Critical Design in Japan Material Culture, Luxury, and the Avant-Garde 9781526139986, 1526139987

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Critical design in Japan

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also available in the series Windows for the world Nineteenth­-century stained glass and the international­ exhibitions, 1851–1900 jasmine allen

The matter of Art Materials, practices, cultural logics, c.1250–1750 edited by christy anderson, anne dunlop and pamela h. smith European fashion The creation of a global industry edited by regina lee blaszczyk and véronique pouillard

The culture of fashion A new history of fashionable dress christopher breward

general editors Christopher Breward and James Ryan founding editor Paul Greenhalgh

The factory in a garden A history of corporate landscapes from the industrial ­ to the digital age helena chance

‘The autobiography of a nation’ The 1951 Festival of Britain becky e. conekin The culture of craft Status and future edited by peter dormer

Material relations Domestic interiors and the middle-class family, 1850–1910 jane hamlett

Arts and Crafts objects imogen hart

Comradely objects Design and material culture in Soviet Russia, 1960s–80s yulia karpova

Interior decorating in nineteenth-century France The visual culture of a new profession anca i. lasc Building reputations conor lucey

The material Renaissance michelle o’malley and evelyn welch Bachelors of a different sort Queer aesthetics, material culture and the modern interior john potvin

Crafting design in Italy From post-war to postmodernism catharine rossi

Chinoiserie Commerce and critical ornament in eighteenth-century Britain stacey sloboda

Material goods, moving hands Perceiving production in England, 1700-1830 kate smith

Hot metal Material culture and tangible labour jesse adams stein

Ideal homes, 1918–39 Domestic design and suburban Modernism deborah sugg ryan

The study of dress history lou taylor

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Critical design in Japan Material culture, luxury, and the avant-garde Ory Bartal

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Ory Bartal 2020 The right of Ory Bartal to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 3997 9  hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Hironen, Pi-Isu, 1994 © courtesy of Hironen Studio Translation and additional editing by Maya Shimony.

Typeset in 10/12.5 Compatil Text by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

To my parents Ruth and Menachem and to my partner Claude with thanks for the love and support they provided me throughout the years.

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Contents



List of figures Preface and acknowledgements



Introduction

viii xi 1

1 Postmodern critiques, Japan’s economic miracle, and the new aesthetic milieu

31

2 The 1968 social uprising and subversive advertising design in Japan: the work of Ishioka Eiko and Suzuki Hachiro¯

3 From cute to Rei Kawakubo: fashion and protest

54 86

4 Mujirushi Ryohin and the absence of style

124

5 Hironen and the representation of the other

151

6 Digital design as social and critical design in the twenty-first

century

184

Bibliography Index

214 226

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Figures

2.1 Yokoo Tadanori, A LA MAISON DE M. CIVEÇAWA, 1965. Silkscreen on paper, 1030×728mm, Ankokubuto-ha Garumera Sho¯kai. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Yokoo Tadanori. 2.2 Suzuki Hachiro¯, Women Should Be Mad at Advertisements of Photocopy Machines that Show Only Female Models. © Suzuki Hachiro¯. 2.3 Suzuki Hachiro¯, Make the Sky Beautiful, Make Business Beautiful. © Suzuki Hachiro¯. 2.4 Suzuki Hachiro¯, Make That Which Flows Beautiful, Make Business Beautiful. © Suzuki Hachiro¯. 2.5 Suzuki Hachiro¯, Hey, Japan, What Are You Going to Do? © Suzuki Hachiro¯. 2.6 Suzuki Hachiro¯, Good-Bye! Frantic Labor. © Suzuki Hachiro¯. 2.7 Suzuki Hachiro¯, Beautiful 70s. © Suzuki Hachiro¯. 2.8 Suzuki Hachiro¯, What Would You Write to Live a Beautiful Life? © Suzuki Hachiro¯. 2.9 Ishioka Eiko, My Dear Superstar, for PARCO, 1978. © Courtesy of DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion. 2.10 Ishioka Eiko, The Nightingale Sings for No One but Herself, for PARCO, 1976. © Courtesy of DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion. 2.11 Ishioka Eiko, A Model Is More Than Just a Pretty Face, for PARCO, 1975. © Courtesy of DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion. 2.12 Ishioka Eiko, Don’t Stare at the Nude, Be Naked, for PARCO, 1975. © Courtesy of DNP Foundation for Cultural ­ Promotion.

