Taku Satoh - Just Enough Design: Reflections on the Japanese Philosophy of Hodo-hodo

Special thanks to Miyuki Tateno and Allison Markin Powell.

Copyright 2022 by Taku Satoh.

All photographs copyright 2022 TSDO Inc., except as specified on is a continuation of the copyright page.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-7972-1132-9 (epub, mobi)

ISBN 978-1-7972-0990-6 (paperback)

Design by Kayla Ferriera.

Typeset in Ricardo and Arno Pro.

Chronicle books and gifts are available at special quantity discounts to corporations, professional associations, literacy programs, and other organizations. For details and discount information, please contact our premiums department at or at 1-800-759-0190.

Chronicle Books LLC

680 Second Street

San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

1. CONTENTS

by Linda Hoaglund

This book began in 2019, when Taku Satoh asked me to work with him on an English-language book introducing his design philosophy. I had first met Taku ten years earlier. He had designed a book of photographs of clothing once worn by those who perished in Hiroshima, by the esteemed artist Ishiuchi Miyako, also the subject of my third film, Things Left Behind. Taku has been an esteemed and sought-after designer in Japan for decades and has created countless projects defying categorizationfrom the reusable whisky bottle that launched his career in 1984 to his worldwide advertising graphics for Issey Miyakes iconic Pleats Please clothing brand and the beloved childrens TV series about the Japanese language that he art directs. Issey Miyake was so impressed by Takus ingenious yet self-effacing solutions that he asked Taku to join him as a founding member of 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Japans preeminent design exhibition space in Tokyo.

You may recognize Takus bashful Pleats Please Penguin, but probably not Takus name. This is because the key to his design philosophy is humility; he intentionally sets aside his ego and his preconceptions in order to identify the essence of every project and render it visible. His primary goal as a designer is to facilitate communication. After decades of working in the field, I am convinced that the definition of design is the skill to bring people and things together. Good design is devising smart connections, he says. Connecting people and things means coming up with a unique approach each time. Maintaining the flexibility to respond to every project with a fresh strategy requires a supple thought process, rather than a single signature style. The essence of design can never be about expressing your personality.

Taku came of age in the 1960s, at the dawn of Japans economic miracle, when the legacies of Japans preindustrial past remained entwined with the objects and customs of everyday life. Craftspeople took great pride in painstakingly fashioning toys, utensils, and tools by hand, using organic materials and selling them at prices most people could afford. Although Japan had largely recovered from the extreme poverty of the 1940s and 50s during and after World War II, clothes and other goods were still treated with respect, handled with care, and when damaged, mended or repaired to extend their longevity, not thrown away. These customs and essential values of Takus childhood form the foundations of his philosophy today and galvanize his critiques of the ubiquitous conveniences spawned by Japans booming economy in the 1980s. Early in his career, as Japans economy was reaching its peak, long before sustainability had become the watchword it is today, Taku created a whisky bottle whose design inspires people to repurpose it years after theyve consumed the last drop of whisky.

The roots of Takus approach to design can be directly traced from his childhood all the way back to Japans Edo era. For two and a half centuries (1603 to 1868), Japan isolated itself from the world and prospered in peace, inadvertently postponing industrialization until the late nineteenth century. Although Japans capital was then an urbane metropolis with a population larger than contemporaneous London, everything was still made by hand. Meticulously handcrafted woodblock prints depicting Mount Fuji, Kabuki stars, and the now iconic Great Wave could then be purchased for the price of a bowl of noodles.

Artisans became apprentices at twelve, trained for a decade, and dedicated the rest of their lives to perfecting their craft. These shokunin handmade everything from textiles to tatami mats, from brooms to umbrellas, from woodblock prints to folding screens. Although their creations were elegant and refined, they didnt consider them works of art or sign them. Nor did the shokunin call themselves artists. They valued their creations over their egos. Indeed, at that time, there wasnt even a word for art or artist in the Japanese language, as the beautiful objects artisans created were so integrated into the practical functions of daily life. The large-scale folding screens, bybu, that Taku references in the opening chapter are stunningly beautiful works of art that have been collected by major museums around the world, but they also once served as room dividers.

Nor was there a word for garbage or trash during the Edo period, because literally nothing was ever thrown away. Instead, things were constantly reused and repurposed. The secondhand kimono markets did a brisk business. Bolts of cloth, handwoven in dimensions yielding just enough fabric to stitch into a single kimono, were resewn into futon covers when the garments eventually frayed, and were finally converted into cleaning rags, which were tossed in with the human refuse to fertilize farmers fields when they became shredded beyond use.

Today in Japan, some are working to reclaim both the physical objects and the cultural values of the Edo era. For the past ten years, Taku has been the creative director for several businesses in a World Heritage Site that exemplifies this. Iwami Ginzan was resurrected from the ruins of a silver mining city that prospered in the Edo era but was abandoned when the mines closed. The communitys goal is to rediscover treasures from the past and creatively adapt them for their lives today, always in harmony with nature. The artisanal clothing brand Gungend, for example, is based in a traditional farmhouse and purposely integrates plant-based dyes and traditional methods to make fashionable clothes for contemporary life. Each year, more visitors are drawn to this remote town, nestled in the mountains, to see the fruits of the communitys collective efforts and stay in inns creatively refurbished from traditional Japanese homes. Other provincial villages across Japan are taking similar approaches, reevaluating their habitats, and restoring long-neglected artisanal methods and ways of life. Taku collaborates with them because he believes their approach may yet rescue Japan from its single-minded focus on financial prosperity.