, launched in 1964, features a dynamic streamlined profile. However, Japanese product designers quickly moved beyond surface styling as a means of making goods appealing and consumable and began to exploit the possibilities of technological virtuosity as a powerful selling tool. Learning from the past—in particular from the Japanese ability to adapt to small, highly flexible living spaces, using screens (shoji) to transform spaces as needed and storing items, such as futons, when not in use—a number of Japanese high-tech manufacturers began to develop sophisticated products characterized by portability, flexibility, and a miniature scale. In 1959 Sony developed the world's first solidstate television receiver, the TXS-301 Television. It has an eight-inch screen and weighs only thirteen pounds. Combining technical virtuosity [End Page 116] and clever design, Japan's electronic products began to gain a significant reputation in the international marketplace.

In the late 1970s, the Sony Walkman employed miniaturization as a marker of high technology and as a means of linking the product to the body and exploiting its potential to transform daily life—ensuring, thereby, that the traditional closeness between material culture and daily life in Japanese culture would continue to inform high-tech products. In the hands of Japan's designers, objects—"tools"—existed to support life, not the other way around. The Walkman utterly transformed daily activities such as riding the subway and jogging in the city streets. Mitsubishi's Electric Micro-Shaver (1980) and Casio's little Film Card Solar Calculator (1982), among numerous other objects, demonstrate Japanese manufacturers' ongoing ability to exploit advanced technology and to create electronic products with no bulk. Japanese designers also excel at creating miniature nonelectronic items, such as Yoshiaki Iida's Plateon Sewing Kit (1986). These objects demonstrate the country's advanced developments in plastics molding, and they built on Japan's tradition of careful packaging and effective storage in the domestic sphere.

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As well as embracing American commercial styling, in the early postwar years Japanese designers began to respond to developments in Europe, emulating European pedagogic practices and the modernist ideals that underpinned them. Through the work of the critic Masaru Katsumie and others, the ideas developed at the Bauhaus were transported from Germany to Japan, and a number of design-education institutions were established in Japan that embraced Bauhaus pedagogy. In Tokyo they included the Creative Arts Education Institute (1951), the Kuwasawa Design School (1954), and the Visual Art Education Center (1955). The Industrial Arts Research Institute, associated with the Ministry for Trade and Industry—and at which the German architect Bruno Taut acted as adviser in 1933-34—moved into design education in those years; the furniture and product designer Isamu Kenmochi, one of its founders, headed the institute's industrial design department.

A number of organizations emerged in the 1950s that would play key roles in the development of Japanese design over the next few decades. They include the Japan Advertising Artists Club (1951); the Japanese Industrial Designer's Association (1952); the International Design Committee (1953); the Japan Designer Craftsman Association (1956); the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Council (1957), which introduced the Good Design Selection "G-Mark" System in emulation of Italy's Compasso d'Oro award; and the Japan Interior Designers' Association (1958). Collectively, these organizations, all of which mirrored western equivalents, provided a supportive framework for the further development of modern Japanese design. Although in 1954 Japan hadn't been ready to participate in the 10th Milan Triennale, an important international design exhibition, three years later Japanese designers felt confident enough to play a part. [End Page 117]

The government and large corporations also provided support for design. However, unlike their American equivalents who made a virtue of naming the famous consultant designers they patronized—men such as Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, and Henry Dreyfuss—Japanese companies did not single out individuals but depended, rather, upon anonymous, in-house design teams that collaborated engineering and marketing departments. Companies' brand names were all-important and, in line with Japanese tradition, designers were considered to be faithful employees working in a collective culture. The companies were, however, training grounds for many of the young designers who in later years would become much more visible internationally and be credited for their individual contributions. Makio Hasuike, a product designer who set up a company in Italy in 1968, worked in his early career for Seiko, Mitsubishi, Mazda, and Honda, while Naoto Fukasawa, a younger designer who came to prominence in the 1990s, worked for Seiko in the 1980s.

