Idea Magazine’s Kiyonori Muroga and Ian Lynam will be giving a lecture and week-long workshop at CalArts in Valencia, California. The accompanying lecture will be on Thursday April 11th at 7pm and is open to the public.

The Year Nothing Happened / W. David MARX
We should all feel blessed that Japan did not see any further tragic natural disasters this year, but at the same time, the widely-desired, post-earthquake national resurgence was not exactly forthcoming. If the last decade saw an explosion of recessionary culture in Japan, 2012 suggested that even this recessionary culture could be on the wane, leaving us a true social vacuum. To have culture, people have to participate in society; to have political change, people have to vote and organize; to have global economic success, companies must make products that the world wants.

None of this happened, however, and in its place, we got nothing new. Instead of a more terrible AKB48-like thing, we got just slightly less AKB48. Instead of extreme political change, the disheartened electorate voted for a return to LDP rule.

A decade ago there was something slightly interesting in the long decline: How would a truly advanced country handle poor economic prospects, fatal demographics, and dwindling global relevance? But now in 2012 we’re too familiar with the very process of decline. We all know that 2013 will just see a little more slouching in the same direction — more nothing. And while the stakes are getting higher and higher for this great nation to turn things around, the stakes for any individual action, field, or event could not feel any lower.

Nothing really happened in 2012, but for your reading pleasure, here are a few things that transpired this year.

Tokyo Skytree / Matt ALT
Even if you don’t appreciate the architecture (or the neato circular pulsing at night), any fan of Japanese entertainment has to pay the Tokyo Skytree a certain grudging respect, if for no other reason than that it serves up its lifeblood — a stable high-definition television signal. But there are two big strikes against the Skytree. In a city filled with perfectly free observation decks (like those of the the iconic Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building), it’s hard to imagine forking out ¥2,000 a head for an elevator ride. But more importantly, every Tokyoite knows in their heart of hearts that the Skytree isn’t really part of the skyline until it gets smashed to pieces in a giant monster movie.

The Election / Adam RICHARDS
Through some weird twist of fate, Abe Shinzo and his long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party regained control of Japan’s messy political system, giving Abe of all people a second stint as prime minister. For three years, the rival Democratic party attempted to forge a new direction for the country but were mired in disagreements on which direction to take, a series of petty scandals, mismanagement following the March 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster, and a mixed bag of policy decisions. The most lasting of these unpopular policies was to pass a consumption tax hike together with the LDP, in a deal that also kickstarted talks to fundamentally revise Japan’s social safety net protections.

So when Prime Mnister Noda called a snap election as part of said deal, a disappointed electorate returned the LDP to power in resounding fashion. The returning Abe administration has taken on a decidedly bolder policy agenda than when he first came around in 2006, when he tried unsuccessfully to maintain the positive momentum of the Koizumi years. Now his first priority is ending deflation, seemingly at all costs, enlisting former PM Taro Aso as finance minister to keep the bureaucrats from meddling. Once that’s out of the way, he wants to revise the constitution; not to change the pacifist Article 9, at least at first, but to lower the threshold for triggering a referendum for proposed revisions from a 2/3 Diet vote to a simple majority. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Abe will manage to stay in office long enough to do any of this.

Nuclear Protests in Japan / W. David MARX
In 2012, there were many protests against nuclear power in Japan. The DPJ government did nothing concrete in response to these protests, and then the most pro-nuclear political party — the LDP — won back power.

Ishihara Shintaro Trolls the Planet / Connor SHEPHERD
If you think Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintarō’s most entertaining days are behind him, last summer he raised the bar for global-scale trolling with his offer to buy the Senkaku Islands from the Japanese private citizen who owned them. There is ostensibly no practical reason why Tokyo would want or need some unpopulated islands hundreds of miles away from the city, so when Ishihara raised ¥1 billion from some friends to purchase them, we can assume that he did so for no reason other than to anger the Chinese, who want the islands for their awesome hypothetical oil and gas. And it worked — the Chinese got angry! And by essentially forcing the Japanese central government to buy them before he could, he single-handedly caused a significant international incident. Seriously, this guy is a pro.

Operation “Sue-my-datchi” / Matt ALT
2011′s disaster relief “Operation Tomodachi” marked a rare high point in the often strained relationship between Japan and the US military. Late this year, however, eight crewmen from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan announced a lawsuit against TEPCO for exposure to radiation, demanding $40 million in compensation and punitive damages. Let’s get this straight: A group of men serving aboard a floating arsenal packing not one but two nuclear reactors and ostensibly engaged in rescue operations, are suing the very country they were trying to assist in the midst of a disaster. One might hope they’d donate any winnings to those who actually lost families and homes, but given the chutzpah needed to even raise a suit like this, it’s probably too much to wish for.

Grandma Went to Jail / Nick DONEGAN
While much is made of Japan’s graying population and the perceptions of filial respect shown by its youth, 2012 saw the elderly turn towards a new activity: crime. With a strangely “understanding” white paper from the Ministry of Justice, and the number of rather gruesome incidents starring the gentile grand-figure, 2012 was a banner year for showcasing granny’s true skills with a knife. With the overall crime rate on the decline — by the National Police Agency’s estimation, at 5.8% per year — and the world economy on the possible brink of recovery, perhaps we will look back on 2012 as “just a phase” in the high-stakes, rebellious, and attention-seeking world of the Japanese pensioner.

Macabre Murder Factory Flies Under the Radar / Adam RICHARDS
Over a period of decades, one woman orchestrated a criminal operation specializing in the systematic kidnapping, torture, defrauding, imprisonment, and murder of perhaps dozens in Hyogo Prefecture’s Amagasaki. Before her arrest this year, Sumida Miyoko would hire thugs to storm the house of an intended target family, subdue them, and proceed to keep them in captivity as she gradually emptied their bank accounts and took ownership of their property. To aid her reign of terror, she would force children to beat their parents while other family members watched. She maintained an apartment full of human doghouses, some of which were on the balcony to keep people for bad behavior during the winter. At least one died from injuries sustained there, while other victims were found in states of extreme starvation, many beaten severely and one with scars making her all but unrecognizable. One daughter of a victim family caught Stockholm Syndrome, became a key accomplice, married Sumida’s son, and had a child.

The grisly details do not stop there, but after reading about this story I had to wonder why on earth isn’t this the Crime of the Century? Perhaps because it highlights so many of the embarrassing systemic problems of Japanese society — police inertia (police refused to intervene on behalf of multiple victims), a lack of neighborly concern, the shocking ease of defrauding Japan’s various bureaucratic systems, etc. Sumida recently killed herself in prison, deftly avoiding justice in a final bit of police bungling that sends a fitting message for those of us living here: When the rules aren’t well enforced, as is so often the case in Japan, it’s the bullies and monsters that will have the upper hand.

Japanese Electronic Maker Doom / Nick DONEGAN and Adam RICHARDS
2012 was one of the most disastrous years for the bloated electronics industry since its inception. Sharp, Panasonic, and Sony started the year off with bad news but thoughtful hopes — selling off factories to Chinese investors, realigning product foci, and even looking to create new product lines! — but ended up reporting losses totaling to ¥1.23 trillion ($15.3 billion). The massive investments failed to pay off, and now Sharp, the most cash strapped of the once-mighty giant manufacturers, looks increasingly likely to end up mostly a parts supplier for Apple. With Sharp supplying iPhone and iPad panels, Sony making the camera sensors, and a small army of smaller manufacturers making many other components, the Japanese electronics industry as a whole seems fated to lack compelling products of its own, forcing it to occupy the less glamorous and less profitable role as the world’s ultra high-tech parts maker.

Japan Keeps Buying US/UK Tech, Nobody Cares / Connor SHEPHERD
Here’s something you might not know: Over the past two years, companies from Japan have been buying all kinds of high-tech companies in the United States and Britain. At the tail end of 2010, social-games giant DeNA bought the American mobile game shop ngmoco for a WTF-level $400 million, and that kicked off a crazy chain of Japanese companies gobbling up US and UK assets (look how many companies mentioned in this article are high-tech), ending with Softbank buying Sprint and HR/classified ad giant Recruit snapping up jobs-listing startup Indeed.com for you-know-what’s-cool-a-billion-dollars (allegedly, not much about this deal is transparent). Despite all this, no part of these deals made any headway towards complicating the general narrative of Japan’s decline.

The Rise of Smartphones / Adam RICHARDS
2012 was undisputedly the year of the smartphone. I bought an iPhone in late 2011, and it has made me curious about what devices my fellow Tokyo commuters are using. Over the past 12 months there has been a remarkable shift. Initially there were maybe one or two smartphone users vs. traditional feature phones in Tokyo, and now the ratio is reversed. I almost feel pity for people who have not opted for a smartphone at this point. By 2013 a clear majority will have them, giving them access to the “real” Internet (and not bastardized versions for feature phones), often for the first time.

