The Meaning of Made in Japan

When I was travelling through Japan in 2014, I stayed for a few nights at a shukubo in Koyasan, a little Shingon Buddhist temple town, tucked away in the mist-covered mountains south of Osaka.

On the first night, the monks invited us to join them for a meal in the communal dining hall. Rain was pounding the forest outside, slashing through the night in great sheets of water, and our group sat awkwardly on the floor, unsure where to put our legs, as a saffron-clad figure placed a small table in front of us. On the table was a teapot, a cup, a pair of chopsticks and a delicate selection of vegetarian shojin ryori (monk food). Nothing fancy, spartan even, but all done with the care and the attention to detail I'd come to characterise as typically 'Japanese'. Whatever that meant.

I remember looking closely at the teapot. It was simple, handmade thing. You could tell by the slight asymmetry, and the way the clay bulged like a wonky pear. But it was warm in my hand, and it felt good, and in a weird way these imperfections somehow enhanced its beauty, and I definitely spent more time looking at that teapot and simply enjoying it as a thing than I'd done during any of my previous encounters with teapots. Read into this what you will.

“That’s the thing about Japanese design,” says American architect and author Naomi Pollock, “whether it’s furniture or architecture or industrial design, you have to look closely, because there are layers of beauty there.”

Naomi Pollock wrote the book on Japanese design. Literally. It's called Japanese Design Since 1945: A Complete Sourcebook, and it's one of 11 books Pollock has penned on the subject. If you want to know what connects the concrete architecture of Tadao Ando with the textiles of Sudō Reiko and a kettle designed by Sori Yanagi, Naomi is the person you call. Especially if you want to answer the fundamental question that seems to float around all Japanese design, which is: why are we so obsessed with it?

"You have to remember," Naomi tells me from Chicago, "that after the War, and certainly into the 1970s, Japanese products were (rightly or wrongly) viewed as cheap. The words 'Made in Japan' weren't a good thing. And then at some point, somewhere around the 1980s, there was this flip, where 'Made in Japan' became associated with high quality."

To understand how brands like MUJI, Uniqlo and Comme de Garçons have taken over the Western design world, and the principles that link them together, you have to rewind the tape slightly. All the way back to 2 September 1945, when Japan formally surrendered to the Allies and marked the end of World War II.

The concept of 'good' design wasn't alien to Japan in 1945. In fact, there was even some crossover with the Bauhaus school in the early 1940s, when legendary French architect Charlotte Perriand worked for the Japanese government as a design consultant. What we think of as 'Japanese style' can really be traced all the way back to the Edo Period (1603–1868), or even the Azuchi-Momoyama Period before that (1573–1603). But the end of the War is still a good place to draw a line: old Japan and new Japan, Meiji monarchy vs. US-backed constitution, agricultural economy turned manufacturing powerhouse.

"After the war, Japan was poor. Really poor," Naomi says. "And they figured that exports would be a good way to boost the economy, so a lot of goods made in Japan, at that time, were made for the overseas market. Of varying quality, I might add. But the bigger issue was Japanese companies basically copying designs from Scandinavia and America, which didn't land too well."

These were the two original sins of post-war Japanese design: cheap quality and derivative ideas. To remedy the situation, the Japanese government established the Good Design Awards in 1957. These awards are still around today, where they're known by their symbol, the G Mark, which has become synonymous with design excellence. The idea was to reward Japanese designers for their originality and somehow cultivate a design language that felt wholly and authentically Japanese. Something the country could own, and therefore sell. Artisans and companies got to work, and factories began popping up all over the country.

One of these was a little furniture brand called Tendo Mokko.

Established as a craft guild in 1940, Tendo Mokko became one of Japan's 20th century commercial success stories. And the company still exists. They make the kind of furniture you see in the waiting rooms of high-end architectural firms. And the brand did become known for its collaborations with famous Japanese architects. If Kenzō Tange¹ was designing a prefectural government hall in the 1980s, Tendo Mokko were probably the ones doing the fit out.

"I visited their factory once," Naomi says, "and I was there right after they brought in the new hires. Kids who had just come out of high school. And these guys are going to spend their entire career at this factory making furniture, and you see them learning the most basic skills. Like how to sand. What does wood feel like. And this is all under the supervision of a sensei, basically."

Tendo Mokko is a great example of something that came to characterise Japanese design during the late 20th century, which was this weird combo of mass production and traditional skill. While Ford-style production lines were churning out cheap consumer goods in the US and Europe had become synonymous with high-end luxury, no country had worked out how to combine the two. At least in a way that was economical. But Japan had a head start: its long and fabled history of craft.

Rooted in centuries of technique, Japanese craft (also known as kogei) is all about respect for nature, meticulous attention to detail, and the seamless blend of function and aesthetics. In other words, it's not just about how an object looks, but how it feels when you pick it up. Every object is a conversation across space and time.