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In spite of the widespread anonymity of designers employed by Japanese corporations through the 1960s and 1970s, a handful did succeed in making their individual contributions visible. Kenji Ekuan, a founding member of the Japanese consultant practice GK Design Group in 1953, is a rare example of an independent designer who worked outside the corporations. Before his design schooling at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he first came in contact with his future GK colleagues, Ekuan had trained as a Buddhist priest. Throughout his long and successful career as a consultant designer—he was responsible for Yamaha motorcycles and the Akita bullet train, among other projects—he sought to maintain links between traditional Japanese aesthetics and contemporary design. His simple Kikkoman Soy Sauce Dispenser (1961)—one of Japan's most banal artifacts—demonstrates how that philosophy can be applied to an everyday object. Isamu Kenmochi, a founder of the Industrial Arts Research Institute, began working as a furniture designer under Bruno Taut in the 1930s and formed Isamu Kenmochi Design Associates in 1955. He is best known, perhaps, for his collaboration with the Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, whom he met in the office of Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in 1950. Together the artist and designer created Stool (1963), a piece of bamboo furniture that became an international icon of modern Japanese design. Although the item is constructed through traditional Japanese basket weaving, its form reflects the organic aesthetic embraced by modern furniture designers in the West in those years. This combination of Japanese craft traditions and modern design made a powerful statement about the role and meaning of modern design in Japan, especially as stools and other chairs were still relatively new objects there. Another design by Kenmochi, the wooden Kashiwado Chair of 1961, also became an internationally recognized icon of modern Japanese design. Most important, Kenmochi's exposure to western modernism—he [End Page 118] traveled extensively in the West and collected many objects and images there—helped introduce other Japanese designers to it.

Sori Yanagi—the son of Soetsu Yanagi, leading promoter of the Mingei movement—played a key role in the early years of the modern Japanese design movement. Between 1940 and 1942 he worked in Paris in Charlotte Perriand's studio, learning about European modernism firsthand. An artist by training, he studied industrial design beginning in 1947. He opened his own Tokyo design studio in 1952, and the same year he cofounded the Japanese Industrial Designers Association with Kenmochi and Riki Watanabe. Like Kenmochi, Yanagi brought Japanese tradition and modern western design principles into contact. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his Butterfly Stool (1956), which combines Japanese aesthetics with molded plywood, an industrial woodworking technique developed by the American designers Charles and Ray Eames. Yanagi worked in both furniture and product design, and in one of the first attempts by an electronics manufacturer to work with a member of the new Japanese design community, Sony hired him to design the H-type tape recorder, launched in March 1951. Yanagi went on to create a wide range of products, including ceramic and metal kitchen objects, lampshades, children's toys, underground rail stations, cars, and motorcycles, and he designed the torch for Tokyo's Olympic Games in 1964. Thirteen years later he became the director of The Japan Folk Crafts Museum, which his father had helped to found four decades earlier, in 1936.

A younger group of Japanese architects and furniture designers carried on the work initiated in the 1950s and 1960s by Kenmochi and Yanagi. Kazuhide Takahama and Reiko Tanabe both created furniture in the modern idiom. Takahama had studied architecture in Tokyo between 1949 and 1953. Like many of his contemporaries, he had traveled to Italy in 1957 to see the 11th Milan Triennale, and after being approached by the Italian manufacturer Dino Gavina he became one of the first of his generation of Japanese designers to stay and work there. Through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he produced numerous furniture pieces for a range of Italian manufacturers, including a stretched-fabric lamp for Sirrah that won the Compasso d'Oro award for design in 1979. Tanabe also trained as an architect and worked in the areas of interior and furniture design. As Yanagi did before him, he employed molded plywood; his Stool (1961) is one of his greatest achievements in that material. Tanabe's work like Yanagi's displays the unity of Japanese tradition and western modernism that defined Japanese modern design in those years.