Internet Rage Flourishes / Adam RICHARDS
For years now, the mainstream media’s response to — and hence the elite’s general impression of — the Internet was to see it as a threat, prompting all manner of scare stories even as the general population found its own uses for it. And politicians made sure to have a presence there but seldom would turn to it for either policy advice or a source of popular support. In 2012, however, Internet rage became much more visible in public discourse. Earlier this year a scandal erupted on the Internet when it was found that a popular comedian’s mother was fraudulently receiving welfare benefits. Not surprisingly, the right wing Internet communities (by far the most visible on the Japanese web) railed against what they saw as an unworthy program that gives cash to the undeserving. What was surprising, however, was that the political class — both then ruling party DPJ and opposition LDP — reacted to the scandal with measures aimed at responding to their concerns. One might be tempted to praise politicians for joining the modern age as it were, but net right wingers are mostly out of step with the general public (not to mention good policy). The question now is whether new PM Abe will be as eager to please what he sees as a core constituency.

Video Games / Matt ALT
2012 marked Microsoft’s decision to abandon the Tokyo Game Show. Many pundits spun the move as yet another symptom of the Japanese game industry’s decline. Others spun it as yet another example of Japanese gamers’ traditional disdain for the fetishistic first-person violence of American shooting games. But the real story was about the rise of mobile gaming aggregators like Gree and DeNA, whose floor displays dominated those of traditional Japanese console game developers in terms of both size and bombast. Their apps are wildly popular in Japan, but can they crack the foreign marketplace?

Japanese Game Developers / Jean SNOW
The world gaming community has not been kind to Japanese game developers in recent years. In response, a majority of the games being produced in Japan overly cater to the home audience, leaving the rest of the world looking to the West for their gaming entertainment. Not a good thing for the Japanese gaming industry, considering the impact gaming has in today’s culture (see iOS gaming and blockbuster launches of the latest iteration in the Call of Duty series) and especially sad considering that many a longtime gamer was raised on Japanese-produced titles and consoles. But as 2012 comes to a close, there are some signs — like RPG king Square Enix aggressively releasing titles on iOS and Android — that all may not be lost.

The Pop Music Charts in 2012 / Ian MARTIN
At the end of every year, chart organisation Oricon publishes its rankings of the best-selling music of the year, and for the past few years the singles charts have been congealing like a scab around mass idol collective AKB48. This year they and their sister groups accounted for twelve of the top twenty, with the other eight positions taken by boy bands from the stable of the more established evil organisation in pop Johnny & Associates. Meanwhile the album charts were dominated by “best of” repackagings of older artists like Matsutoya Yumi, Yamashita Tatsuro, Exile, and Mr. Children, who held both of the top two positions with their “Micro” and “Macro” compilations. K-Pop was largely absent from the rankings, although KARA and Girls’ Generation continue to be reasonably strong sellers. With singles largely existing as a means for fans to display their love for idols, albums seemingly an exercise in nostalgia for a gradually ageing fanbase, and either the industry or the market turning away from overseas influences, the future looks pretty dismal for the Japanese pop mainstream.

Shugo Tokumaru — In Focus? / W. David MARX
The sweeping and majestic guitar strums of 2010’s Port Entropy took Japanese genius songwriter-producer Shugo Tokumaru from international Pitchfork darling to the heights of indie fame in his home country, complete with his songs plastered under TV CMs for blue-chippers Sony and JAL. With his new In Focus? Tokumaru could have easily gone full-out, feel-good J-Pop, but instead took a step back to his daring, experimental roots — resulting in what is easily the year’s best Japanese record. His eclectic instrumentation may have been further neutralized into a mellow mix, but peppy, peppy songs like “Katachi” and “Down Down” took Tokumaru to new places with fully danceable rhythms and tight pop structure. The whole thing is held together with the glue of cartoonish micro set pieces, weird time signatures, inventive vocal melodies, sped-up munchkin background vocals, and 1960s vocal jazz references. Really, what other miracles could we possibly want from this musical Messiah?

Best Indie Albums / Ian MARTIN
Aside from Shugo Tokumaru, the indie and DIY scenes continued to release a wide array of great music under the radar. Fukuoka all-girl indie supergroup Miu Mau released the News EP on CD/R, with a combination of chunky synths, sweet harmonies and spindly, flat, metallic guitars wandering over tunes ranging from the lo-fi Shibuya-kei of “Neon Sign” to the retro-futurist new wave Asiatica of “Mirai no Classic.” Another all-girl three-piece Fancynumnum put out the more densely layered No Now, bringing mantric krautrock beats and textures together with kayōkyoku-like melodies. One of the most extraordinary albums of the year was minimalist psychedelic post-punk band Extruders’ Pray, a live album recorded in a Buddhist temple and released as a CD/R in a brown paper bag, while at another extreme Half Sports showed that 1980s styled guitar pop doesn’t have to be gloomy and affected with the raucous, ramshackle Slice Of Our City providing moment after moment of joyous power pop. Finally, one of the most category-defying and downright odd albums of the year was Kumamoto band Doit Science’s Beefheartian splatterfest Information, with its off-kilter melodies, disorientating collision of rhythms, and wide-eyed diversions into barbershop.

No Dancing / Ian LYNAM
June saw a handful of protests to the recent renewed enforcement of a 1984 addition to the Entertainment Business Control Law that bans dancing in music venues and clubs with less than a 66 square meter floor. Since 2010, Japanese law enforcement agencies have gone out of their way to crack down on dancing in small clubs in Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Osaka. With ten raids in 2010, twenty-one in 2011, and an as-yet undisclosed, yet potentially higher number in 2012, the government is doing its absolute best to uphold an archaic law. The odd thing is that the law was originally instituted in 1948 to crack down on prostitution. As for the reasoning in the contemporary context, the jury is still out.

Jail Time for Downloading / Ian LYNAM
Both houses of the Diet passed a law that added punishments to pre-existing anti-piracy legislation in June of this year, and it came into effect in October. Draconian in nature due to the sprawling range of content and lack of clear definition, this new legal framework, in essence, means watching pirated content or making a backup copy of a DVD can get you up to two years in prison or fines up to ¥2 million. (Don’t worry, Tsutaya fans — ripping CDs is legal.) A key (if untested) loophole that has been discerned thus far is that the viewer must be aware of their pirate action’s illegality. The law requires a rightsholder to identify and report violations themselves, and so far no one has been arrested. All the same, tech-savvy Japan residents would be wise to watch their digital backs.

Sony Music Japan on iTunes / W. David MARX
Sony Music Japan — one of Japan’s biggest music labels — finally put its domestic catalog on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The lesson here is that Japanese companies can’t stop history or progress, but they can delay for a very long time.

Adrian Favell vs. Nara Yoshitomo / W. David MARX
Earlier in 2012, British sociologist Adrian Favell published an academic look at the rise of Japanese contemporary art titled Before and After Superflat. There was little notice in Japan until a translated version of his chapter on Nara Yoshitomo “as a businessman” hit the desk of… Nara Yoshitomo. The aging punk rocking artist took to his Twitter account to vent his spleen (calling Favell lots of not nice things, including “会ったこともない外人”) and denouncing the article as being factually inaccurate. The controversy boiled down to Favell’s challenge of Nara’s image as a “naïve” pure painter; Nara did not like being called “consummate slacker CEO” — at least the “CEO” part. Most interestingly, this controversy created a wave of people in the Japanese art world who rushed to defend Nara against the evils of foreign academic analysis.

Modern Times / Ian LYNAM
It’s been a big year for Tokyo-based Taiwanese-American photographer Patrick Tsai. After an upset at the Canon “New Cosmos of Photography” competition, he went on to have his first monograph Modern Times published by boutique photo publishing house Nakarokusha. A slew of exhibitions in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Nara, and elsewhere followed, as well as being picked by Time Magazine’s for its best photo books of the year. Modern Times is now being displayed in the art/photography sections of every major bookstore in the country at present — a rarity when most foreigners’ work is valued as an import. Tsai has managed to cultivate a body of work that is deemed worthwhile during their his time spent domestically in Japan.

Takamine Tadasu’s Solo Show / Darryl Jingwen WEE
Almost two years after the fact, Takamine Tadasu presented one of the more nuanced responses to the aftermath of 3/11 by casting a penetrating eye on parts of the Japanese psyche that are often neglected, shrugged off, or willfully ignored. Highlights of his show at Art Tower Mito included a room littered with shambolic reams of paper filled with xenophobic, jingoistic hate speech and bulletin board ephemera, and revolving LED signs that churn out the trite hyōgo slogans that festoon every street corner and public transportation facility in the country. The deft spatial composition of this show that straddles theater set and conceptual, text-based art, combined with a finely balanced sense of irony — as well as fortuitous timing hot on the heels of a rather disappointing election — makes this a highlight of the past year in contemporary art.

