It has been a year since Akiyama Shin quietly took down his shop in Shinjuku, closing the revered schtücco design studio, entrusting his former staff with the care of a number of important clients, and returning northward to the humble fold of country life in his home prefecture of Niigata with his wife/collaborator Ayako and newborn son. Tokyo lost an important and vital member of our design community at that moment — prolific and craft-centric in his output, thoughtful in his philosophy and approach. This quiet, humble man’s exit stage-left is something worth noting.1

His departure was followed by a flurry of activity: most notably, a post-mortem, live-in retrospective at Pantaloon an Osaka-based gallery and design studio, which saw schtücco’s oeuvre filling the walls of the entire space alongside misprints, proof sheets, book dummies and a rearrangement of the materials within the space. A tent and catalogued inventory of everything the young family would be using during their month-long stay within the gallery — vegetables, clothing, cloth diapers and technology were all ordered, stacked and itemized — reflecting the Akiyama family’s subsumption into a now totalizing collapse of work, life and art.

A series of lectures and events accompanied the exhibition, individuals from Tokyo and Osaka invited to Pantaloon to engage with Akiyama in dialogue for the public, exploring the roles of design in relation to art, literature, music, and the everyday. Curators, artists, editors, and designers were all invited to speak candidly about work and what design holds for us all at this particular moment. All were invited into a sort of temporary community with Akiyama and his family as its pillar in a rare moment of personal reflection that is usually rare in the hustle-bustle of Japanese business.2

The exhibition and associated events gave nuanced form to so much of Akiyama’s way of working — one that is engaged politically, aesthetically and socially. Everyday graphic design in Tokyo is prominently service-oriented3 and to have this act of servicing brought into a gallery, and then, most importantly, destabilized by emphasizing the more personal, authored, community-centric aspects of a critical and speculative graphic design practice in a setting that had simultaneously been deconstructed and reconstructed according to the designer’s personal vision, exposed the public to alternate ways of working that had potentially not been experienced in Japan before.4

Akiyama’s formal education in architecture is belied by his personal works. Created under the nom de guerre Buku Akiyama, they are a quiet structural assessment of the everyday combined with the bookmaker’s lexical desire for order and cataloging. This on-again/off-again art practice is best documented in his 2009 book, Composition No.2 “an exceptional state”: with equipments owned by hiromiyoshii. Within, Akiyama’s reorganization of FARM, an exhibition space in the Kiyosumi area of Tokyo, was photographed by Masahito Yamamoto, documenting Akiyama’s event in which he took the contents of the studio and rearranged all into structures, three-dimensional compositions, and system-like collections. The book, designed by schtücco and published by Akiyama’s own publishing house edition nord, appears to be damaged, the spine of each in the edition of 600 intentionally torn off, exposing Akiyama’s fascination with raw material and process.

edition nord is both a conceptual celebration and exploration of the most instinctive and primary elements of art-making, combining the immediacy of the found, rapid mark-making and narrative — spinning and folding these attributes into physical forms that are a taught tension of crafted precision and the raw materiality of chance processes. The typography within is highly considered and abundant in its exploration of different methods of reproduction. Papers, printing, and the visual edit that holds each together is rugged and assured — a poised conflation that reveals the authored instinct. As a collection, Akiyama’s work feels like the output of an individual involved to the deepest levels with his craft, rendered in often stark palettes alongside considered typographic scales akin to musical compositions. In all, there is a palpable sense of the book as an expanse that engages the reader physically, mentally, and emotionally — it is not treated as mere printed physical ephemera.

Past edition nord titles have included compendiums of work for artists such as Masanao Hirayama/HIMAA, Tadashi Kawamata, Eiki Mori, and Komichi Kobayashi. The imprint’s inaugural release, an edition of eight hundred bound boxes of photographs exactly reproduced from source material provided by artist Christian Holstad for a 2007 exhibition titled “Blood Bath & Beyond.” The printed cards within question the authorship of the photograph and the concept of assumed identity depicted in the reproductions — a collation of imagery of masked and costumed individuals. The box was the result of two years of labor, mimicking the physical qualities of the original photographs, working with printers to adjust the sheen and surface of each printed replica of the found photographs to perfection, including original inscriptions and backing material on all thirty-eight pieces within the collection. Beyond authorship, these near-exact duplicates bring into question the nature of the copy versus the original in a profoundly Habermasian way; the originals are merely found whereas the reproductions are collated (and thus categorized), given additional focus through the lens of ‘art’5 and monetized. Perhaps it is no accident that the vehicle for delivering these media is a box, as the edition opens contemporary art practices and art publishing strategies up to a bevy of compelling questions.

Shin’s new stüccke line of books for edition nord explore drawing as a medium and focus, most notably Kawai Misaki’s Pencil Exercise — a mammoth compendium of quick, mirth-filled line drawings. This 500-page expanse of quirky mark-making that evince Kawai’s place as the heir to the throne of art-making dominated by so many skateboarders (most notably Mark Gonzales) creating loose, off-the-cuff works that celebrate life, absurdity, and the world around us with more than a pinch of atavistic tendencies. These books are held together using the most spare, yet strongest material. The covers are minimal or essentially dematerialized, taking the form of postcards or smaller sheets of paper. Added to this Is a sense of customization. Kawaii’s book features eight different “cover” designs, a minimal foreground to the mono-color drawings that comprise the edition.