The best-known member of this heroic second generation of Japanese modern furniture designers is the interior and furniture designer Shiro Kuramata. Kuramata was the first Japanese designer working in the modern style to be recognized and admired outside Japan. Like his contemporaries, he built upon Japan's traditional aesthetic forms, combining them with metal and plastic and other new materials from the West with the goal of aligning traditional Japanese aesthetics and crafts with modern western [End Page 119] sensibilities and production techniques, but he made a more individualistic contribution to postwar Japanese design than many in his generation. Operating in the gap between design and fine art, Kuramata moved beyond "tasteful" modernist design to embrace a new, postmodern approach. He developed a multifarious group of forms, materials, and images with which he expressed his thoughts and preoccupations.

Kuramata's background was in woodcraft, which he had studied in Tokyo, and furniture making, both of which had been followed by training in interior design that included principles developed in the West. He first applied them in his work for the interior design department of the Matsuya department store. He opened his own office in 1965 and began to work on a number of projects that made an immediate impact. Over the following years, up until his death in 1991, he created a body of work that included over 180 pieces of furniture. He also designed a number of store interiors, including boutiques in Paris, Tokyo, and New York for the fashion designer Issey Miyake. Characterized by terrazzo or metal mesh (which he had introduced in the Matsuya department store), those temporary spaces brought together two hugely talented designers.

The preoccupations displayed in Kuramata's interior designs are mirrored by those that inform his furniture designs. From his multidrawered and irregularly shaped dressers 49 Drawers and Side 2 (1970), he went on to create the renowned all-steel How High the Moon Armchair (1986) as well as other strikingly innovative designs. His Miss Blanche Chair (1988), inspired by the corsage worn by the main character in Tennessee Williams's 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire, epitomizes Kuramata's skill in combining transparency, spatial articulation, and storytelling in a single piece of furniture. Kuramata succeeded in bringing Japanese furniture design to the attention of the rest of the world, and in his work for Miyake and others he helped to show the international community that Japan was also excelling in the areas of architecture, interior design, and fashion.

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While deeply rooted traditions linked to portability, flexibility, and the quality of everyday life informed many Japanese designs for audio and video equipment and cars, the craft-based fields of architecture, interior design, fashion, textiles, and ceramics were more linked to another range of Japanese traditions, including a Zen Buddhism-inspired aesthetic minimalism that from the early 1980s onward was one of the world's favored design idioms. Existing alongside the decorative, complex forms and images of postmodernism, this neomodern style provided a level of stability in a world that was increasingly characterized by change. Linked to the new materiality that accompanied, and indeed offset, developments in the digital world (which favored the virtual over the real), the minimal Japanese interior represented everything that had been lost in western culture. In Japan both architects and furniture designers embraced the possibilities it offered. Studio 80, founded by Shigeru Uchida and Toru Nishioka in 1981, was responsible for many stunning minimal designs, including fashion-boutique interiors [End Page 120] for Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake. Uchida was dependent on traditional Japanese ideas of interior space, but he promoted new ways of tea drinking and created a number of rooms for that purpose. Takashi Sugimoto created the firm Super Potato Design in 1973. Since then his team has been responsible for many remarkable, minimal spaces emphasizing a commitment to natural materials, including wood and granite. Recent designs include the interior of Seoul's Park Hyatt hotel in 2005.