Goldblatt in Delight Shock about Murakami Loss / Matt TREYVAUD
Not only did Murakami Haruki not win the Nobel Prize this year, actual winner Mo Yan‘s English translator Howard Goldblatt was reportedly “delighted that the other Asian titan, Japanese author Haruki Murakami [...] didn’t win.” The sentence ends “… when so many other Asian writers get so little attention in the West,” which, okay, admirable sentiments we can all get behind, but still — ouch, man. Next year’s winner will probably just hire a small child to point at Murakami and laugh. (Goldblatt’s Granta interview is also worth reading.)

The Return of the King / Matt TREYVAUD
Ten years after delivering a Tale of Genji for people who like commas and poetry, Royall Tyler has graced the world with a The Tale of the Heike for people who like line breaks (and homework). Fans of tales about premodern Japanese entities with two-syllable names might also want to check out the translation of the Ise Monogatari Tyler banged out in the interim with Joshua S. Mostow.

New Books about Old Music / Matt TREYVAUD
In the world of comics, Amyū’s Kono oto tomare! 『この音とまれ!』 took on the monumental task of making koto music cool (mainly by putting very little actual koto music in the story).On the other hand, 2012 did also see the republication of jiuta master Tomiyama Seikin I’s 1966 Seikin: jiuta shugyō 『清琴 地うた修行』 (as the meat of Jiuta/sōkyoku no sekai『地歌・箏曲の世界』) and Okamoto Chikugai’s Shakuhachi zuisō shū 『尺八随想集』, so the news was not all bad.

Best Action Manga of 2012 / Matthew PENNEY
Yūyami Tokkotai (Twilight Suicide Squad) by Oshikiri Rensuke is a real seinen original that combines high school club stuff, gags, hand-to-hand combat with a ridiculous sense of impact, and some genuinely creepy J-horror scenes that borrow equally from the 1990s and 2000s hits (Ring, Audition, Ju-on) and classic films based on Edogawa Rampo and Yokomizo Seishi novels. Moving deftly between parody and homage and driving almost immediately into a single-arc story that at ten volumes is already foreshadowing a tight and timely conclusion, Yūyami Tokkotai stands out from the many similar series on the market that are ponderously drawing out their stories past thirty volumes and beyond any artistic credibility.

Meanwhile Hunter x Hunter is a series that due to juvenile early arcs and a long hiatus has not built the international fan-base of Shonen Jump brethren Bleach and Naruto. Creator Togashi Yoshihiro, best known for his work on Yu Yu Hakusho, is a experienced creator and in 2011-2012 has successfully introduced a darker tone along with artistic experimentation in the fight scenes — characters take on the form of Buddhist statues and one protagonist’s lines become almost calligraphy-like as he powers up, a far cry from the usual (and increasingly sterile) speed lines and flaming auras.

Best “Artistic” Manga of 2012 / Matthew PENNEY
Maruo Suehiro’s Binzume no Jigoku (Bottled Hell) shows that the ero-guro master continues to grow as an artist. In the title adaptation of Yumeno Kyusaku’s 1928 novella, Maruo brings alive a natural environment that is equally beautiful and terrifying, mirroring perfectly the combination of sexual desire and horror that tears at the protagonists — a shipwrecked adolescent brother and sister. Where Maruo once went for licking eyeballs, he now maintains his transgressive style with symbolism and understatement. Even better, the volume also contains a number of shorts that show he can still summon the old grotesquerie on cue.

Also, Yukimura Makoto’s Vinland Saga is finally beginning to hit the thematic highs of the author’s past hit Planetes. Yukimura uses an old Norse setting to deal with slavery and structures of power and hints that his version of the push to the “new world” is rooted in utopian anarchism.

Fukushima Manga / Matthew PENNEY
There have been over a dozen volume length manga dealing with the March 11, 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi meltdown. The most challenging is Imashiro Takashi’s Genpatsu genma taisen (the title combines “genpatsu” — nuclear power — with the name of the series of novels about a psychic invader from deep space that became the famous/infamous 1983 anime move Harmagedon) which captures the anger felt by many readers while looking critically at the political economy of nuclear power in Japan.

Kobayashi Yoshinori’s (yes, that Kobayashi Yoshinori) Datsu-Genpatsu Ron (On Abandoning Nuclear Power) makes a strong critique of Japan’s nuclear industry from the Right, asking why the public should be asked to pay month after month to electrical monopolies while still picking up the tab to the tune of hundreds of times the company’s stock value if something goes wrong. Kobayashi, of course, believes that while nuclear power is a no-no; nuclear weapons are where Japan should be looking. On the whole, this volume is less deliberately offensive than most of his work and certainly shows a shadow of the mid-1990s Kobayashi who was held to be an adroit progressive before Sensōron (On War) blew everything up.

The most powerful manga on the 3.11 disasters deals with the tsunami rather than the nuclear crisis. The twenty-first volume of Kusaka Riki’s Helpman! (a reference to elder care “helpers”) looks at the quake and inundation of Tōhoku communities from the point of view of the elderly and care workers. Over half of the total dead were 65 or older and hundreds of elderly died in shelters in the days and weeks after the crisis. Helpman! draws attention to this side of the tragedy, which was often homogenized as a “national” or “regional” experience, without losing the sharp affective high points of a mature seinen style. Helpman! is a underrated series that keeps getting better and shows that mainstream manga magazines (in this case, Evening) continue to explore new possibilities for the medium.

I attended high school in the countryside of upstate New York¹ during the very late ’80s and nascent ’90s. During this time, a popular T-shirt for the local hayseed headbangers to wear was a Metallica tee that bore the slogan “We Were Metal When Metal Wasn’t Cool.” This is essentially the same ethos behind the late Japanese graphic designer Awazu Kiyoshi’s body of work in the 1980s — he was analog when analog wasn’t cool. The world was waiting with baited breath for the digital revolution to arrive, doing their damnedest to create a seamless world of perfect models populating perfect advertising efforts, but Kiyoshi Awazu did an about-face and embraced the primitive side of commercial art. And this is why I lionize him as a figure in Japan’s design history. In that era’s world enamored with slick façades, his romance with the crude and imperfect feels like a breath of fresh air, even forty years after creating his most vital work.²

I had been biding my time, waiting for a decent eulogy-in-print of Awazu in the international graphic design press since he passed away in April 2009. Awazu was among the upper echelon of Japanese graphic designers throughout his career domestically, though has received far less attention abroad than his peers Yokoo Tadanori and Tana’ami Keiichi. But it looks like Awazu’s time in the spotlight isn’t coming, so I’ve taken up the task here in hopes of encouraging design aesthetes internationally to examine his life and body of work. It’s funny — the same lack of sentiment expressed abroad is neatly mirrored in Japan. Chatting with Muroga Kiyonori, the editor-in-chief of Idea Magazine, he expressed the view that he’d always felt that Awazu was a lesser force than his contemporaries, but with his passing, Awazu’s lifework is potentially worth a deeper study. With that unconscious taunt, I picked up the gauntlet…

Born in 1929, the self-taught Awazu took up the mantle of graphic designer in 1954, designing posters for kabuki and less-popular shingeki theatrical troupes such as Shinkyo Gekidan, Zenshinza, and Shinseisazuka. This was followed by a number of years in which he created posters for film studios such as Dokuritsu Eiga and Nikkatsu, quickly gaining notoriety for his deft mixture of illustration, custom lettering, and detailed typography. Awazu’s 1955 poster “Give Back Our Sea” was both award-winning and culturally resonant, establishing the designer as an advocate of social causes through his portrayal of a fisherman barred from his trade. His posters for the 1957 documentary The Crying Whales and the 1957 play Chuji Kunisawa further cemented Awazu’s position as a young designer to watch.

Awazu spent the rest of the 1950s and the 1960s hard at work, refining his folk-influenced style, experimenting with color and form, and investigating the possibilities of chance processes after an encounter with composer John Cage. In a bold move at the time, Awazu consistently declined invitations to join advertising agencies and larger design studios, opting for a more autonomously directed career outside of advertising. His frequent collaborations with architects helped infuse some of Japan’s national monuments with a proto-hippie folk sensibility that eschewed the hard edges of modernism for an organic massing of lines and naturalistic form. The ’60s found Awazu continuing his work in film, creating fascinating poster designs for the avant garde film The Woman In The Dunes, and Kwaidan, an adaptation of four traditional Japanese ghost stories as popularized by journalist, amateur ethnologist, purported orientalist, and plural miscenegist writer³ Patrick Lafcadio Hearn. Freewheeling formal experimentation influenced by Pop Art and ’60s counterculture from both abroad and home in Japan also found their way into his work, primarily influencing Awazu’s bold color schemes, raw linework, and nuanced typography.⁴ Traces of Ben Shahn‘s illustrative approach and lettering pop up in Awazu’s work in the 1960s, as do elements of the Push Pin Studios appropriation of “olde timey” advertising cuts deployed decoratively, a compositional approach influenced by Yokoo Tadanori, concentric linework, and a reliance upon overprinting for dazzling optical effects.