It is natural that Akiyama has turned to self-publishing. the establishment of the edition nord imprint followed fifteen years of designing books and printed promotional materials for some of Tokyo’s most successful galleries, notably hiromiyoshi. Akiyama has designed books for artists such as photographer Araki Nobuyoshi, sculptor/painter Keegan McHargue6, architect Ando Tadao, as well as innumerable others. It is also curious as to what Akiyama’s trajectory from here will be, as a publisher and as a graphic designer. I, for one, am curious- his arc in graphic design and self-initiated curatorial projects is a potential blueprint for how graphic design might be practiced in a distinct way in Japan that veers from the mere labor-based model so prevalent today. It is ‘merely’ a matter of public awareness, acknowledgement and encouragement — phenomena that often occur slowly in a nation slow to change. If picked up and ran with, it’d infinitely enrich design culture in Japan.

1 Despite Akiyama’s pastoral retreat from Tokyo, he is still very much an active force in the city, representing edition nord at the Tokyo Art Book Fair, appearing alongside Kawai at the opening for the Pencil Exercise exhibition and book release.

2 I note this from personal experience, I engaged in the series, giving a lecture and a short question-and-answer session with Akiyama. I am grateful to him for his politeness at me hogging the mic like an American jerk.

3 As noted in my recent lecture series in the United States, the life of the graphic designer residing in Tokyo is often stark — graphic designers tend to work far-longer hours than their American and European counterparts and earn approximately 60% of what their Western counterparts do. There are exceptions, but they are few and far-between.

A personal, anonymized case study:
Naoko is a friend and graphic designer working for a small architecture publishing house. She begins work at 10am and finishes work at 4am. She has not had a day off this month — crafting books, printed promotional material, creating booth designs for book fairs and generally helping out around the office. She is paid approximately ¥2.8 million a year — a near-unlivable wage.

4 This being said, Yokoo Tadanori has continually created situations of a similar nature in the 1960s and 1970s that upheld his stature as a designer, artist, hedonist, and creative individual. But these events tended to be in the service of a cult of personality surrounding Yokoo, as opposed to extending the sphere of public/private and engaging communities as done by Akiyama. Akiyama utilized his relative fame to set public dialogue and critique in motion, whereas Yokoo utilized his actual fame (also relative, but stratospheric compared to Akiyama’s renown merely amongst designers) to propel himself into engaging in self-serving creative projects spanning television (titles for the television show むー), getting his photo taken with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (synergy by association), and acting (in a mediocre fashion in the film 僕は天使じゃないよ/Boku Wa Tenshi Ja Nai Yo).

5 And the gallery system which commodifies art.

6 It was McHargue who introduced me to Akiyama in 2007, during the run of his successful solo show “Mauve Deep”C at hiromiyoshi. McHargue, artist Tauba Auerbach, the Akiyamas and I wended our way through a succession of obscure record stores in Shinjuku, watching as McHargue dutifully dug out new additions to his expansive record collection. No mere name drop, McHargue recognized the intensity in which both Akiyama and myself have articulated our positions within the realm of design. I am merely grateful for the introduction.

A The name and subject matter of the designer’s publishing house has been changed — to open up standard business practices in Japan through the concrete example of an individual is to ruin a person’s career.

B That Yokoo’s varied methodologies and career turns have never been exposed to serious criticism in the design or popular press is case for worry, hence these barbed stings that occasionally appear in my essays.

C I would also like to note that this exhibition title is pretty much the most awesome title for an exhibition ever.

Murakami Haruki’s most recent novel 1Q84 was released in English translation this past October — his most widely anticipated work and arguably the most anticipated Japanese translation ever.

Before its initial May 2009 release, Murakami kept the content of the two-volume novel a close secret. That sense of mystery fueled sales in Japan: The novel quickly sold out and went through several printings. Murakami added Book Three in April 2010 to finish the tale of writer/math teacher Tengo and physical trainer/assassin Aomame, two thirty-year-olds who are transported to an alternate universe and battle bizarre forces that control the universe. Book Three sold a million copies in just two weeks.

News of the Japanese version stoked the interest of the author’s international fan base. Now that Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, and Phillip Gabriel (in addition to his many other translators around the world) have caught up with Murakami, fanboys and girls have to get their news from abroad via those who can read Japanese, or other languages which are more quickly translated. The Japan Times ran a review of Books One and Two (and later Three) as did The Complete Review cataloged the international critical response as the European translations followed the Chinese and Korean. Orthofer even wrote a review of the first two books based on the German translation.

In October, some American bookstores held midnight release parties, and one New York San Francisco bookstore even bought tacos and beer for customers who had pre-ordered the novel. The critical response to the 900+ page mammoth arrived quickly thanks to review copies that had been issued months earlier. 1Q84 has been included on all of the year-end best of lists by default (Amazon, New York Times, Barnes and Noble, The Economist), and many have lumped it together with Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and George R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons, celebrating the return of the epic five-pound novel.

Critics overall, however, have been far more divided than the initial fervor surrounding the release would suggest.

Some have attempted to locate Murakami’s Japanese-ness as John Updike did in The New Yorker in 2005 for Kafka on the Shore, praising Murakami for his “Japanese spiritual tact.” Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal gives a balanced review that is mostly negative, but his final comment claims that the book “floats in a globalized ether”: It’s weak because it is “wrapped in a cocoon — or an air chrysalis — of cultural amnesia” and doesn’t take advantage of the country’s literary history. Emily Parker of The Daily Beast defends the novel with the puzzling suggestion that readers should “stop looking for hidden meanings.” Instead “Be one with the Japanese. Japanese cultural phenomena don’t always translate so well overseas.”

Michael Dirda of the Washington Postand Kathryn Schulz of the New York Times both claim that the book kept them reading (and thinking about it after they finished), but Dirda is far more willing to overlook its weaknesses. Schulz is one of the few critics to question Murakami’s use of rape, calling the novel “psychologically unconvincing and morally unsavory.” She isn’t ready to dismiss it completely, though. She still enjoyed reading it.