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The story of modern Japanese architecture parallels that of design in the years after 1945. It was driven by architectural giants such as Kazuo Shinohara, Mayumi Miyawaki, Hiroshi Hara, Toyo Ito, Tadao Ando, and Kenzo Tange and those who studied under and worked with him (Kisho Kurakawa, Arata Isozaki, Fumihiko Maki, and Yoshio Taniguchi). Japanese architecture influenced the development of modern industrial design through its many protagonists who also engaged in design projects. Isozaki, a member of the same generation as Takahama, Tanabe, and Kuramata, is among the best-known designers in that context. Isozaki studied under Kenzo Tange in Tokyo. After completing his studies in 1954, he worked in Tange's office until 1963, when he set up his own practice. Through the 1960s Isozaki was a member of the Metabolists, an architecture group so named because of the organic forms of their buildings. He broke away from them in the 1970s to develop his own form of soft architectural minimalism, which combined Japanese and western traditions and aligned itself with international postmodernism. His buildings of those years include the Oita Branch Bank (1966) and the Fujimi Country Club, also in Oita City (1973). By the 1980s he had developed a more mannered architectural style, which is visible in his design for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (1984–85). He designed the Monroe Chair (which owes a huge debt to the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whom Isozaki admired enormously) in 1974. It quickly became an icon of modern Japanese design, earning Isozaki a reputation as a designer of worth as well as a prolific, internationally active architect.

Masayuki Kurokawa, another architect-designer born in the prewar years, graduated from the Department of Architecture at the Nagoya Institute of Technology and set up his architecture practice in 1967. Embracing furniture, clocks, watches, lighting fixtures, drinking glasses, cutlery, and jewelry, his work is deeply indebted to the culture and craft traditions of the Kanazawa region of Japan. The boundaries between architecture, interior design, product design, furniture design, and fashion and textiles eroded throughout the 1970s and 1980s, extending the idea of the unified designed environment that underpins traditional Japanese craft and design. If spaces are defined by the smallest objects contained within them, then as much attention must be given to, say, a pen or an ashtray as to the space that contains it. Kurokawa's Gom set of stainless steel and rubber desk objects (1975–92)—ashtrays, containers, a pen, and the like—epitomizes the minimal approach of traditional Japanese craftsmen. [End Page 121]

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Japanese fashion design made a huge impact internationally in the 1980s. Its roots extend back to Hanae Mori, who, from the 1950s onward, worked to establish a modern Japanese fashion design movement. Her Tokyo fashion house opened in 1951, and she spent the rest of that decade creating costumes for the film industry. In the mid-1960s Mori moved into haute couture, making a name for herself in the United States and France. With the emergence in the 1960s of such hugely talented individuals as Issey Miyake, Kenzo Takada, Kansai Yamamoto (who was inspired by the costumes worn in Kabuki theater), Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo, a modern Japanese fashion movement was established and it rapidly gained an international reputation. Yohji Yamamoto and Kawakubo developed an "antifashion" movement characterized by an austere minimalism, a reduced color palette, and "deconstructed" garments. They introduced to the rest of the world a new philosophy of fashion, based on the loose-fitting kimono, that emphasized the importance of textiles and the sculptural role of dress.

Miyake set up his studio in Tokyo in 1970 after training in graphic design and spending several years working in Paris and New York. Characterized by their flowing forms and, from the late 1980s onward, their tightly pleated fabrics, his garments transformed the relationship between clothing and the bodies it envelops. The importance of textiles to new Japanese fashion was demonstrated by Miyake's collaborations with Japan's leading modern textile designer, the weaver Junichi Arai, through the 1970s and 1980s. Arai's contribution to modern Japanese design is hugely significant, as it was he who brought Japanese traditions in that field into the modern era. Arai was born into a mill-owning family in the city of Kiryu, in the Gunma Prefecture, a long-standing center for textile production. From the mid-1950s onward he injected modernity into traditional weaving practice by introducing metals into his woven fabrics. By the late 1970s he was using computers to innovate yet further and was pushing the traditional techniques of ikat and tie-dye into new areas. In 1984 Arai cofounded NUNO, a company and retail outlet specializing in innovative fabrics. His work evokes the natural world, referring to waves and human hair, and emphasizes the rich textural possibilities of woven fabrics. Arai's continuing respect for Japanese tradition is reflected in his collaborations with the local craftspeople who create his products. His ability to cross the boundaries between art, craft, technology, and fashion renders the distinctions between those categories redundant.