Canonized for his early works, Awazu’s veer into graphic left-field in the late ’60s and ’70s seems to only be the territory of visual connoisseurs. I personally know of a grand total of two other giant fans of his work amongst design aficionados abroad. Undocumented in English is a wide swath of experimentation for the fields of architecture and theater from this period — the excitement of British paper architects Archigram married to the decorative elements of ukiyo-e expressed through the medium of coarse-grained silkscreen. Traditional motifs are filtered through at-times highly disturbing contemporary lens — dismembered heads emitting copious bodily fluids and the omnipresent crows of Tokyo crying tears of shame, interleaved with expressive hand-drawn characters, their strokes swollen and collapsing upon themselves.

What was potentially most notable about Awazu’s work in the 1970s and 1980s was his devotion to the poster as a form of graphic expression in a time when public perception and appreciation shifted from “pure” graphic design to more photo-reliant, advertising-based big budget initiatives such as those produced by art directors like Ishioka Eikoh for the PARCO department store chain spanning film, print, and broadcast. While Japan’s design industry moved wholesale to a fascination with the gloss and sheen of the photograph and the airbrush, Awazu battered away via pen, brush, ink, and press type, creating virtual cosmoses of flattened figure/ground relations.

Despite being out-of-step with visual trends at that time, Awazu had established himself as a force to be reckoned with, and commissions continued with an increased focus on collaborative projects in the field of architecture. Most notable of these projects was Awazu’s exterior for the Nibankan Building⁵ in the red-light district Kabukicho. Reminiscent of proposed early Modern Japanese kiosk designs, the Nibankan Building’s various planes are pasted with bright colors and geometric shapes — like a Pop Art painting fragmented and vomited on a simplified, though not simplistic multi-planar structure. Designed by architect Takeyama Minoru, the building was featured on the cover of Charles Jencks’ breakthrough 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. The collaborative, forward-thinking, and formal approach as well as the holistic graphic treatment were an early precursor of hyper-decorative treatments by other Post-Modern architects, most notably Michael Graves. Included in the architectural plan was a proposal for five-year interval graphic revisits, the pop colors and shapes to be revisited regularly. Adventurous and forward-thinking, the re-skinning of the building was meant to mirror the constant change that is so much the innate essence of Kabukicho.

Nestled in nearby Harajuku, the Awazu Design Office chugged away — Awazu and an assistant working through each day’s assignments, breaking for extended games of go amidst the fumes of Krazy Glue, Awazu’s adhesive of choice⁶. He preferred the clear, very, very permanent sealant for paste-up in lieu of the then-typical rubber cement. Then in 1988, the company quietly packed up and relocated to a remote part of Kawasaki where Awazu had Kyoto Station architect Hara Hiroshi build him a palatial modern home with an in-house studio amongst the rice fields and rolling hills of Kanagawa. From his new home, Awazu continued his assorted activities, exhibiting internationally, taking on design commissions, sculpting, and screenprinting.

In 2000, Awazu took over the job of Director of the Toppan Printing Corporation’s⁷ Printing Museum, the ardent independent contractor finally becoming a “company man.” Awazu steered the museum situated in the industrial Edogawabashi district to numerous awards and an enhanced status amongst cultural institutions in Tokyo. Meanwhile, he continued to actively research and exhibit, exploring a long-held interest in the petroglyphs of Native Americans, which culminated in an exhibition on the subject.

Awazu passed away in his beloved Kawasaki after an extended bout with pneumonia at the age of 80. His website is still operational as of December 11, 2011. It has yet to mention his death.⁸

Walking through Kabukicho today at midday, the Nibankan Building stands disheveled and worn. The last graphic facelift was probably a decade ago. Most of the businesses in the building appear to be closed — a mini-economy of bath houses, pachinko parlors, and assorted tawdry service providers boarded-up and shut, most likely forever. Looking up at one of Awazu’s masterworks, a raspy voice from nearby resonated in my ear — a proposition from a prostitute. Leveling my eyes at her, I smiled and said, politely, “No, but thank you” in Japanese. I’m a service provider, too, as was Awazu-san, and looking at the lovely giant red number 2 topping the building and the striped and concentric circled amalgam that is pasted on the building’s surface, I couldn’t have been more adequately pleasured.

¹Pain.

²And, frankly, this statement stands for his contemporaries. Yokoo devolved into a bad painter (and worse actor), riding out his early fame on a gilt-edged red carpet. Tanaami has busied himself exploiting the early aesthetic which he departed from decades ago, trotting out inkjet prints on canvas that have been poorly painted-over, offering low-rent Thomas Kinkade-style productions as “originals,” despite the evidence of the paint-by-numbers methodology in play.

This whole trend reifies the time-worn concept of The Designer As Failed Painter — that all designers actually seek fine art careers, but have taken up the workaday practice of graphic design as a way of earning a living — a myth that is given form by those who fail to find fulfillment in a life in the commercial end of the arts.

Perhaps I should look out before I shoot my mouth off like this. I am 40 years old and have only been practicing graphic design professionally for fourteen years (and have chosen to devolve into being a “failed writer” in lieu of being a “failed painter,” apparently). Honestly, I find the whole designer as failed painter theme sordid. Embrace what you do. In the now-decade-old words of cultural writer and agitator W. David Marx, “Design is the new rock ‘n’ roll.” Designers should revel in their activities, not fawn over the activities of the painter in the garret rendering still lives brushstroke-by-brushstroke. Do what you do and OWN it.^C

³And this is where I give Hearn crazy props. He was a white man with the gall to marry a black woman fifty years before it was legal in Ohio and then to marry a Japanese woman in Japan in a time when it was fairly unheard of.^A

⁴And turtles! Awazu was fucking apeshit for turtles. He worked so many goddamn turtles into his work that it’s painful. This includes not one, but two known gigantic three-dimensional sculptures of turtles — one adorning his later Kawasaki home and another public sculpture.^B

⁵The Nibankan Building stands as architect Takeyama’s precursor to the Shibuya 109 Building, every foreign otaku’s wet dream/nocturnal emission — the hub of Shibuya fashion which opened in 1979 and whose cylindrical structure is a major stopping point for nearly every one of my Study Abroad students from the U.S. Their fascination with Gyaru/Gothic Lolita/Mori Girl/Time Slipper/Whatever-fashion-flavor-of-the-month-the-international-media-has-quantified-and-categorized-lately makes me sad usually — they are young and they are thinking about the veritable data, not the vessel. I’m aging (rapidly). I dwell on the less important things… like graphic design and architecture instead of sock glue.

⁶This bit of information speaks to me, somehow — Awazu was consistently dedicated to experimentation and visual research and chose to seal his progress in the most permanent way possible, as well as a method that is highly irritant to general human existence due to its toxicity. There is something devoutly poetic about this.

⁷Toppan is the Disney® of Japanese printing conglomerates. To date, my interview to pick up a paltry freelance project for the Toppan Printing Corporation stands as the single biggest epic fail of my career to date. (And that’s saying something — I have had my fair share of fuck-ups… trust me).

⁸This, too, is somehow poetic. No matter how hard the PR spin (or lack thereof), one cannot evade mortality.

^ALittle-known fact: Hearn also had a bum eye due to getting punched in the face on a high school playground, and never allowed anyone to photograph him with his bad eye on display. Peep Wikipedia — Hearn is always posing to hide his eye, or has his baby blues closed.

^BI am randomly excited about this. When I was 16 years old, I got an awful (but miniscule) full-color tattoo of a cartoon turtle sporting a top hat with a wilting flower on my ankle. 22 years later, I am married to a Japanese woman whose name literally translates into “Turtle Mouth.” She views the tattoo as being foreshadowing (and awkward for her family, as tattoos are taboo in Japan, particularly the rural area where her extended family resides). I just view it as evidence that I am highly prone to making really, really fucking stupid decisions.

^CThis being said, it’s disclosure time: I was offered a live painting gig at Tokyo Big Site, Tokyo’s biggest auditorium, for a whiskey trade show a few years ago. The organizer, a friend, confused me writing about graffiti and lettering with being a tried-and-true graffiti writer/street artist, and asked me to paint a giant canvas in front of a crowd of hundreds alongside a real sumi-e ink painter working on a similarly-sized sheet of rice paper.