Another review in the New York Times, this one by Janet Maslin, was far more negative than Schulz’s and summed up the critical response: “…1Q84 has even [Murakami’s] most ardent fans doing back flips as they try to justify this book’s glaring troubles.” Nathan Heller of Slate is one of these fans, apparently. In the beginning of his review he acknowledges that “a novelist who can draw in, and retain, so large and avid an international audience must be doing something right.” And then the backflips begin. He decides that that “something” is this: 1Q84 succeeds by re-creating a childhood experience of storytelling.” He dismissed the banalities, the childish plot points, and fantastical nature as intentionally childish.

Heller is a more forgiving reader than Christian Williams of The Onion A.V. Club who refuses to play the game and bashes the novel, labeling it “stylistically clumsy” and filled with “tone-deaf dialogue, turgid description, and unyielding plot.” Perhaps the most succinct summary of the novel came on Amazon from a user named “bookcynic” who stated “many curiosities were left unexplained.”

While this is true for many of Murakami’s novels, nowhere before has he been gone on for so many pages with so little resolution. Nor with so much awkward sex: The novel was nominated for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award, an annual contest sponsored by Literary Review. 1Q84 was nominated along side King’s novel as well as Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas; David Guterson ended up winning for his rewriting of the Oedipus Rex myth, Ed King.

For more perspective, let us turn to Jay Rubin’s take on Kafka on the Shore in his book Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words — perhaps the most fitting description of Murakami’s fiction post-1987:

One’s reception…depends heavily on the degree of one’s willingness to ‘go with the flow’ of the story. To a reader less willing, Murakami seems to be relying far too heavily on contrivance and coincidence, and he too easily overlooks inconsistencies on the realistic pane.

Critics willing to read past what Schulz called the “surface gaffes” are more likely to enjoy the book. This, more than anything else, explains the range of responses to the book.

Other than Christopher Tayler of the London Review of Books, critics have also failed to mention that 1Q84 is Murakami’s least funny novel. Tayler astutely notes that the third-person narration “dampens the wisecracks, deprives the central characters of Boku’s buttonholing powers and generally takes the edge off Murakami’s storytelling.” One of the most enjoyable (if not the most enjoyable) parts about reading Murakami, especially his early works, is hearing his boku narrator’s commentary on the world around him. Take, for example, the narrator’s encounter with hotel reception when he asks about the development of the new Dolphin Hotel in Dance Dance Dance:

Thirty seconds later, [the receptionist] returned with a fortyish man in a black suit. A real live hotelier by the looks of him. I’d met enough of them in my line of work. They are a dubious species, with twenty-five different smiles on call for every variety of circumstance. From the cool and cordial twinge of disinterest to the measured grin of satisfaction. They wield the entire arsenal by number, like golf clubs for particular shots.

This is the Murakami I know and love. His narration had a healthy disrespect for authority but didn’t make much of it. At the heart of the narrator is sentimentality.

To an extent, Murakami wrote through his own disillusion of the dissolution of the student movement of the late-’60s. While Murakami worked late hours running a jazz bar after he graduated from Waseda University, his former classmates sold out for the Japanese economy, helping run the big businesses that fueled Japan’s boom. Norwegian Wood then is the end of the line — until then his narrators had been capable of drinking off the bad times or forgetting them, but in Norwegian Wood we learn that there is no amnesia, that in fact the narrators have been haunted by memories of lost love and dead friends. While this is a notable shift in tone, Watanabe, the narrator of the book, still has a healthy, sardonic view of the world.

The tone of 1Q84, however, is drastically different than anything Murakami’s ever written. Written completely in third person, the lack of first person narrator makes it difficult to tell when Murakami is trying to be funny and when he is trying to be earnest. Aomame’s lesbian encounter, for example, seems overly earnest:

As her mind traced these graphic memories, the brass unison of Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta rang like festive background music. The palm of her hand was caressing the curve of Tamaki’s waist. At first Tamaki just laughed as if she were being tickled, but soon the laughter stopped, and her breathing changed. The music had initially been composed as a fanfare for an athletic meet. The breeze blew gently over the green meadows of Bohemia in time with the music. Aomame knew when Tamaki’s nipples suddenly became erect. And then her own did the same. And then the timpani conjured up a complex musical pattern.

Yet the strange juxtaposition of bold brass instruments and erect nipples also begs to be read as comedy (unintentional though it may be). Murakami’s biggest failure with 1Q84 may be that he’s trying too hard.

While researching the history of Onitsuka Tiger’s branding and graphic design, I came across an odd, yet highly appealing piece of custom lettering on the company’s ONICK ski boots from the 1970s. Reminiscent of aspects of the typeface Black-Out by Eli Carrico (released by my type foundry Wordshape), yet vertically compressed with razor-sliced counters and odd stencil element that makes up one of the legs of the “K,” the ONICK lettering is a potential source for an intriguing modular font.

Original ONICK lettering

I immediately thought of Tsunekawa Ryoichi as a potential collaborator to bring this piece of lettering to full-fledged life in the contemporary context. Based in Nagoya, Tsunekawa runs an independent type foundry called Dharma Type, including three specialized foundry sub-labels: Flat-It, devoted to display lettering; Prop-A-Ganda, a series of fonts inspired by and based on retro propaganda posters, movie posters, retail sign lettering and advertisements in the early 20th century; and Holiday Type, a series of decorative and retro scripts for holiday use.