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56

60 62 63 64 65 66 67 70

71

74

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Figures 2.13 Ishioka Eiko, The Day to Talk about Men Came, for PARCO, 1979. © Courtesy of DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion. 2.14 Ishioka Eiko, ALL THAT JŌJI!, for PARCO, 1980. © Courtesy of DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion. 3.1 Mina Seville, Rockabilly Subculture – Rockabilly Dancers Pose in Yoyogi Park, Tokyo. © Mina Seville. 3.2 Fairy tale style Lolita. © Angelic Pretty. 3.3 Elegant Gothic Lolita. © Courtesy of Moi-même-Moitié. 3.4 Fantasy style Lolita. © h.NAOTO. 3.5 Yoko Ono, Cut Piece performance, 1964. © Yoko Ono 1964. Photographer: Minoru Hirata. 3.6 Kusama Yayoi, The Anatomic Explosion happening at New York Stock Exchange, 1968. Photo by Bob Sabin. © Yayoi Kusama. 3.7 Linda Spierings, Paris, 1982 (Lace Sweater designed by Rei Kawakubo). © Peter Lindbergh (courtesy Peter Lindbergh, Paris). Photographer: Peter Lindbergh. 3.8 COMME des GARÇONS, 1997 SS. © COMME des GARÇONS. 3.9 COMME des GARÇONS, 2006–2007 AW. © COMME des GARÇONS. 3.10 A House Organ, Magazine Editorial / B1 Poster, 1996, AD·D: Tsuguya Inoue, P: Zabriskie Point © NSW, A: Michelangelo Antonioni, ADV: COMME des GARÇONS. 3.11 ’98 Spring/Summer Show, DM / B1 Poster, 1997, AD·D: Tsuguya Inoue, P: Roman Signer, ADV: COMME des GARÇONS. 3.12 Calendar ’90–’99, B0 Poster, 1990, AD·D: Tsuguya Inoue, P: North Atlantic Humpback Whale, Catalogue, College of the Atlantic, ADV: COMME des GARÇONS. 3.13 Cindy Sherman, advertisement for COMME des GARÇONS, 1993–94 (costume designed by Rei Kawakubo). Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. 3.14 Visionaire No. 20: Six ¼, Magazine editorial / B1 poster, 1997, AD·D: Tsuguya Inoue, P: Kishin Shinoyama, A·ADV: COMME des GARÇONS. 3.15 Launching COMME des GARÇONS perfume at Shinjuku Isetan department store, autumn 1994. © COMME des GARÇONS. 4.1 Mujirushi Ryohin’s first forty products (nine household products and thirty-one food products). © Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd. 4.2 Tanaka Ikko¯, wake atte yasui, 1980. © Tanaka Ikko¯ / licensed by DNPartcom. 4.3 Tanaka Ikko¯, shake wa zenshin shake nanda, 1981. © Tanaka Ikko¯ / licensed by DNPartcom. 4.4 Tanaka Ikko¯, ai wa kazaranai, 1981. © Tanaka Ikko¯ / licensed by DNPartcom.