Due to scant design commissions on my part at that time, and a sizable commission for pictorially synthesizing the essence of a thirty-year-old single malt whiskey which was going to be dutifully poured down my throat on canvas during the painting process, I gratefully took up the task at hand. What resulted was the murkiest painting of deconstructed pop cartoon characters to ever grace an auditorium stage. And a mammoth hangover. A painter I am not. And now, a few years later, I consistently have to insist that I am decidedly not a painter to the folks I happen across who saw me flinging acrylic paint around onstage that day. Consider yourself warned.

Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production focuses on the activities of highly active designers, type foundries, distributors/retail spaces and Japanese design publications from the past ten years. The goal of this section is to help promote cognizance of graphic design activity in Japan — acknowledgement of such activity is often hindered by the linguistic and social differences between Japan and the rest of the world, yet this gap is lessening.

Hattori Kazunari

Hattori Kazunari is well-known for his direction of advertising for the Kewpie Corporation and East Japan Railway Company, as well as his art direction for the magazines Mayonaka, Ryūkō Tsūshin, and here and there. He also designs books, exhibition posters, logos, and symbols, all embracing the rough edges of digital production. His work in the field of corporate identity is notable, having designed the identity of the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum and many other projects.

Yamaguchi Yosuke

The graphic design work of Yamaguchi Yosuke is an anomaly in the current Tokyo design landscape. American graphic designer E*Rock once said of his own work, “I  paint like a designer, and design like a painter” — this is no less true of Yamaguchi’s wide-ranging print works and collections of paintings. Haunted by a dark, atmospheric color palette and ambiguous, ethereal figures, his posters and books are — self-generated image-making married to found typography and hand-drawn lettering that looks to history as much as it does to a dystopian future.

More: http://blogs.dion.ne.jp/bonfire

Hirano Kouga

Hirano Kouga is a Japanese graphic designer who is known for his book designs with his unique handwritten letters. Since the 1960s, he has designed more than 6,000 books and worked consistently with particular clients including publishers like Shobunsha, the theatre company Kuro Tento (Black Tent) and the band Suigyu-Gakudan (Buffalo Band). His works for individual clients are diverse, but form an uniform visual identity. He is active designing and lecturing.

More: http://imprint.printmag.com/daily-heller/kouga-hirano

Idea Magazine

Muroga Kiyonori’s time since assuming the editorial helm at Idea Magazine in 2003 has seen a radical shift in focus. Gone are the days of an internationally-oriented slick trade journal, instead opting for a deeper, more critical focus on Japanese graphic design as a whole. The past few years in particular have seen in-depth essays, articles, and interviews with and about the designers who have helped shape Japan’s visual culture from the viewpoints of typography, graphic design, manga and anime, video games, book design, and product design. This Japan-centric vision is bolstered by internationally aimed articles exploring more peripheral areas of design such as post-punk D.I.Y. publishing, type design, contemporary critical graphic design practice, international design history, and the occasional feature on rich bodies of work by foreign designers.

More: http://idea-mag.com

Excerpted from Idea #340:

Towards a new form of practice

A number of young designers in Europe and America who are attempting to develop their own paths in exploring graphic design through innovative small-scale practices. Many of the designers featured were born in the 1970s and 1980s, coming of age in commercial practice in the digital environment. The majority of those featured operate within the sphere of graphic design production from the approach of a more personal practice, inflecting their work with nuanced, idiosyncratic conceptual and formal approaches.

While widely varied due to cultural context and social/environmental differences, all have a kinship in unique, singular approaches to developing formal options for clients. This is perhaps the sticking point for the latest wave of graphic design- perhaps the “solution” as an end result of graphic design as a process is a dead methodology. What is instead offered are graphic “options” in lieu of “solutions” — inquiries answered with inquiries.

Taking cues from history, both of earlier Avant Garde movements in art (commercial and otherwise), as well as the lineage of educational institutions that informed them, these practitioners’ works are infused with an individual aesthetic sensibility.

Casting nets

Looking abroad to understand divergent, though concurrent contemporary practices is of value to Japanese designers. Over the past decade, a shoring up of contemporary practice and aesthetics has occurred in Japan, with indigenous designers looking inward to create aesthetics that are both uniquely signature and singularly Japanese. While less concerned with foreign graphic tendencies, having a window from which to view contemporary graphic output abroad is of immense value, providing the space to pause and reflect on potentialities.

In recent history, Japanese designers had tended toward a Euro/America-centric worldview, looking West for inspiration and leadership. Though that time has ended, there is still something to be gleaned from viewing a collection of work that is quite truly different from contemporary graphic design within Japan.

Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production focuses on the activities of highly active designers, type foundries, distributors/retail spaces and Japanese design publications from the past ten years. The goal of this section is to help promote cognizance of graphic design activity in Japan — acknowledgement of such activity is often hindered by the linguistic and social differences between Japan and the rest of the world, yet this gap is lessening.

Harata HeQuiti

Harata HeiQuiti (Heikichi) is a Japanese graphic designer whose focus is in editorial design and whom is well-known for his poetic visuals. Harata was born in 1947 and graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music with a major in Visual Design.

Influenced by preceding 1960s designers like Sugiura Kohei and Yokoo Tadanori, Harata began working freelance solo and developed a highly signature optical/pictorial/poetic means of combining of imagery and typography. He is influenced by early 20th modernist writers and poets like Inagaki Taruho. Parataxis — the literary technique of conscientious connection using short sentences about very distant topics by framing them together — lays at the very core of his approach.

In the early 1970s, Harata worked on the magazine Shinjuku Play Map, which led to a large body of commissions in editorial design, from which he gained a strong following. His early visual works for Japanese underground magazines like Heaven and visuals for the legendary Japanese popular music group Yellow Magic Orchestra embodied the zeitgeist of Japanese New Wave graphic design and visual art in the ’80s. In the same period, he self-published an independent magazine WX-raY — even though only the inaugural issue was published, Harata’s influence reverberated widely, sparking a wave of self-initiated and self-published media by graphic designers.

These activities have made Harata a cult star in Japanese graphic culture. He has been active in various cultural fields including literature, music, and theater. Harata is one of pioneers of Japanese manga design, integrating the typographic design and comic characters within these projects.

Harata has developed and practiced his own book design methodology “Shoyō-Sekkei” (書容設計). Literally translated, the aggregate parts are:  Sho (book) + Yō (vessel) + Sekkei (design). No mere conflation, the Yō element simultaneously means “outlook” — referring not only to modern Western “form and content” philosophies, but a more holistically comprehensive overview of the total architecture of the book as object and how readers will interact with a book project as both object and media. Harata utilizes traditional Japanese aesthetics to help reify both the thought and form of these types of projects.

At the core of Harata’s practice is a desire for a unified methodology of total design that dissuades deconstruction or fragmentation. Heavily reliant upon the compound, juxtapositional nature of the Japanese language, Harata’s work is worth prolonged examination. His work represents the very best in potentialities of graphic expression with imagination and integrity, as opposed to the disintegration of design into mere methods and mannerism.

Ohara Daijiro

The work of Ohara Daijiro represents a near-polar opposite in his reverence for the untrained, though channeled with precision in his use of bubbly cartoon lettering, art nouveau-esque display types, and roughly-rendered geometric characters. The past century collides in his work in a visceral way, bleeding dot gain and the uneven tones of cheap reprographic technology. Reminiscent of vintage candy shops, low-budget U.K. psychedelia, and reverberating with the echoes of the ’60s and ’70s small press in Japan, Ohara’s work retains bits of the innocence of the work in Graphic ’55, the island nation’s first full-fledged graphic design exhibition. These assorted strains of influence are mixed with a hand-wrought tactility that is innocent and playful, yet craft-centric in its thoroughness and richness of form and finish.

Ohara’s designs for Sakerock mimic their continuation of the values and sounds of late 1980s indie music in Japan — the past reverberating into today through their work alongside stalwarts like Kicell, Your Song Is Good, Zainichi Funk, and Mu-Stars. There is no denying the strength of musical communities, especially when paired with visual execution in step with melodic vision.

More: http://omomma.in

Gakiya Isamu

Utilizing a mashup of illustrative, collage, comic and manga sensibilities, Gakiya’s work operates at the corner of Archie comics, magical voids, other dimensions, and lowbrow illustration. Anarchic, with a tongue in cheek sense of humor, highly graphic and culling from a myriad of sources, he combines hand-wrought illustration and lo-fi reproductive techniques into seamless, seductive planes of fantasy.

More: http://gakiyaisamu.com

Tokyo Art Book Fair

Annual small publishing expo founded by Ehguchi Hiroshi and Miyagi Futoshi of Utrecht and Oliver Watson of Paperback Magazine. It is now the largest annual arts publishing fair in Asia.

More: http://zinesmate.org/

Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production focuses on the activities of highly active designers, type foundries, distributors/retail spaces and Japanese design publications from the past ten years. The goal of this section is to help promote cognizance of graphic design activity in Japan — acknowledgement of such activity is often hindered by the linguistic and social differences between Japan and the rest of the world, yet this gap is lessening.