Tsunekawa’s work has seen a flurry of notice overseas this past year, having been featured in both MyFonts’ “Creative Characters” and YouWorkForThem’s newsletter. As the work of most Japanese type designers is almost wholly unnoticed abroad, the fact that Tsunekawa was interviewed by two of the most popular type distribution companies in the world is something beyond the norm. Perhaps it is because he works independently, or perhaps it is due to the charm and friendliness with which his typefaces are infused. Either way, this attention is both welcome and appreciated.

ONICK ski boot

Beyond mere charm, Tsunekawa’s work is nuanced, detailed, and accessible due to its high level of finish. His fonts stand apart from his contemporaries in Latin typeface design in Japan due to his fascination with pop, vernacular, and historical lettering from “non-pure” sources, whereas type designers like Okano Kunihiko and Kobayashi Akira have spent years analyzing the essence of Western letterform construction and unlocking the essence of Latin forms, Tsunekawa views surface and the awkward nature of his sources as being of value, as well.

His irreverence for the formal doctrines of history imbue his typeface designs with a rugged inventiveness that would be missed by most — glyphs without source designs are guessed at and approximated, often in a manner wildly divergent from what Western eyes would assume. It is in these moments that I find sheer delight in Tsunekawa’s work and that make me most pleased to invite him aboard Néojaponisme and Onitsuka Tiger’s type development project.

Rough sketch for ONICK

His assorted typefaces show an eclecticism in finish and as holistic systems. Tsunekawa’s return email to me about the proposed type project showed a digital sketch of how a completed typeface family from the source lettering might look, rendered with an effortlessness and dedication to detail that belies a skilled craftsperson. Further development showed Tsunekawa’s rigor. The typeface in development rapidly featured glyphs ignored by many: a full set of fractions, Eastern European diacritics and accents, superior and inferior numerals, alternate characters, and custom ligatures — all designed with regulated, detailed spacing.

ONICK type specimen

ONICK is a typeface Tsunekawa should be proud of — an homage to a moment in history rendered in the absolute best fashion. We are proud to present it to the world as a series of type kits including desktop and web fonts bundled with @font-face CSS kits for immediate use.

Download ONICK here.

Following the one-two-three punch of the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in Fukushima, much ink and many pixels have been spilled over foreign media outlets’ treatment of the disasters. In particular, many foreign residents (including myself and other members of this web journal) have accused the overseas mass media of panicking locals who rely on English-language news (and their parents) by overplaying the nuclear situation in comparison to more measured domestic coverage. Those playing devils’ advocate, such as Uesugi Takashi, claim the foreign media brought a balanced viewpoint to a dangerous situation the Japanese government is doing its best to downplay.

Whichever side you take, there’s one piece missing from the puzzle: How do Japanese feel about the coverage of their country from abroad? And more to the point, how do domestic journalists feel about their foreign counterparts? Largely because everyone has had their hands full dealing with the unfolding crises, there’s been precious little commentary from the Japanese about the portrayal of their nation’s predicament abroad. Until now.

“The most notable aspect of the incident was the sheer number of journalists who ‘deserted in the face of the enemy,’” declare Yokota Takashi and Yamada Toshihiro, who reported on the crisis in Tohoku as correspondents for the Japanese language edition of Newsweek. Their article, entitled “And Then the Journalists Ran Away,” is a scathing critique of the behavior of the Western mass media in the early days of the Fukushima disaster.

Until now, Japan regarded the foreign media with an unadulterated measure of respect. We honored their journalistic standards as we relied to a degree upon their authority. [...] But this fairy-tale crumbled during the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. Entangled in the very news they were supposed to report, [the Western media] lost all sense of composure.

Yokota and Yamada paint a portrait of journalists who were as terrified of the dangers of radiation as the readers and viewers to whom they were supposed to be delivering the news.

Take, for example, the case of a journalist from America’s one of the world’s most well-known financial newspapers, who was covering the U.S. military support efforts alongside correspondents of this magazine. [...] In normal times, this Tokyo-based correspondent conducted himself with the utmost of composure. On the first day of our coverage of the U.S. military, he coolly filed stories from the front lines on his smart phone.

But when dawn broke the next day, he was a changed man. This was right as the situation at Fukushima Daiichi began to worsen. Hastily packing his bags, he began to rush away from the command center. When a U.S. military spokesman tried to persuade him that we were in no immediate danger, the preoccupied journalist cut him off with an “I just want to get out of here!” before disappearing into the city of Sendai.

Yokota and Yamada, however, reserve their harshest criticism for television reporters.

Hands down, the American television stations were the most hysterical presence. Playing up the drama of world news is their bread and butter, but it reached new heights in Tohoku [...] At first, the point was to showcase their reporters doing on-site coverage. But this quickly devolved into a circus.

The pair go on to describe a breathless report by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, which (by very nature of being in English) undoubtedly wasn’t seen by many locals. It took place just after Cooper learned about the second hydrogen explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi complex.

In a live back-and-forth [from Japan] with a nuclear expert back in the studio in America, Cooper peppered his fellow reporters with questions like “How far are we from Fukushima?” and “Which way is the wind blowing?” Upon hearing that he was more than 100 kilometers distant from the Fukushima reactors, he exclaimed “Then shouldn’t we get out of here?” Whether he was doing this in order to build a sense of drama, or out of sincere apprehension, we don’t know. But what is clear is that he made no attempt to calmly ascertain the facts of the situation, and in so doing needlessly fanned the fears of the audience.

Even the most well meaning attempts to frame the situation often came off as clueless, according to Yokota and Yamada.