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Through the early 1980s, product designers, architects, interior designers, fashion designers, and textile designers increasingly collaborated on projects. Others—graphic designers and ceramicists, for example—remained more firmly entrenched in their traditional territories, but they still engaged in a considerable amount of innovation. Postwar developments in graphic design built on Japanese traditions in packaging, popular prints, and magazines. In the nineteenth century, prints had been one of the mediums through which modern Japanese culture was popularized in Europe. That [End Page 122] export phenomenon persisted after 1945, although, as in architecture and product design, graphic design in Japan began to integrate ideas and ideals of European modernism. This two-way movement is expressed, for example, in posters by Yusaku Kamekura and Tadanori Yokoo. American packaging also made an impact in the early postwar years, and the American designer Raymond Loewy modeled a cigarette package for a Japanese tobacco company on his famous design for Lucky Strike cigarettes. The 1964 Olympic Games provided an opportunity for Japanese graphic designers to showcase their skills, and from that year onward a modern Japanese graphic design movement, based on European Constructivism, developed. The giants of postwar Japanese graphic design include Ikko Tanaka, Kiyoshi Awazu, and Shigeo Fukuda. Fukuda, a graduate of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, worked not only as a graphic designer but also as a sculptor, theatrical set designer, and muralist. His skill as a visual humorist is widely recognized. In 1965 Fukuda mounted an exhibition of his work that comprised 120 toys made from natural materials. He cites the Italian designer Bruno Munari, who worked in both two and three dimensions, as an influence. In the mid-1980s Fukuda designed many striking posters.

Influenced by the same Pop sensibility that underpinned much Japanese graphic design of the 1960s and 1970s, the ceramicist Makoto Komatsu's little crumpled paper bags made of porcelain and glass—such as the Crinkle Tumbler (1974)—reflect a meeting of craft traditions with mass-mediated popular culture. Japan had always embraced the popular and the everyday while also celebrating craft skills, and Komatsu's artifacts succeeded in extending that alliance into the postwar era.

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In 1982 Makio Hasuike established MH Way, in Milan. He had moved to Italy in 1963 after working for a number of Japanese corporations, including Seiko, with whom he [End Page 123] had designed clocks for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Hasuike spent his first five years in Italy working for other designers, including Rodolfo Bonetti, before launching his own company.

MH Way worked across the design/manufacturing spectrum and issued, among other products, a range of plastic briefcases that proved to be extremely popular, as well as the highly successful polyvinyl chloride Zoom Tube, designed to carry drawings. Hasuike's work displays aesthetic characteristics—purity, clarity, simplicity, transparency, portability, a love of materials—that owe much to Japanese tradition. His family of desk products—including pens, pencil cases, and diaries—have much in common with the simple everyday objects created by Muji, a no-name brand that became a global Japanese success story in the 1990s.

Toshiyuki Kita arrived in Italy in 1975, and like Hasuike he made his reputation there. He had studied at the Naniwa Design College and opened his own office in Tokyo in 1967; he had been collaborating with Italian firms since 1969. His first Italian design of note, the famous Wink Lounge Chair, was launched in 1980 by Cassina, the premier Italian furniture maker. Its bright colors and Mickey Mouse ears betray its western Pop allegiance, but its flexibility and adjustability are Japanese in inspiration. After the success of the Wink Lounge Chair, Kita designed a series of Japanese-style lights and from his base in Italy initiated a campaign to protect traditional Japanese crafts—papermaking, lacquerwork, bamboo work, and basket making—from extinction.

The first exhibition of work by the Memphis design group, held in 1981 in Milan, represented a key moment in the story of Japanese designers in Italy. Led by the veteran Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, Memphis sought to renew the language of contemporary design, and three Japanese designers—Arata Isozaki, Shiro Kuramata, and Masanori Umeda—were invited to participate in the adventure. Their work was among the most innovative on display, demonstrating that Japan was no longer following the European avant-garde but running abreast with it or, arguably, leading it.