Booklet Press

A non-profit, small-scale press and independent publishing library located in Minato-ku’s Shibaura House. Run by architects Morishita Yu and Évita Yumul, Booklet is a free library devoted to small press initiatives, focused primarily on ‘zines and cultural publications.

More: http://bookletpress.org

Okano Kunihiko

A recent graduate of the TypeMedia program at the KABK in the Netherlands, Okano stands as perhaps the most nuanced and rigorous designer of Latin typefaces and lettering in Japan. His most recent typeface is Quintet, a layered script family available via House Industries’ PLINC system. Quintet demonstrates his years of experience studying the nuances of calligraphic lettering.

Kunihiko Okano’s approach represents a calligraphic-based approach that emphasizes legibility and readability in creating Latin character sets that complement the Japanese character sets for the typefaces he designs. A tireless and thorough craftsman, Okano is an unrelenting force in the Japanese sphere of typography. His work speaks for itself — graceful and poised type designs that retains the springy qualities of pen-rendering.

The AXIS Font family, much of which is the work of Okano, is the typeface family utilized by Apple, Nintendo, and Mazda to express the brands’ typographic voices in Japan. NTT Docomo, the largest mobile phone carrier in Japan, also utilizes AXIS as the default typeface for its handsets. Despite the contemporary styling of the AXIS Compact family, whose Latin forms follow the formal evolution of humanist sans serif typefaces such as Frutiger and Myriad, Okano is no mere default Modernist. His work exercises multiple perspectives — the chopped terminals of punch cutters, deep ink traps of the 1970s and 1980s, and exaggeratedly differentiated counter spaces enhance readability with one foot in the past and one solidly in the present. Okano’s typefaces move your eyes — some almost somnambulantly in their refinement, while others insinuate a rhumba, moving optics along in steady, surprising succession.

Okano’s logotype work operates in different terrain, often that of contemporary nostalgia — a national obsession with better days (given form via the 1995 movie Always — San-chôme no Yûhi, a gauzy, soft focus look at the post-War obsession with the automobile and the electric conveniences freshly offered to the general public at that time). While in no way overt, many of Okano’s works mine history for aspects of their base forms, then update them with the sharp angularity offered by an incisive sense of the contemporary. Okano is no retro revivalist offering up readymade solutions; his work is that of one who understands history, then synthesizes and sublimates the lessons of the masters into brave new form.

More: http://shotype.com

so+ba

This design studio in the Kyodo area of West Tokyo was established in 2001 by Swiss partners Susanna Baer and Alex Sonderegger. so+ba is active in the fields of graphic design, art direction, and sound visualization. Both partners teach typography and design at Tama Art University.

More: http://so-ba.cc

Dainippon Type Organization

Partners Tsukada Hidechika and Tsukada Tetsuya operate a hybrid typographic design practice and product design studio devoted to typographically-themed toys. Their “Toypography” project is a system of colorful, modular curved, and straight shapes for creating Latin and Japanese characters. Their playful take on connotative bilingual lettering treatments for corporate and commercial clients is both evocative and masterful, despite veering wildly from style to style.

More: http://dainippon.type.org

Yorifuji Bunpei

Mixing twee, oddball illustration, accomplished typography and pop color schemes, Yorifuji Bunpei’s work is omnipresent throughout Tokyo. Yorifuji-designed posters for the Tokyo Metro train system adorn every station and his public awareness campaigns for Japan Tobacco dot the streets of the city, reminding citizens of the potential good manners of smoking. His large-scale worked is backed up by the design of innumerable intimate art and photography monographs for small publishers like Nanarokusha (ナナロク社), Akagokusha (赤々舎).

Yorifuji has simultaneously produced multiple self-initiated projects. The yPad is a series of iPad-sized sketchbooks filled with grids, typographic tips, and project scheduling calendars intended to help designers. His bestselling self-published books The Catalogue of Death, Master of Imagination & Drawing and The Catalogue of Unco mix quirky illustration, oddball humor, and prose with appealing, well-considered typography and design.

More: http://www.bunpei.co/

Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production focuses on the activities of highly active designers, type foundries, distributors/retail spaces and Japanese design publications from the past ten years. The goal of this section is to help promote cognizance of graphic design activity in Japan — acknowledgement of such activity is often hindered by the linguistic and social differences between Japan and the rest of the world, yet this gap is lessening.

Typecache.com

A repository of type from around the globe broken down by style and foundry — an excellent resource provided by Yumiba Taro and Yoshino Akira.

More: http://typecache.com

Tsunekawa Ryochi

Tsunekawa is a thorough designer of nostalgic Latin display typefaces. Mixing Art Deco, post-War advertising, and early Modernist sensibilities, this former architect-turned-full-time type designer continually releases highly appealing, poppy type designs informed by history.

More: http://dharmatype.com

Oubunshotai & Oubunshotai 2

Linotype’s type director Kobayashi Akira has published two excellent books on the use and nuances of Latin type written in Japanese, published by Bijutsu Shuppansha.

More: http://www.bijutsu.co.jp

THA

Nakamura Yugo’s interactive design studio is one of the most revered in the world, blending generative software, broadcast direction, web design and development, module device user interface design and self-initiated projects like the Framed electronic artwork system.

More: http://tha.jp

W+KTokyoLab

Advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy launched their W+K Tokyo Lab record label and Tokyo office in 2003. The office releases CDs and videos of contemporary Japanese pop music alongside highly expressive videos of the label’s artists. W+K Tokyo Lab has released music and visuals by instrumental hip-hop pioneers Hifana, beatboxer Afra, emcee Chinza Dopeness, electronic artist Jemapur, and a number of others. Co-founded by Wieden + Kennedy partner John Jay, it was taken to its full form under the direction of fellow co-founders Eric Cruz and Bruce Ikeda (both no longer with Wieden + Kennedy) alongside form-giving collaborators Gino Woo and Shane Lester.

More info: http://www.wktokyolab.com

Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production focuses on the activities of highly active designers, type foundries, distributors/retail spaces and Japanese design publications from the past ten years. The goal of this section is to help promote cognizance of graphic design activity in Japan — acknowledgement of such activity is often hindered by the linguistic and social differences between Japan and the rest of the world, yet this gap is lessening.

Black Bath

Following a handful of years working alongside the expat design duo Namiki, Tamenaga Yasuyuki launched his studio Black Bath, focusing on graphic and interior design. Of particular note are his interiors for the offices of Google Japan.

More: http://black-bath.com

AQ

AQ is a digital design firm and consultancy based in Tokyo run by Chris Palmieri, Eiko Nagase, and Paul Baron. The firm founded Tokyo Art Beat, Tokyo’s online guide to visual culture events and create dynamic web design for a wide array of cultural and commercial clients.

More: http://aqworks.com

Art Space Tokyo

Written by Ashley Rawlings and Craig Mod, Art Space Tokyo acts as a 272-page personal guide and interpreter, connecting the reader with the neighborhoods and figures behind some of the most inspiring art spaces in Tokyo.

Each of the featured spaces has been rendered as a striking illustration by Takahashi Nobumasa. The book covers art spaces in neighborhoods such as Ginza, Yanaka, Gaienmae, Omotesando, Harajuku, Roppongi, Asakusa, and more. The neighborhood surrounding each art space has been meticulously mapped with recommendations for the best food, coffee and sights to enjoy in an afternoon of art viewing.

More: http://artspacetokyo.com

Akiyama Shin

One of Japan’s most prolific designers, Akiyama Shin has designed books for innumerable contemporary artists. He runs a Niigata-based practice and self-publishes his and others’ art and design projects via his edition.nord imprint.

More: http://akiyamashin.jp, http://editionnord.com

Axis type family

The definitive Japanese gothic typeface, designed by Type Project in conjunction with Kobayashi Akira and Okano Kunihiko.

More: http://www.typeproject.com

Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production focuses on the activities of highly active designers, type foundries, distributors/retail spaces and Japanese design publications from the past ten years. The goal of this section is to help promote cognizance of graphic design activity in Japan — acknowledgement of such activity is often hindered by the linguistic and social differences between Japan and the rest of the world, yet this gap is lessening.

Matsuda Yukimasa

Matsuda Yukimasa’s books have presence amid the veritable sea of published books in Japan. His works have a near-magnetic pull on bookshelves — slim in stature, handsome in finish, and painstakingly detailed in quality. As objects alone they resonate. The choice of fine papers, docked page edges, die-cut wraparound covers, and exquisite choice of colors and type speak to the tastes and vision of their creator. The form of his books always directly correlate to the content within — honoring it and extrapolating upon a visual theme in a contemplative, poetic, and non-literal way. To say they are “beautiful” books is an understatement — they are the types of books that would make designers of yore weep in testament to their immaculate execution. This is not hyperbole — the work of Matsuda Yukimasa is rugged, assured and holistic in scope inside and out.