77 78 88 93 94 95 97

98

99 104 106

109 110

112

114

115 117 129 130 132 134

ix

x Figures 4.5 Mujirushi Ryohin, paper shredder. © Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd. 4.6 Mujirushi Ryohin, acrylic storage (five drawers). © Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd. 4.7 Mujirushi Ryohin, bind notebook. © Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd. 4.8 Mujirushi Ryohin, electric kettle. © Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd. 4.9 Mujirushi Ryohin, pop-up toaster. © Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd. 5.1 Hironen, Utz-Li Gutz-Li, 1991. © Courtesy of Hironen. 5.2 Ronen Levin, Five O’clock Orange, 1989. © Courtesy of Ronen Levin. 5.3 Hironen, To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor, 1991. © Courtesy of Hironen. 5.4 Hironen, Pi-Isu, 1994. © Courtesy of Hironen. 5.5 Hironen, Uni-Chair, 1992. © Courtesy of Hironen. 5.6 Hironen, Kinoko, 1992. © Courtesy of Hironen. 5.7 Hironen, Poko, 1992. © Courtesy of Hironen. 5.8 Hironen, Biedermeier, 1991. © Courtesy of Hironen. 5.9 Hironen, Love Seat, 1995. © Courtesy of Hironen. 5.10 Hironen, Tiffany, 1992. © Courtesy of Hironen. 5.11 Hironen, Speedo, 1992. © Courtesy of Hironen. 6.1 Tokyo Bousai (Disaster Preparation Tokyo) presenting official character Bousai-kun, cover page, 2014. © Tokyo Metropolitan Government. 6.2 Tokyo Bousai (Disaster Preparation Tokyo), 2014, pp. 180–1. © Tokyo Metropolitan Government. 6.3 SEALDs activists’ placards, 2015. © REUTERS/Thomas Peter. 6.4 Professional Sharing. © 2014 Takram Design Engineering. Design and direction: Yosuke Ushigome (Takram). Film production: Kentaro Hirase (CANOPUS Inc.), Masayuki Toyota. Film technical support: TONY. Costume design: Alexa Pollmann. The project was commissioned by THE FAB MIND exhibition at 21_21 Design Sight, Tokyo. 6.5 Wakita Akira, FINA (fluid-HMI inspired by nature), 2015. © Wakita Akira. 6.6 Shenu: Hydrolemic System. © 2012 Takram Design Engineering. Visual credit: Figure artwork: Bryan Christie (with the addition of organ rendering by Takram). Product credit: Project lead: Kinya Tagawa (Takram), Concept development: Kotaro Watanabe (Takram), Design: Kaz Yoneda (ex-Takram). Art direction: Moon Kyungwon, Jeon Joonho. Project lead and concept development (until 2011): Motohide Hatanaka (ex-Takram). 6.7 Sputniko!, Menstruation Machine – Takashi’s Take, 2010. Installation with video (colour, sound), screens, and printed Panels, 3:24 min., dimensions variable. © Sputniko!

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140 140 141 142 142 158 161 163 169 170 171 172 173 176 177 178

187 188 190

197 199

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Preface and acknowledgements

In 2015 I was invited by Sarah Teasley and Jilly Traganou to write an article for a special issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society (Vol. 28) dedicated to design and society in modern Japan. The article I submitted focused on Suzuki Hachiro¯ and Ishioka Eiko, two art directors who broke new ground in the 1970s with ad campaigns that employed 1960s’ protest movement politics in the branding of commercial companies. My research for that article was the catalyst for the writing of this book (and also made its way into the book as Chapter 2), but more importantly, it took me back to the 1980s in Tel Aviv, where I spent my youth in underground clubs (The Penguin and Liquid), listening to subversive music (Bauhaus, Nina Hagen, Grace Jones, Amanda Lear, and Minimal Compact), dressed in queer clothes inspired by David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, and Elton John, and going to weekly screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the small Paris Cinema. The critical aspects of counterculture and subculture expressed through clothes, music, and design objects became a significant part of my life during those years – long before I realised that these elements serve individuals as a public display of their attitudes towards social issues like gender, status, race, identity politics, body politics, and social affiliation to a subculture. About ten years later, in the 1990s, I found myself in Tokyo as a student enjoying the exciting new visual and material world around me, which seemed subversive but which, to my surprise, was not meant for rebellious youngsters and students due to its expense. As a student of Japanese Studies, who grew up on classic Orientalist texts such as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, I became fascinated with the impossible conflation of luxury and avant-garde. I later realised that this marriage is not unique to Japan; rather, it is rooted in postmodern ideology, where late capitalism and the post-Fordism service culture