“One of the key things to keep in mind about Japanese design – and this spans everything from furniture to mass-produced items – is that it’s designed as much with the hand as with the eye,” Naomi says.

What she means is that Japan somehow found a way to unify the power of the production line with the hand-made artistry of traditional craft. And that was the secret sauce that turned the country into a global design juggernaut, all the way from the 1980s to the present day.

There are examples everywhere, if you know where to look. Take Naoto Fukasawa, arguably Japan's most influential product designer. In his studio there's a workshop, where designers will literally sculpt full-size sofas out of styrofoam². And this isn't unusual. Many Japanese designers still rely heavily on physical models. In some cases, only when something has been shaped and crafted by hand will it be 3D scanned and uploaded, so the CAD data can be sent to the manufacturer.

“As a Japanese person, I am influenced by the things that have developed in this environment,” Fukasawa tells us from Tokyo. “However, my design philosophy doesn’t come from being specifically Japanese. Rather, I focus on the relationship between humans, the body, and the surrounding environment.

"It is true that my work is influenced by various cultures from different countries, but I strongly design with the awareness that humans are part of nature."

Then there's design legend Sudō Reiko, who heads up NUNO, one of Japan's most important textile companies. She's famous for her use of tactile materials, like delicate paper woven into fabric. "She's even used techniques from the automotive industry to create shimmery surfaces," Naomi says. "But she's making these fabrics by hand – she doesn't do the manufacturing, they're made in huge weaving factories – but the design, the feel of the product, that's all done by hand."

Or how about Hakusan's famous 'rock cup', designed by Masahiro Mori in 1978? A simple white ceramic up, without handle or adornment, able to be churned out by the zillion. But curling around one side is a shallow recess that allows the cup to slot neatly into the user's hand. "You put your thumb in this indent, and it fits perfectly, and you know that that's his thumb, Mori's," Naomi says. "It's this very direct connection between artist and user through the medium of mass-produced ceramics."

If you asked a layperson to sum up Japanese design in one word, that word would probably be 'minimalist'. But that's not quite accurate. Minimalism in the West isn't the same as minimalism in Japan. Japanese artists don't describe their work as 'minimalist'", and there's definitely no cultural link between 'simple' and 'boring'. Instead, there's the concept of 'No More, No Less', which really means reducing objects to their most fundamental essence. Ornament doesn't come from any man-made flourishes, but from the object itself.

If you're making a chair, for example, your obligation as a designer is, first, to make a comfy chair, and second, to show off what's already there: the grain and shape of the wood. The idea is to ditch anything that distracts from that inner beauty. It's kind of like the famous Michelangelo quote: How do you carve a statue from a block of marble? You just remove everything that isn't a statue.

Fukasawa understands this better than anyone. There's often this paradox between effort and result, he says, where the longer you work on something, the worse it gets. "The things that crystallise instantly are simple, and if I think too long, I get surrounded by complex elements, which become unnecessary to the original idea."

"People look at the work of Tadao Ando and go, 'Oooh, minimalist concrete houses'," Naomi says, "which is true, but he's basically treating concrete the way other people would treat wood. Gently bringing out its beauty. It's so soft, so smooth, you really have to touch it to appreciate it. Even though concrete is a traditionally industrial material, he's approaching it with the eye of a craftsman."

In Japanese design, perhaps more than other school of design, “more than meets the eye” is taken literally. Visual inspection isn’t enough. You have to hold these things, run your hands over them, feel them between your fingers. Just as the designer intended.

The name that looms large over the whole 'Japanese minimalism' aesthetic is MUJI, the famously "brandless" brand, which has grown from a private supermarket label to one of Japan's biggest and most successful manufacturers. 1364 locations around the world. Annual turnover: approximately 661 billion yen.

Established in 1980, MUJI's original mission was to offer great-quality, affordable products to the modern consumer, and do this by eliminating wasteful processes, excessive packaging and, yeah, brand logos³. They were the original Japanese white label company. Early product lines featured just 40 items, including household goods, food and clothing, but in the late '90s, MUJI decided to expand its range. A lot. About as far as a range can go, in fact. There followed MUJI travel accessories. MUJI shampoo. MUJI pens. MUJI electronics. MUJI skincare products. Even prefab MUJI houses.

Over the years, the brand worked with famous designers like Fukasawa and Kenya Hara to create a cohesive MUJI look. And thanks to international expansion in the 1990s, that look became synonymous in the West with paired-back, Japanese minimalism. MUJI and Japan, Japan and MUJI. The two were one and the same.