In the 1980s Japan was in rapid transition. A new consumer society was emerging whose citizens favored products aligned with popular culture. Pink electrical appliances aimed at young girls sat in stores alongside cute (kawaii) products such as Tomoyuki Sugiyama's Bubble Boy Speakers (1986), while everyday objects, such as plastic food and anonymous, novel electrical goods, filled the shelves of retail outlets and the environment in general. The coexistence of a range of cheap and cheerful popular designed goods and images—manga comics and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, among them—with the campaign to retain craft traditions represented a continuation of the existence of two parallel levels of material culture that had been in place in Japan for many years.

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The economic recession of the 1990s changed things dramatically. The slowdown of the economic expansion that had underpinned the emergence of Japan's postwar design [End Page 124] culture (and the rise of the country's corporations to domination of world markets) brought a new sensibility to the fore. The pendulum swung away from ephemeral gadgets and popular culture and back to the more universal, craft-based end of the design spectrum. Architecture and interior design took on a new importance, and both disciplines re-emphasized their roots in Japanese tradition. The anonymity of company designers was replaced by a new, individualized design culture in which, following the example set by the West, designers were revered almost as fine artists, capable of acts of creativity and poetry. A new generation of designers emerged in the 1990s, many members of which had studied and worked with the designers, such as Shiro Kuramata and Issey Miyake, who had come to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s. The premature death of Kuramata in 1991 created a hiatus in which Japan and the rest of the world reflected on where Japanese design had come from and where it was going. Several exhibitions held around this time of Kuramata's work and of Japanese design in general from the period after 1950 offered ideal opportunities for such an assessment.

Most important, the processes of internationalization and globalization that were already in motion accelerated after 1990, and the movement of designers across the globe increased significantly. More and more Japanese designers worked outside the country, while increasing numbers of westerners—including Nigel Coates, Jasper Morrison, George Sowden, John Pawson, Norman Foster, and Ron Arad (British); Ettore Sottsass, Michele de Lucchi, and Aldo Rossi (Italian); Marc Newson (Australian); and Philippe Starck (French)—came to Japan to design.

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Product design, one of the strongest of Japan's design fields in the years following 1990, took on a new identity in the postcorporation era. Individual designers became prominent, and they increasingly embraced a wide spectrum of operation, from high-tech and electronic goods to lighting and furniture. A few corporations, such as Canon, continued to work successfully with in-house design teams. Following in the footsteps of craft-based product designers—such as Michio Hanyu, who had created simple metal flatware in the 1960s—many of the new product designers aligned themselves more closely with Japanese craft traditions than with high technology. Among those born in the 1940s are Shun Takaoka and Kei Takaoka (designers of the 1982 Front Rotation Alarm Clock), Hiroyuki Tazawa (who designs objects made of recycled paper), and Kazuo Kawasaki, whose Carna Folding Wheelchair (1989) grew from his own experience after he was injured in a car accident. Kawasaki has made a significant impact with designs incorporating a strong social agenda.

The next generation of product designers, born in the late 1950s, includes Hiroaki Kozu (Speakers, 1989) and Kosuke Tsumura (Final Home 44-Pocket Parka, 1994), who have crossed the boundary between fashion and product design. However, Naoto Fukasawa has undoubtedly been the most successful and influential designer of that [End Page 125] generation. In 1989 he left his job at Seiko in Japan and moved to San Francisco, where he joined the company that would soon become the prestigious design firm IDEO. In 1996 he returned home to set up a Japanese branch of the firm, and he remained with it for the next six years. In 2003 Fukasawa formed his own company and became one of Japan's leading product designers; he has taken on a number of roles, including creative director of Muji. In 2004 he launched the domestic-product brand plusminuszero. The Wall-Mounted CD Player (1989) he designed for Muji, along with his mobile phone designs (Infobar Cellular Phone, 2003, and Neon Cellular Phone, 2005) and the many other objects he has created-including the Plus Minus Zero Humidifier (2003) and a range of household appliances and furniture itemshave earned him numerous design prizes. Fukasawa's philosophy is rooted in the traditional Japanese belief that design should make everyday life more beautiful and more efficient.