Some [foreign journalists] lost their intellects along with their cool. [...] Even going so far as to delve into stereotyping. [...] When the 800 original nuclear workers were reduced to 50, the Western media quickly dubbed them “The Fukushima 50” and praised their valor. But this also proved fertile ground for prejudicial references. England’s Sky News called them “Nuclear Ninja” and “Samurai,” while the famed German paper BILD referred to the JSDF helicopters dropping water on the plants as “kamikaze.” At first glance this sort of reporting might seem harmless, but it isn’t.

The pair reasons that these “racist” stereotypes aren’t just sloppy reporting. They draw attention from the people who are truly suffering: the actual victims of the tsunami.

Effectively the predicament of the victims has been made secondary. Little has been reported about those who are desperately searching for their families, the lack of adequate medical care for the elderly who make up the majority of refugees, or the economic impact of the disasters.

They describe a vicious cycle that affected not only viewers, but governments as well.

When foreign media saw reports like Cooper’s, which overstated the terrors of radiation, many began to wonder if the situation wasn’t actually far worse than the Japanese were leading them to believe. It’s entirely possible that this overplaying of the dangers more than necessary played a key role in the decisions of several embassies to evacuate their citizens.

Yokota and Yamada reserve some words of praise for the media outlets that are treating the situation with the attention they feel it truly deserves.

The New York Times, which has run no shortage of articles that stereotype Japan, has increased the number of reporters covering the country and continues to do good work. And many other foreign journalists actually requested to be sent to Japan to support Tokyo bureaus deflated by the journalistic exodus.

But the pair conclude that even as things improve, the impact of foreign-media-fed hysteria remains.

The fact remains that the use of inflammatory words “Chernobyl-level disaster” continues to paint the entirety of Japan as devastated. The fear of radiation has led cargo ships to avoid ports in Tokyo and Yokohama, and there have even been cases of experts being forbidden from entering stricken areas to conduct surveys of the conditions there. This is hindering recovery. It’s a second disaster caused by the media.

Japan survived the trial of the Tohoku/Kanto Disaster, but we can’t say it’s thanks to the foreign media.

“If someone designs an original typeface … they don’t invent new letters; they invent new shapes for letters that we understand only because they are so similar to the shapes of letters that already exist. It is not so much the particular shapes that are important, but rather the ingenuity of the letterforms in the context of all the other letterforms that existed before, and the meaning or significance they convey in that context.”
– Mr Keedy, 2004

The work of Okano Kunihiko (岡野邦彦) and Ohara Daijiro (大原大次郎) represent wildly different approaches to typography, though each is a master craftsperson at creating original contemporary letterforms inflected by conceptual and formal lettering from the past. Little seen outside of Japan, their work represents a new guard of typographic designers filtering into the Japanese mainstream.

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 their 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 punchcutters, deep ink traps of the 1970s and 1980s, and exaggeratedly differentiated counterspaces 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.

The work of Ohara Daijiro meanwhile 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 pop band Sakerock mimic their continuation of the values and sounds of late ’80s 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.

Rhythm is very much the base of good lettering and typography, and this is where Okano and Ohara’s work connects: Each is creating patterns of work that keep time in ways that are reliant upon history while being very much original compositions. Each will be remembered as being part of a continuum — creative ‘fellow travelers’ who have created applied visual form filled with meaning.

* Originally published in the German typography quarterly Slanted #11 along with the first in a twelve-part primer on Japanese typography to be published in book form at some undetermined future date.

Walking through my neighborhood, Hatagaya, I get a daily reminder of a dead part of the American typographic and linguistic lexicon that has died in the West, yet is alive and well in Japan. This, dear readers, is the screamer- an oversized, extremely italicized exclamation point.

Popularized in the 1920s and 1930s, screamers were cast separately from standard typefaces, and deployed in newspapers for added visual emphasis- punching up headlines and advertisements alike.

In remembrance of this aspect of typography deceased in Western typography, though very much alive in the Japanese typographic signage vernacular, Néojaponisme and Wordshape offer a set of screamers for our readers free of charge.

In 1926, at the request of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, the foundry he worked for, American type designer Oswald Bruce Cooper designed a wide selection of screamers that included left-tilted (back-slanted), upright (normal) and right-tilted (italicized) versions. The designer of the wildly popular Cooper Black typeface, Cooper was a much sought-after force in the pre-Bauhaus world of graphic design- a creator of work that was both idiosyncratic and communicative.

The foundry rushed the screamers into production, much to Cooper’s dismay. Cooper was disappointed with the final form of the screamers– they were designed in assorted weights to match the assorted series of typefaces that Cooper had designed, as well as in a variety of other formal options: squared-off, incised, wavy, Tuscan and rounded.

Cooper’s working design methodology was to redraw his projects a number of times in order to refine the formal results. However the screamer project was hastily cut by the head of BB&S’s matrix engraving room in fourteen sizes from the initial sketches. This preemptive final form caused Cooper to fire off a fiery missive stating, “Everything I draw is bum the first half-dozen times I draw it; the trouble with these is that I drew them only once!”

This typeface is the result of researching Cooper’s original drawings and series of engraved proofs for the screamers, as well as the original Screamer type specimen.

Cooper Screamers have never been available before in digital format. Cooper Screamers are part of a larger research and development initiative begun by Ian Lynam in bringing out unreleased digital versions of the typefaces and ornament of Oz Cooper. Accompanying the initiial fonts was the release of the definitive essay on the life and work of Cooper in Idea Magazine #339. Download them here.

Tokyomango: Summary of Joi and Lisa’s session about Japanese obsessions at Foo Camp

Joi Ito and Lisa Katayama are two of the most influential voices on Japanese culture for a global audience, but I was a bit troubled by some of their analysis of otaku for the O’Reilly Foo Camp.