Having first delved into the world of editorial design in the 1980s alongside Sugiura Kohei, Matsuda’s path has been one that is ascendant, yet immersed in the development of private projects — unceasingly wide-eyed in his pursuit of research and exploration, applied form and deliberate choice. He creates work that pulls from history as much as contemporaneity to inform the structure of each page with an emphasis on functionality as much as beauty. Highy focused, yet wide-ranging in subject, they would sit easily in the Books On Books section as well as Graphic Design, Typography, Anthropology, or Art.

Of particular note is his self-authored and designed ZERRO, published in 2003. A compendium of extinct, exploratory, ubiquitous, and imaginative visual languages and symbols that ranges from the nonsensical to the exceedingly rare, ZERRO displays the singular mind at work behind his Ushiwaka-maru publishing imprint. Each spread contains an example of a visual rubric, a short history of said collection and a visual example — some painstakingly redrawn and others reproduced immaculately. From Cree Script to the set of symbols deployed by the Japanese Navy to the Cipher of Alchemy to revisionist scripts from Japanese history at moments where orthographic reform felt so immediate and necessary to a handful of individuals, ZERRO offers thousands of entry points for further research. At the very least, it is a neat collection of inspiring reductive visual form and at its most a virtual camera obscura looking unto the world of sign, symbol, and meaning.

Each of the projects that Matsuda undertakes reveals his fascination and curiosity with language and natural form, with history and synthesis, and with curation and contemplation. Agnostic in style, yet florid in execution, his work is a wonder to behold — the books embrace life and experience in a way that few do.

We are at a moment in the continuum of graphic design where self-initiated projects carry as much weight as client-based projects and Matsuda fits more than neatly into this. More an archetype than a follower, Matsuda’s work enriches Japanese design culture in an active way — as a historian, a writer, an editor, a form-maker, a designer, and a publisher. His work is of near-utopian synthesis and each aggregate part is completed with acumen. For content, form and production to be so neatly folded together so tidily and yet so exuberantly is a treasure.

More: http://www.matzda.co.jp

Torinoumi Osamu/Jiyu Kobo

Born in 1955. Graduated from Graphic Design Course of Tama Art University. In 1989 Torinoumi founded Jiyu Kobo with Suzuki Tsutomu and Katada Keiichi, where he now works as both the CEO and type designer.

Torionumi has designed typefaces like Hiragino series (for Dainipon Screen Mfg., Ltd.) and the commissioned Koburina Gothic. He also designed more than forty typefaces, focusing on text type designs, as well as producing his own house brand The Yu-shotai Library whose releases include the Yu-Mincho family, the Yu-Gothic family, Yu-tsuki Midachi Mincho, and Yu-Kyokashotai M.

Jiyu Kobo received the first Keinosuke Satou award for its activities, the Good Design Award in 2005 for their Hiragino family, and the Tokyo TDC Type Design Award in 2008. Torinoumi teaches in the graphic design course at Kyoto Seika University.

More: http://www.jiyu-kobo.co.jp

Too Much

Subtitled the “Magazine of Romantic Geography,” Too Much focuses on cities through the lens of urbanism and the poetic. Founded by Tsujimura Yoshi of OK Fred Magazine and Cameron McKean of Paper Sky Magazine, Too Much treads an edgy path through the bywaters of global cities.

Excerpted from an interview with Cameron McKean:

After leaving New Zealand and moving to Tokyo in 2007 my ideas about what constituted “design” ballooned out, past all the commercial projects I’d done or seen, past art-making, and this ballooning-out eventually popped sometime around 2008. This was when I started writing as a way of taking things back to the beginning – just thinking and words. Later I started taking photos. My “practice” is one of demotivation and finding a single solid place to start from rather than a desire for interdisciplinarity or variety. Although we might have forgotten lots of the practical general skills our grandfathers knew, it seems that creative freelancers these days are generalists of a different kind — there are just too many possible spaces for design to exist in. Having a varied practice is just a necessary evil these days — how nice it would be to truly specialize!

More: http://toomuchmagazine.com

Utrecht

Situated in Tokyo’s bustling Omotesando neighborhood, Utrecht focuses on small publishing, both releasing their own titles and their bookshop housing a wide array of design — and art-oriented publications from all over the world.

More: http://www.utrecht.jp

Shirai Design Studio

Acting art directors and designers of Idea Magazine, Shirai Yoshihisa’s studio team are typographically rigorous, formally evocative, and gentle in treatment of ornament. Projects for Robundo, Ryobi, Seibundo Shinkosha and many other private concerns make up their body of work, celebrated in their recent book Typography Suite and the accompanying exhibition of the past two decades of graphic design work. Shirai is faculty at Musashino Art University.

A week-long, seven part series about contemporary Japanese Graphic Design. Today’s initial post offers a critique of the current international graphic design retrospective exhibition traveling across the United States and its disavowal of graphic design culture outside of America and Western Europe. This will be followed by a series of posts highlighting contemporary Japan-based graphic design activity of interest, introducing assorted designers, design studios, and other, more wide-ranging practices.

2011 saw the opening of Graphic Design: Now in Production, a massive, sprawling exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with the exhibition set to later travel to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina.

Accompanying the exhibition is the release of a catalog with the same title. Andrew Blauvelt of the Walker Art Center and Ellen Lupton of the Cooper-Hewitt curated both, with Ian Albinson of artofthetitle.com, Jeremy Leslie of magCulture.com, and Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio of BrandNew/Under Consideration in additional curatorial roles.

The catalog’s introduction reads that the book is “Gently inspired by The Last Whole Earth Catalog,” mixing “short chunks of text with images from contemporary practice, anchored by a series of longer essays.” The introduction speaks about the pitfalls of attempting to shore up a recent history, in particular the past decade, of graphic design as a sphere of activity and production, and in this respect, the catalog falls far short of its attempt at documenting graphic design on a truly global scale.

Methodologically, putting together a paragraph about assorted practices, projects, methodologies, and visual trends is a fairly easy task. As a practicing graphic designer, I was aware of an easy ninety percent of the projects covered within the book. Sure, it takes time to write 500 short paragraphs about 500 subjects, but all within are easy targets.

As usual, Experimental Jetset get a disproportionate amount of coverage and fills it with a cocky, one-trick pony, having distilled a “punk rock” reaction to design practice and history and then slathering it with an easy quote from a dead theorist.¹ Åbäke get their usual turn, as well — their poor form and “exploratory” practice² backed up with the somehow still “cool” “parasite magazine” hogging up a handful of pages. I do not disagree that Experimental Jetset and Åbäke should be mentioned and get their fair due — I mean, where would we be in this contemporary age overwrought with Helvetica without EJ?³ — but are they so important as to trot out visual and semantic equivalents of a wet fart as “premium” content for this catalog and have it go unmentioned? And wouldn’t the Åbäke parasite magazine reduced to a photo with a blurb jutting from the gutter of one page be enough?

Then, there are the glaring omissions. Where is the wild and exciting form-making of Universal Everything/Matt Pyke? Where are Craig Mod‘s lovely paeans about electronic publishing and design? Where are Nieves and the current trend of content-lite chapbooks masquerading as zines? Where is the @font-face/webfont revolution? Where are Northern Mexico’s amazing DJ logos? I mean, the church-burning black metal cult get their moment via Christophe Szpajdel‘s Bic pen acrobatics, but what about the blissed-out folks surrounded by terror, yet exercising none themselves? And why the hell is the Linux logo in there? No graphic designer gives a shiiiiiit about that thing. In short, the state of graphic design is on fire (or at the very least is being subjected to an overwhelming amount of shortsightedness), but everyone’s too busy Tweeting and “starting up” and mimicking old Archis layouts to get down to business.

What is truly lacking in the book and exhibition is a sense of scope: Graphic Design: Now in Production represents a North American/Western European worldview toward graphic design that eschews the labors of much of the world. Notably absent is much mention of recent graphic design activity in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. With short-format writing the dominant trend at the present moment, solid strategic thinking should be present in initiatives to represent any holistic approach to an area of cultural production. Sure, the writing can be short and pithy, but it should be far-reaching in the material covered.

If observed on a macro-level, certain countries get the short end of the stick. Korea, for one, is wholly unrepresented in the catalog. The most influential graphic designer in that country Ahn Sang-Soo receives no mention despite the fact that his work has revolutionized and energized graphic design as an area of intensified interest. Younger, well-known Korean graphic designers whom have studied abroad such as Sulki and Min Choi also do not appear in the book, even though they have instigated a very defined and widely-published aesthetic and methodological approach⁴. Less well-known, but equally influential and highly participatory projects such as Ondol/A Few Warm Stones⁵ are also ignored. In essence, the message from America being sent is, “Thanks, Korea. We’ll gladly take your study abroad students, but we’ll be damned if we’ll acknowledge any contributions from your country.”