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xii

Preface and acknowledgements came to collaborate, joining forces with avant-garde ideas and aesthetics to create ‘cultural capitalism’, to borrow Slavoj Žižek’s term. This avantgarde culture does not protest against the capitalist system but rather uses it creatively as a platform for generating change. While Japanese designers were not the only ones to do it, they were certainly pioneers in understanding the potential of the capitalist system for placing avant-garde on the shelf alongside other styles, branding it as ‘luxury’ and elevating this genre to perfection. It is the Japanese designers I got to know in Tokyo who introduced social criticism through their objects that are the basis for this book. I would like to thank the many designers in Japan, including Ronen Levin who worked in Tokyo during those years and introduced me to Japanese design and designers, for the wonderful works they have created over the years. I would like to thank Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem and the different scholars in the Department for Visual and Material Culture for sharing with me their knowledge and theories in a wide range of disciplines. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude for the encounter with sociological and anthropological theories facilitated by Eva Illouz (who taught me the power of critique), Tamar El Or (who taught me about the intellectual power of material), Yona Weitz (who taught me the power of field research), the writings of Sara Chinski (which helped me link critical theory to the world of culture), and Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni and Jennifer Robertson, scholars of Japanese sociology, who helped me formulate and focus the research and better understand the Japanese context. I would also like to thank the community of Japanologists in Israel, particularly my teachers Ben-Ami Shillony and Jacob Raz for the warm home they gave me over the years, Michal (Miki) Daliot-Bul for sharing her deep knowledge of popular culture in Japan, the late Ayala Klemperer-Markman for helping me understand the development of feminism in Japan, and Rotem Kowner for his ongoing assistance. I am indebted to Sarah Teasley and Jilly Traganou who invited me to write the article that became the seed from which this book came into being, and to Gennifer Weisenfeld who recommended me to them. I would also like to express my gratitude for the inspiring lectures given by Glenn Adamson and Alice Rawsthorn in Jerusalem. I would like to extend a special thank you to Manchester University Press and, especially, to Emma Brennan and series editors Christopher Breward and James Ryan, who undertook this project and were of tremendous help at every step of the way. Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Ruth Bartal, for reading the materials during the writing process and offering her invaluable insights and for all the support she has given me over the years.

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Preface and acknowledgements

xiii

A note on translation All translations from Japanese and Hebrew texts are the author's own translations. The original text is not included in the book due to space limitations.

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Introduction

The 1960s in Japan gave rise to what was ‘undoubtedly the most creative outburst of anarchistic, subversive and riotous tendencies in the history of modern Japanese culture’, as described by Japanese art curator and scholar Alexandra Munro.1 The events of this decade reached their apogee in 1968, the year marking the centennial of the Meiji restoration and a turning point in postwar Japanese history. That year, Japan became the second largest economy in the world, a feat perceived as near miraculous by both Japanese and foreign economists. Moreover, the new international status of Japan following the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and in anticipation of Osaka Expo ‘70, filled many urbanites, members of the civil service, and white-collar workers with a sense of optimism and a strengthened desire to forget, repress, and leave behind the traumas of war. That same year, however, violent counterculture riots initiated by students on university campuses spread throughout Japan, sparking nationwide social protests. The Diet building, the prime minister’s office, and the American embassy were surrounded each day by thousands of demonstrators who opposed and challenged Japan’s political actions, bringing the country to the verge of a civil revolution. The tension between these two opposing forces – economic growth based on capitalist ideals, and social protest rooted in the ideology of left-wing movements – was felt throughout the 1960s. This tension constituted one of the forces underlying the radical transformation of Japanese aesthetics and visual culture, and more specifically of Japanese design. Renowned throughout history for its distinct aesthetic properties, Japanese design was transformed, in the 1960s, into a catalyst for the development of commercial companies that flourished under the new economy. By supplying these companies with differentiation, a competitive edge, and added value, design in Japan assimilated the capitalist ideology that was