In trying to explain the obsessiveness of otaku culture, they were quick to whip out “cultural explanations” — Zen Buddhism, the Tokugawa caste system, and ukiyo-e. Apparently Japan, despite massive social changes over a thousand years, has somehow retained the same “spirit” over time, which oddly manifests not in the middle of society, but in its strangest marginal outcast subcultures.

The danger of using the blunt “culture” explanations, however, is that it neglects to look at the actual and specific mechanisms which maintain or change culture. In most cases, these mechanisms are political or economic, and values shift according to structural situations. And most importantly, those within the system are often actively fighting against it. For example:

For generations, people have been taught to be happy perfecting their role in society, without necessarily viewing social or financial gain as a measurement of their success—it’s the shokunin culture in which focusing on one job allows one to obsess with abandon until they reach perfection on a very local level.

During the Tokugawa era, the rigid class system attempted to keep society stable by dividing society into four classes (five if you count the burakumin). At the bottom of society, however, the merchants actively worked against the system by pushing further and further with financial success. And you can make a case that this uneven financial gain of those at the bottom of the caste system led to the system’s downfall. Furthermore, when this class system was abolished in the Meiji Restoration, there was a huge rush of farmer’s and merchant’s sons successfully increasing their station in life — despite some kind of eternal Japanese “taboo” against this. In other words, there is no straight line of social stratification from the 17th to 21st century, and plenty of people have fought against the pre-determination of social class.

The real question, which these issues do little in addressing, is why otaku in particular tend to go to extremes of perfection. Surely there are cultural factors at work, but this kind of behavior is almost universal for subcultural units: in which participants tend to push further and further within accepted codes in order to show dedication to the group. There were surely British mods in the ’60s who were identical to otaku in their obsession with mastering their subcultural language of fashion signifiers. Some factors of Japanese culture make this more extreme, but there must be something about the unique social position of the otaku — and their birth in the high consumer years of a mature post-industrial capitalist economy — that serves as the best explanation.

Lisa mentioned that, when she was interviewing people for her 2D love story in the NY Times magazine, several sources likened the ability to fall in love with a body pillow to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness training.

I am sure if I openly loved an inanimate object, I too would be desperate to justify that love with some kind of ancient Japanese spirituality. I am not sure, however, that we are supposed to take this self-diagnosis seriously. Is there a way to demonstrate a path between these Buddhist values and a fringe sexual subculture? How did the pillow-humper access these Zen Buddhist principles? Are they just in the “ether” of Japanese society? Then why doesn’t everyone hump pillows? Again, the question about the otaku is less about their adherence to Japanese values, but their reason for anti-social and mostly frowned-upon behavior.

But this one bothered me the most:

While young Japanese people might have the outward appearance of rebellion, the majority follow a certain set of social rules. They will probably wait in line to get on the train just like any other good citizen. For example, Joi once bumped into a guy wearing a button that said “fuck off and die.” The guy promptly bowed, apologized, and walked away.

Note that the button did not say “Fuck Off and Die” in Japanese. And Joi did not run into a yankii guys who told him「死ね!」. The fact that the button was in English explains everything.

Now, I am sure the guy wearing the button generally understood the meaning of the statement, but we have to think about the actual mechanics of foreign culture importation in Japan. Punk culture —from which the button’s attitude comes — came to Japan explicitly through consumerist mass media in the late ’70s and early ’80s, mostly marketed to and read by the upper middle classes. This process automatically tends to purge the signifier of its original meanings and turn it into pure “fashion.” The media in which the message was spread in general does not spread or advocate a real “punk” view of society. Punk kids — whether in the UK or US “punk” mold — have always been primarily drawn from the consumer classes, and this consumer activity is correlated with higher placement in the social ladder. This ironically means that punk attitude has a real social risk for those most likely to buy punk fashion.

Japan’s real punks — the yankii, the bosozoku — are not a part of this consumerist world and embrace a “punk” attitude as part of their lifestyle. They would not bow to you if you accidentally bumped them.

So the reason that “rebellious-looking” teens follow the set rules is because they have imported a “rebellious” look as a look. Otherwise, their values are aligned with other members of middle-class society. This explanation that “punks are really polite,” however, only accounts for middle class teens. Working-class delinquent teens, who are not officially パンク系 but are punks in the broadest sense, are less likely to follow social rules.

I don’t mean to suggest that nothing in Japan can be explained by cultural heritage, but there are always enough exceptions and breaks in the straight timeline to warrant closer scrutiny. Furthermore, Japanese people themselves tend to use cultural tradition as a way to justify their own actions. This is basically true everywhere in the world. In the U.S., conservatives and liberals constantly fight over who has the most accurate interpretation of the Constitution and the Founding Father’s values. It’s officially our job to not take culturalist claims at face value, or at least, to discover the engines and pathways that make culture continue throughout time. Some of the otaku’s behavior is very Japanese. But in the end, they probably have little or nothing to do with Zen Buddhism.

At 1000 yen for 150 quickly-digested pages, Ishii Hiroyuki 石井裕之 and John W. Culver’s book on “black cold-reading,” Aru nise-uranaishi no kokuhaku あるニセ占い師の告白 (“The Cold Babble: Confessions of a Pseudo-Psychic”), was an ironic presence on the shelves earlier this year. A book with the stated purpose of teaching its readers to recognize and resist emotional manipulation, advertised with “Banned from sale?!” (発売禁止！？) in large print plus a tiny “Pick it up before it is!” (になる前に手にとってください！) alongside — not to mention the sister volume on “white cold-reading” released at the same time for the same price — well, you could be forgiven for concluding that the first lesson is to wait for it to turn up on the 105-yen shelves at Book Off.