Younger product designers active today, born in the 1960s and 1970s, include Kazuhiro Yamanaka, who created a range of lamps in the early 2000s ("Rainy Day" Lamps, 2003), and Tokujin Yoshioka, one of Japan's most innovative young designers. A graduate of the Kuwasawa Design School, Yoshioka worked with both Kuramata and Miyake before going freelance in 1992; he made his Milan debut a decade later. He is an interdisciplinary designer who combines shop design with exhibition design and furniture design. He uses high technology—especially fiber optics—in a very creative way, combining it with a sophisticated approach to the use of light. Many of his designs are installations of one kind or another. He compares the objects he designs to Japanese cuisine—their simple appearance conceals the hard work that has gone into preparing them.

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Along with product, furniture, and environmental design, Japanese crafts have gone from strength to strength over the last two decades. In the area of textile design, in particular, modern heroes, such as Junichi Arai, have led the way, with the Mingei tradition behind them. A group of younger designers, born in the 1940s, includes Koichi Yoshimura, Kyoko Kumai, Yoshihiro Kimura (who has worked with both Kansai Yamamoto and Issey Miyake), and Eiji Miyamoto, also a collaborator with Miyake.

Reiko Sudo and Yuh Okano, two of Japan's younger textile designers, have made significant contributions in recent years. Following the ethos and aesthetic Arai developed, both designers subtly blend traditional values with new technology. Sudo and Arai formed NUNO Corporation in 1984, and Sudo took over the firm three years later. She is best known for her textured woven fabrics, which often incorporate pleats, and her extensive use of synthetic materials and computer-aided design. Okano, educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, also uses both synthetic and natural fabrics. In the parallel field of contemporary ceramics, Shigeyoshi Morioka, among others, has shown that early-twentieth-century Japanese pottery has not been forgotten, and reworked traditional forms [End Page 126] are having a lasting impact. Indeed, while it may have seemed that Japan's contribution to modern design lies in its enthusiastic embrace of new technologies, as the twenty-first century advances it is becoming increasingly apparent that its lasting contribution will, in reality, be in its skill in bringing its traditions to face the challenges of the present day.

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Although Japan's economy has not yet fully rebounded from the recession of the 1990s, in the early twenty-first century the country is a serious contender for world leadership in innovation in contemporary design. Tokyo now boasts its own design museum—21_21 Design Sight, led by Issey Miyake and Naoto Fukasawa—it hosts its own annual design shows and events along lines developed in Europe. Tokyo's contemporary environment, epitomized in the upmarket shopping street Omotesando Dori, pays homage to international architecture and design. Young designers from around the world travel to Japan to see the stunningly innovative projects on display, while young Japanese designers—including the Nendo group; the Tonerico trio, two of whose members emerged from Shigero Uchida's office; and Rieko Miyata, who makes lamps out of ribbons—exhibit internationally. Others, such as Shin and Tomoko Azumi, based in London, live and work abroad. The globalization that began to emerge several decades ago is now a reality, and Japanese design may be found anywhere in the world.

While a few of Japan's corporations continue to produce world-class designs—a strikingly minimal LCD projector designed by Takuya Niitsu for Sony and Toyota's hybrid car, the Prius, stand out in this context—the best Japanese design is done by talented individuals who challenge conventions, cross boundaries, and call on tradition to provide a necessary continuity with the past. There can be no doubt that the work of the giants of modern Japanese design—Shiro Kuramata, Miyake, and Arata Isozaki, in particular—has been seminal in bringing that past to bear on the present. Thanks to them, in the early twenty-first century Japanese design no longer looks to the West for inspiration but is, rather, setting the pace the rest of the world must follow.