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Critical design in Japan responsible for its prosperity. At the same time, this period saw the rise of critical and conceptual design or anti-design practices shaped by the new and revolutionary focus on social protest, which undermined the values and norms of both premodern and modern Japanese society. These practices, which were concerned in the 1960s with feminism, the politics of the body, and identity politics, evolved in the 1980s and 1990s to include a concern with the ecology, with anti-consumerist and anti-institutional critiques, and with social otherness. In the case of both capitalist and critical design practices, this period saw a shift from the creation of functional, aesthetically pleasing design objects to ones that communicated a social message. The works of designers active in Tokyo beginning in the 1960s were presented in magazines and exhibitions, creating an enigmatic international aura surrounding the term ‘Japanese design’. This aura, which went beyond – and sometimes even countered – the social stance of its creators, continues to surround the work of their contemporary followers. This book describes the power of design and of a design-based approach (known as Design Thinking) to create and initiate social and cultural systems charged with meaning, using objects to construct new values and social norms that eventually transform patterns of behaviour and thought. In order to explain the aim of these critical design practices and the role of design as a social, cultural, and critical agent, I will examine the activity of their creators and their emerging role as social entrepreneurs shaping a new environment and lifestyle, rather than as service providers. Although considered as popular culture, I will argue that these design projects impacted the construction of power relations and of new paradigms and categories, forming an arena of production that gave rise to the encounter of postmodern aesthetics, critical theories, and the new capitalist order. The exploration of this arena reveals the power of material culture in voicing social criticism, while partaking of the affluent capitalist economy. It also underscores the relations and differences between visual protest and verbal protest.

The social role of design In contrast to art, which is generally perceived as existing in an autonomous sphere that we observe from a certain distance (and are asked not to touch), design is a creation that we live alongside, and within, in our daily life, as we use everyday objects ranging from our dishes and linens to our books. Unfortunately, however, the term ‘design’ is often trivialised, misunderstood, and misused. It is usually confused with styling and with decorative, expensive, and superfluous objects such as a conceptual oneoff chair or glamorous high-heeled shoes. Design is thus often seen as an indulgence for spoiled customers in developed countries, and is typecast as a seductive ploy that tricks us into buying things of questionable value

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Introduction

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– objects that we will soon tire of and abandon, together with the rest of the toxic junk that destroys our ecology.2 Media philosopher Vilém Flusser argues that the word design occurs in contexts associated with cunning and deceit: ‘A designer is a cunning plotter laying his traps.’3 Yet the design of objects is an inevitable human necessity, and every object created since the dawn of history was designed. Such objects are meant to cater to our everyday physical needs, as well as to serve us in extreme situations such as natural disasters. Moreover, it is important to note that objects not only fulfil our physical needs, but also our emotional needs – embodying our memories of people, places, and events in our lives. Psychologists, meanwhile, often attend to the therapeutic power of objects, such as the ‘transitional object’ used by young children during their evolution from complete dependence on the mothering figure to relative independence. Various objects also serve an economic function as commodities that circulate across national borders in the global market, partaking of a political, economic, and social network. Serving to exchange information, ideas, and aesthetic principles, they are thus capable of transforming world views and social orders. The consolidation and preservation of national identity is also often performed by means of objects or a specific style. The Japanese government, for instance, appoints craftspeople to serve as ‘national living treasures’ who preserve traditional cultural memory by continuing to practise local design techniques. Moreover, as design critic Alice Rawsthorn argues, any design exercise sets out to change something and acts as an agent of change that can help us make sense of what is happening around us and turn it to our advantage. According to Rawsthorn, design can ensure that ‘changes of any type – whether they are scientific, technological, cultural, political, economic, social, environmental or behavioural – are introduced to the world in ways that are positive and empowering, rather than inhibiting and destructive’.4 In other words, design is a powerful vehicle for different social powers. There are also popular objects that ornament our bodies or homes, and which we seem to treat as merely decorative. Yet these objects are similarly charged with a social function, since they endow us with a personal or social identity and serve as tools for communication, for the construction of individual and class identity, and for the facilitation of social ties. These functions were attended to by Umberto Eco, who redefined the hallowed Modernist principle of ‘form follows function’ by arguing that the form of the object is not only functional but also symbolic and that it is this symbolic charge that renders the object accessible and desired. Eco thus sought to expand the accepted definition of function, ascribing to the object’s symbolic function an importance that is no lesser than that ascribed to its everyday function. The symbolic function, according to Eco, represents the social role of the object – that of enabling and confirming certain social connections and social status, and of validating the decision