Also lacking are contributions from so many other countries — the effect of easily available software and computing on Ethiopian and Eritrean music packaging, the Thai signage landscape, branding in Singapore, and innumerable others. New Zealand gets a random single hit through the work of David Bennewith‘s monograph on Joseph Churchward, but nowhere is Kris Sowersby, New Zealand’s immensely popular leading type designer.

Japan, the country in which I reside, gets a mention in the catalog, though one that is fleeting and not wholly correct. The activity of the Morisawa Corporation gets a brief writeup by curator Andrew Blauveldt:

Morisawa
The Japanese language employs three different language systems: kanji, hiragana and katakana, representing thousands of characters. This reality, coupled with the complex nature of character strokes, makes font design for the Japanese language especially difficult and demanding. Japan’s leading maker of fonts is Morisawa, a company whose roots reach back to 1924. Morisawa typically spends up to four years to meticulously render its typefaces, which can be found throughout the country in use on everything from signs to screens.

A more accurate description is that the Japanese visual language is comprised of a number of other systems, as well as including Latin characters and analphabetic symbols.⁶; To be ignored is one matter, but for a whole country’s activity to be given a glossed-over, under-informed conflation through the prism of a sole company/easy target is just as insulting. Sure, Morisawa is the biggest type foundry/distributor in Japan, but the company is by no means the best. The past decade has seen Morisawa’s primary advance be a push for annual font licensing through their Morisawa Passport subscription program, not the development of excellent typefaces. Many smaller type foundries have popped up or refined their game, offering far more formally thorough typefaces that render better at smaller sizes than Morisawa’s. In essence, an attempt at an easy summation and a lack of sophisticated understanding is provided in lieu of in-depth cultural analysis. (Moreover, if the Morisawa entry was not included, this whole essay most likely would have never come into being.)

Morisawa is an odd choice as the representative of design activity in Japan. Known quantities/old guard such as Hara Kenya and his work for Muji, Groovisions, Nakajima Hideki, and Sugiura Kohei are not mentioned. Newer Japanese practitioners whose work is widely respected and whom have helped shape global aesthetics over the past decade such as W+K Tokyo Lab (in the realm of formally rich, detail-oriented motion graphics), Dainippon Type Organization (operating at the intersection of concept and modular typography/lettering), and Nakamura Yugo’s THA (trailblazing web-based aesthetics and practices⁷) also go unmentioned. In their stead, the reader is lobbed an easy, sloppy catch — akin to summing up American graphic design as summarized by Adobe or British graphic design as being exemplified by Monotype Imaging Ltd.

Aside from purely typographic and orthographic concerns, Graphic Design: Now in Production neatly mirrors the lack of regard and research exhibited by graphic design-oriented writers and researchers toward areas other than Western Europe and North America since the establishment of a body of writing about graphic design as a practice.⁸ Graphic design is not merely an America/Euro-centric First World pursuit, and the cultures and histories surrounding the development of graphic design elsewhere are worthy of pursuit.

It is with this disregard for acknowledgement and discontent with the cultural viewpoint expressed in Graphic Design: Now in Production that we have put together Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production. Gently inspired by a myopic worldview of graphic design activity, and mimicking the form and format of Graphic Design: Now in Production, what will follow shortly is an overview of contemporary Japanese graphic design practices in a mix of short-format texts accompanying images with outbound links in the version here.⁹ The focus of this feature is equally myopic, showing only a number of important projects and practices from within Japan that have surfaced in the past decade. It is my hope that it will act as a localized supplement to the greater understanding of design activity.

Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production focuses on the activities of highly active designers, type foundries and Japanese design publications from the past ten years. The goal of this section is to help promote cognizance of graphic design activity in Japan — acknowledgement of such activity is often hindered by the linguistic and social differences between Japan and the rest of the world, yet this gap is lessening. The activity of publications like Idea and +81; Japan-based international designers like Helmut Schmid and AQ; and internationally-minded Japanese graphic designers like Hara Kenya have helped to increase the communication and awareness of Japanese graphic design as a sector of culture and cultural production. It is my hope that the follow-up feature helps serve the same purpose. It is by no means a holistic, comprehensive collation of all important graphic design activity in contemporary Japan, and pointedly veers in the direction of smaller, more critically-oriented practices and publications.10

A culture having a different language and a divergent history does not make the culture off-limits for international review. This should be a challenge to individuals examining graphic design as documentarians — the world is larger than navel-gazing information graphics analyzing one’s personal consumption habits, as popular as that may be. Other languages and cultures are intensely more interesting in the long run. In particular, Japan’s history in regards to graphic design has been under-analyzed in the English language, both in the historic and contemporary schemes¹¹. It is worth straying from the comfortable and easily understood to cast a wider net: observing and analyzing graphic design from a wider perspective. It is also worth questioning what is presented in officious formats: because something is plated does not make it food. In the case of Graphic Design: Now in Production, this analogy may not be wholly apt, but I, for one, left the dinner table still feeling hungry.

¹ I really, really wonder how “important” Experimental Jetset really are. They have a staggeringly huge body of work, but when conflated, it is often a simplistic collection: “One concept/visual style per project only, please move along…” This was discussed more at length in the essay “With A Spatula In Her Hand” in my self-published The Space Is The Place Supplement and reprinted in Slanted Magazine #19.

² Åbäke have made it excusable for every half-baked cultural practice to parade itself as being somehow graphic design-oriented.

³ Their “self-critiquing” works have already been wrung and hung out to dry by Randy Nakamura in “On The Uselessness of Design Citicism”.

⁴ Notably, that of the Werkplaats Typogrpaphie.

⁵ Ondol is a student research project led by Chris Ro that explores Korean graphic design and typographic history in journal form also go unnoticed. With only two volumes published to date, Ondol has already greatly added to the discourse and body of Korean graphic design literature, education, and understanding.

⁶ The following is excerpted from Japanese Typography Part One: Building Blocks, published in Slanted #11:

The core components of the Japanese language:

kanji
This is the family of Chinese logographic characters imported to Japan which are utilized to write nouns and the bases of verbs and adjectives. Kanji are morphograms — visual symbols which represent words rather than sounds. They can be a bit confusing, however, in that the forms of Chinese calligraphy were borrowed and used to represent natively Japanese concepts and subjects. Some kanji are fairly direct pictograms, while others represent ideas. Kanji include huge numbers of compound characters, as well. Some kanji can have up to ten different readings (base meanings/morphemes).

There are over 50,000 characters that comprise the kanji system, though between 2,000 to 3,000 are in common use in Japan.

hiragana
The syllabic family of Japanese characters that can be used to spell out words phonetically, be that a form of kanji, or not, as is the case for many Japanese words to inflect language. Hiragana developed from Chinese characters used to aid pronunciation, a practice which originated in the 5th century. Originally, there was more than one hiragana character for each syllable in the Japanese language, but this was reformed in 1900, and one character (or character set) was codified for each sound. Hiragana, being simplified calligraphic characters, are formally fluid and graceful.

There are 46 hiragana characters currently in use.

katakana
The syllabic family of Japanese characters utilized for words from foreign languages, onomatopoeia, and to spell out difficult kanji-based words. Katakana were potentially developed from simplified Chinese characters as a form of shorthand, though a conflicting and disputed theory exists that they are a form of imported script from Korea.

There are 46 hiragana characters currently in use.

romaji
The Western alphabet, sprinkled liberally throughout written Japanese where appropriate for ease, atmosphere and communicativity. Latin lettering is often simplified in terms of the omission of macrons and circumflexes necessary to pronounce Japanese words correctly (which just leads to further confusion for all involved).

numerals
Based on Chinese numerals, there are a number of systems including a common one that utilizes a minimum of strokes per character, as well as a formal numbering system used for financial documents.

punctuation
Japanese punctuation is as highly developed as punctuation in Western languages, though very different formally. For example, in lieu of quotation marks, Japanese uses its own form, called kagikakko, i.e.:「Hello!」Western punctuation is utilized, as well, in particular question and exclamation marks.

non-alphabetic characters
Included in most Japanese digital typefaces is a large collection of marks and symbols used to delineate abstract ideas such as “postal code” (〒)

The Japanese language is a mix of all of these different systems, each with several subcategories.

⁷ i.e: Ffffound!, Pinterest’s precursor and archetype

⁸ That being said, despite many design educators’ grumblings, Philip Meggs and Alston Purvis should be praised for the brief history of Japanese commercial art that was folded into their History of Graphic Design.

⁹ The print version of this essay is bolstered by texts not applicable to Néojaponisme’s Japan-centric focus.

10 The work of more popular designers such as Hara Kenya and Nakajima Hideki get a fair amount of play in the contemporary global graphic design press at present.

¹¹ Korea’s even less so.