"We sometimes talk about if MUJI created the new hotel, what kind of hotel would MUJI create?" Hara told Dezeen in 2017. "And not just a cheap one. MUJI is kind of a counter to both the cheapest hotel and the highest hotel. If MUJI landed a baseball team, what kind would we get? And if MUJI was an airline, what kind of service would we provide? If MUJI was a tourism company, what kind of service could we create?"

What Hara's trying to articulate here is what we might call the 'spirit' of MUJI, and by extension the spirit of Japanese design, which is something that's tough to put into words, but (to borrow from Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 description of pornography) we know it when we see it. Walk into any Japanese design store, like Melbourne's CIBI retail space, and even though every shelf is stocked with different brands, artists and manufacturers, there's a cohesive vibe that links the whole thing together. And MUJI realised long ago that you could aggressively market and sell this vibe, whether the object in question was bed sheets or backpacks.

"I'm not interested in the popularity of the products," Hara said. "What's unique about MUJI is people don't go there with a specific item in their mind. I don't think that there are many other brands like that."

MUJI is a brand that effectively combines half a dozen classical Japanese design principles: kaizen (continuously improving all aspects of production), monozukuri (a commitment to craftsmanship), shibui (subtle, understated elegance), and mottainai (using every resource and object to the full).

"Nothing goes to waste," says Naomi, "and that's something that's becoming increasingly prevalent. You see it in Japanese cuisine. When you sit down at a Japanese restaurant, you only taste the final product, but behind the scenes they're using everything. Nothing gets thrown out until every conceivable drop of flavour has been sucked out of it."

Sustainable design is pretty ubiquitous these days, but Japan got there centuries ago. It's easy to forget that Japan in the 19th century was a very poor, feudal, isolationist country. Nothing like the neon industrial giant we know today. The ruling class had a lot of money, but once you got a couple of rungs down the social ladder, poverty was widespread. Waste was a foreign concept because people literally had nothing to waste.

And that thrift mentality has kind of seeped into Japanese design over the centuries: shirts tend to get mended rather than dumped, broken plates get fixed (sometimes with powdered gold or silver; a process known as kintsugi), old products get upcycled and reused.

For Japanese designers, the inevitable ageing of things isn’t inherently bad. In fact, when seen from another perspective, the older and more worn something becomes, the more beautiful it is. Not age before beauty, but beauty from age. Maybe that’s why Japanese design has a timeless quality; it embraces and celebrates the passage of time.

"It's known as wabi sabi, which is actually a pretty complicated concept," Naomi says. "I'm not even sure I can define it accurately. But it's partly that there's beauty in the decaying of things. And I think that ties into a general belief in Japan that nothing is forever. Everything will wear out eventually. There's beauty in the wooden tray that's been used for 80 years precisely because it's worn down, because it's chipped and scuffed.

"But Japanese design, while it looks beautiful, that's not really the point. The real mission for every designer is to make their product appealing to the user. It's not stated anywhere. It's just implicit. Like my MUJI blender, it just works. It works so well."

Meet legendary product designer, and long-time MUJI collaborator, the one and only Naoto Fukasawa.

How do you approach finding the 'essence' of an object?

The moment I receive a request from a client, an idea, shape, or even an image of the object and its place in life crystallises in my mind. This is probably due to my experience working with brands around the world. My senses are likely reacting to the surrounding environment, which may feel monotonous, and these impressions are recorded in my brain and senses.

Japanese design often balances tradition with innovation. How do you navigate this balance in your own work?

For Japanese people, harmony is very important. Design refers to the relationship between people, objects, and the environment. When all elements work together in balance, it aligns with the idea of minimalism and simplicity in design.

Are there any Western design influences you've incorporated into your own work?

The concept of design was introduced to Japan from the West. Japan has its own culture of beauty, art, crafts and folk crafts, but I believe the Japanese learned the concept of design from the West. Therefore, I can talk about the best designs in the world. These are truly authentic. It's clear that I aim for something authentic and genuine in my work.

How does good design impact society?

I believe design is a parameter of society. It's like the small switch or dial used to slowly change the direction of a large tanker. I believe that one good design can change society, and that's how I approach my work.

Of all your designs and projects, which do you consider the most meaningful?

I think projects like 'Juice Skin', the 'MUJI Wall-Mounted CD Player', and 'B&B Italia's Shelf X' are great examples. These ideas came to me in a flash. They were unprecedented, and yet, when people see them, they're amazed by the value of the idea and the flawless details. It's a mysterious kind of shared understanding — feeling moved by something we've never seen before, almost as though it had always existed. This is one of the strange joys of being human.

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¹ The guy behind the world-famous Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. In the second half of the 20th century, Tange became one of the world's most influential architects and urban planners. His ideas about flexible cities and high-density living inspired the design of places like Hong Kong and Singapore.

² Spare a thought for the poor cleaners.

³ The name "MUJI" is short for MUJIrushi Ryohin, which means "no-brand quality goods".