There’s nothing wrong with the content of the Confessions. The writing is purple but not labored. The account of Culver’s early psychic wood-shedding is pointless fluff, but the sentence-by-sentence breakdown of a sample cold-reading session is a decent introduction to the topic. The most interesting thing about the book, though, is that one of its authors doesn’t exist.

“This book,” Ishii explains in the first sentence of the introduction, “Is in the form of a translation of John W. Culver’s ‘The Cold Babble: Confessions of a Pseudo-Psychic’ [...] but, in fact, this is a work of fiction by myself, Ishii Hiroyuki.” He goes on to explain (or claim) that this was one of his first ideas for writing about cold-reading (a term the katakana version of which, incidentally, Ishii appears to have trademarked), rejected by the publisher for being too “provocative,” but that he has decided to revive the idea in the hopes that it will help shock Japan out of its ongoing susceptibility to fraudulent spiritualists and ore ore scams.

Ishii is not the first Japanese author to fake a foreign nationality. Inukai Yūichi 犬飼裕一 has argued that pretending to be a foreigner in order to criticize Japanese society is “a tradition” in Japan. One of the best-known examples of this trend is Yamamoto Shichihei 山本七平, who used the pen name “Isaiah Ben-Dasan” in the 1970s to publish the Nihonjin to Yudayajin 『日本人とユダヤ人』 (“The Japanese and the Jews”) and attack Honda Katsuichi 本多勝一’s Asahi Shimbun series on the Asia-Pacific War. A few years later, Fujishima Taisuke 藤島泰輔 began his twenty-volume-plus Fushiji no kuni nippon 『不思議の国ニッポン』 (“Wonderland Japan”) series under the name “Paul Bonet.”

There are differences. “John W. Culver” is pure glamour: a fake psychic in the U.S., land of celebrity, and crime is a good if unadventurous hook. “Ben-Dasan” and “Bonet” were partly about glamour too, but more importantly, they were meant to suggest objectivity — “I have no particular stake in any Japanese culture war; here is what I think.” Ishii cheerfully reveals the truth about “Culver” in his introduction, while Yamamoto reportedly did not ever fully admit to being “Ben-Dasan”: one’s show business, the other’s sock puppetry.

Either way, it’s disappointing that Ishii decided to pound on a blue-eyed straw man like that. Surely Japan would have been better served by an exposé on cold-reading within its own borders.

The cover of Amélie Nothomb’s Tokyo Fiancée, translated by Alison Anderson for Europa Editions, depicts the only two characters in the novel: the author and the Rising Sun. They sit facing each other; Nothomb looks back over her shoulder at us, and the Rising Sun looms behind her, perfect, opaque, and blotting out everything else.

This artificially narrowed focus does not make the novel a bad one. Nothomb is refreshingly unafraid of the thin line between clever and stupid, leading to such entertainments as this:

I blessed whoever it was who had invented engagements. Life has its share of trials; a mechanism of fluids allows us, all the same, to make our way through them. [...] Yes, I shall irrigate you, lavish you with my riches, refresh you, appease your thirst, but how can I know the course my river shall follow: you shall never bathe twice in the same fiancée.

She also reveals herself to be a perceptive and insightful observer — but only of herself. Every other character in the novel is a cardboard cutout whose personality derives from some essentialist stereotype or other. Nothomb’s fiancé Rinri, for example, literally cannot pour himself a drink without inspiring a Crichton-grade Japanological analysis. When he insists on washing himself at the sink, it is because he is unwilling to “sully the waters of the honorable bathtub”; when we learn that he has “traveled a great deal — and always alone, without a camera” — Nothomb is careful to note that this makes him “not typically Japanese.” Most unfairly of all, she even projects the same attitudes onto Rinri himself, such as in this medievally sparse exchange:

“Have you already brought your lady love here?”

“I have no lady love.”

“Have you ever had a lady love?”

“Yes. I did not bring her here.”

I was thus the first lady to have the honor. It must have been because I was a foreigner.

Before long we come to understand that Tokyo Fiancée is not the intense face-to-face character study you might expect of a novel about getting engaged in a foreign land. Rather, it is a carefully edited slice of one person’s interior life as they sort through some issues of their own. (Note that the action overlaps the period covered by Nothomb’s earlier Fear and Trembling — it’s hard to blame her for being self-indulgent on the weekends if that’s what her weekdays were like.)

Other characters generally feel even more phoned-in than Rinri. Exceptionalist, boorish U.S. expats; Rinri’s patronizing, cruel mother; an undifferentiated mob of gold-toothed classmates from Singapore. At the extreme of this trend are figures such as the one described only as “a Canadian girl” who gravely warns Nothomb that “these marriages” produce “the most awful children”:

“What on earth are you talking about? Eurasians are magnificent.”

“But dreadful. I have a girlfriend who married a Japanese guy. They have two children, six and four years old. They call their mother weewee and their father poop.”

I burst out laughing.

“Maybe they have their reasons,” I said.

“How can you laugh? And what if it happens to you?”

“I don’t think I’ll be having kids.”

“Oh. Why? That’s not normal.”

I walked away humming a song by Georges Brassens in my head: “No, those good folk sure don’t like it / When you head off down a different path…”

Typical Canadian! Always trying to tie down the restless Belgian soul with their rules and regulations. Fortunately, Nothomb has a companion on her smug voyage down that different path: Japan, played here by Mount Fuji itself.

Mute but friendly, the mountain is drawn more vividly than any of Nothomb’s human interlocutors, partly because of its folk-links to her early childhood (spent in Japan, though far to the west). The encounters between writer and mountain are of greater emotional consequence than her entire relationship with Rinri.

Italy’s Corriere della Sera, according to the book’s back cover, praised Nothomb for the “profound relationship she has with Japan, with its symbols, its stereotypes, its archetypes.” But this is also her greatest flaw: she is so invested in archetypes and symbols that she never breaks through to the reality they abbreviate. Some passages seem almost to acknowledge this, like this meditation on Mount Fuji:

The volcano is a sublime invention that you can see from almost everywhere, so much so that at times I took it for a hologram. I’ve lost count of the number of places on Honshu that offer a superb view of Mount Fuji: it would be easier to count the number of places from which you cannot see it. If nationalists had wanted to create a unifying symbol, they would have had to build Mount Fuji. It is impossible to gaze at it without feeling a sacred, mythical tingling: it is too beautiful, too perfect, too ideal.

Except at the foot, where it resembled any old mountain, a sort of shapeless lump.

Similarly, while the notion of koi inspires a mini-essay on varieties of amorous experience (all rooted in national character, natch), more pedestrian words like osshaimasu are casually misspelled. (Seriously — neither Nothomb, nor her editor, not Anderson, nor Anderson’s editor could be bothered checking out how to spell the words they use?)

Ultimately, this extreme disregard for the grain-by-grain trickle of experience precludes any real insight into it. Tokyo Fiancée is pleasant and generous, but never amounts to more than the tale of a European born in Japan and a Japan born in Europe.

Back in the Néomarxisme days, one of the first major debates was the state of Japan’s “postmodernity”: whether Japan perfectly embodied the ideal postmodernist society, and therefore, was the best place to look for clues to our global future. In his newly-translated book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals
(originally published in 2001 as 『動物化するポストモダン―オタクから見た日本社会』), professor and critic Azuma Hiroki (東浩紀) deconstructs this self-association with postmodernism in Japan, arguing that the idea of a “postmodern Japan” has more to do with 1980s’ narcissism than proper theoretical conclusions. (Wikipedia links added by editors.)

Theories of postmodernism emerged in France in the 1960s, spread to the United States in the 1970s, and were imported into Japan in the 1980s. Postmodernism is a complex and difficult discourse that grew out of an amalgamation of structuralism, Marxism, theories on consumer society, and critical theory. Its circulation was thus largely confined to universities. In Japan, however, it was acclaimed outside universities in the mid 1980s as a fashionable mode of thought for the younger generation, but then subsequently forgotten together with the era. As a fad in theory, Japanese postmodernism was often referred to as “New Academism.” Even after postmodernism (i.e., “New Academism”) disappeared from Japan, theories on postmodernism remained a subject of study in English language universities throughout the world and affected subsequent academic trends. As I have written on these differing circumstances in an earlier essay, I ask those who are interested to consult that text. In any case, what is important here is not really the content of the theories of postmodernism but the fact that in Japan this highly complex body of thought turned into a kind of faddish media frenzy.

As a few critics at the time have already pointed out, this postmodernism fad was connected to the narcissism that permeated Japanese society in the 1980s. The discourse on postmodernism popular in Japan at the time was unique in the way it deliberately confused and intermingled questions over what encompassed “postmodernism” and what encompassed “Japaneseness.”

The claim endorsed by postmodernists at the time went something like this: Postmodernization refers to a process that occurs after modernity. However, Japan was never completely modernized in the first place. Until now this has been considered a defect; but as we progress to a new stage of world history from modernity to postmodernity, it rather promises to become a benefit, because this nation, never fully modernized, is easily able to embrace the process of postmodernization. For instance, as modern perceptions of humanity never fully penetrated Japan, it can adapt to the collapse of the concept of subjectivity with little resistance. In this way, Japan will emerge in the twentieth century as a leading nation boasting a fully matured consumer society and technological prowess…

Whereas modernity equals the West, postmodernity equals Japan. To be Japanese is thus to be standing at the forefront of history. Historically, this simplistic formula could be conceived as a repetition of the claims of the prewar Kyoto School that Japan was able to “overcome modernity.” Concurrently, it was also a direct reflection of the economic climate of the times. In the mid-1980s, in direct contrast to the United States, which had been suffering a protracted period of economic tumult since the Vietnam War, Japan suddenly stood at the zenith of the world economy, having entered a period of short-lived prosperity that would end in the bubble economy.

Postmodernists in Japan during this time elected to draw on the work of the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Nothing better expresses the reality of Japanese postmodernists’ desires than this choice. As I explain further in the following chapter, Kojève is known for ascertaining two different types of possible social formation in the postmodern era: the animalization of society as seen in the U.S. model and the spread of snobbery as illustrated in the Japanese model. In this regard, Kojève is oddly sympathetic towards Japan, and he predicts that the Japanization (or snobbery) of Westerners will prevail over Americanization (or animalization). In the eyes of Japanese in the 1980s, the prosperity of the times no doubt signified that we were heading toward the realization of this prospect.

Phrased another way, the prosperity of the 1980s enabled Japanese society to forget superficially the existence of its complex towards the United States, which we have examined. “Now the United States has been defeated! We no longer have to speak about the penetration of Americanization in Japan but rather must consider the advancement of Japanism in America!” The rise of postmodernism as an intellectual fad was supported by a climate that produced such claims. This same set of factors in turn aided the spread of otaku culture. The image of Japan that obsesses otaku is in fact no more than a U.S.-produced imitation, yet the atmosphere described above was the very thing that conveniently allowed people to forget about these origins. (16-18)