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Critical design in Japan to obey certain rules. The decorative character of an object is thus not merely a manifestation of style, but also has the ability to activate its users, to endow them with an identity, to produce new social paradigms and categories, and to catalyse forms of social innovation.5 Thus, as already noted above, the material structure of the object and its aesthetic, decorative style are both significant for an understanding of its design. Within this introduction, I shall attend to the position of design in terms of both its material and its visual dimensions. As Guy Julier has noted: ‘design is more than just the creation of visual artifacts to be used or “read.” It is also about the structuring of systems of encounter within the visual and material world.’6

Material culture, social norms, and design Norms, values, and conceptual social categories are invisible yet powerful entities. The sociologist Eva Illouz argues that they exist in every social group, and underlie the behaviour of most people. Even if they are not always conscious, they compel us to act in predictable ways in order to be considered good, honourable, or trustworthy. According to Illouz, ‘one of the most puzzling questions sociology tries to answer is: How is it that different people behave in similar and predictable ways even when no one visibly forces them to do so? The answer is simple − through the norms they learn and absorb from their environment.’7 The norms are usually repeated across a wide variety of social and cultural contexts, and it is this repetition that endows them with power, transforming them into an invisible property of our thinking. In order to explain how norms shape thoughts and behaviour, Illouz mentions a metaphor offered by the sociologist Ann Swidler: We know that while bats fly, they use built-in sensors to locate physical obstacles in space by means of echolocation. These sensors enable them to fly undisturbed in dark caves and avoid the walls, even though they see close to nothing. For human beings, norms are the walls of their environment. They behave and orient themselves based on an implicit sense of these walls – that is, of what is permitted and what is prohibited, of what in our environment is perceived as moral or immoral.8

The words ‘norms’ and ‘normal’ share a common source: normal, concludes Illouz, is nothing but the name we give to what norms silently dictate. People do not notice the political and ideological structures underlying their lives, since no one can ‘notice’ terms such as ‘patriarchy’, ‘ethnic hierarchy’, or ‘militarism’. We do not see abstract concepts and lack the language needed to understand the invisible forces moving back and forth between the collective and private realms. Our experience thus appears to us to be personal even when it originates from a particular form of social

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organisation.9 The cave described by Swidler creates what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘habitus’ in which we live. Bourdieu explains how, in the process of socialisation, children internalise the values and norms of their social world through the order of things, whose silence normalises socialisation and produces the habitus. In his essay ‘The Berber House or the world reversed’, Bourdieu demonstrates how the architectural scheme of the house (the characterisation of spatial configurations, the different divisions of the space, and the relation between them) and the characterisation of the objects dispersed throughout the space reflect and dictate social gender roles within and into the interior space of the house. The movement within a formulated material configuration (the designated spaces and various objects) that resonates the ideas and their usage, engenders an unconscious internalisation of body practices as the main means of internalising and reaffirming the habitus.10 The conventional understanding of norms views them as enforced by the mechanisms of various institutions (ranging from official mechanisms such as schools, prisons, or fines to informal behaviours such as derision, typecasting, humiliation, or excommunication). Bourdieu shows how the social categories underlying every society are also translated into material objects.11 Norms and values – both invisible entities – are thus realised through objects or signs, which in turn construct and preserve social values much like social institutions. This understanding is given expression, for instance, in the sociologist Norbert Elias’s study of the social norms invented in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, such as the new prohibitions against eating with one’s hands, farting or burping in public, and urinating or defecating in the vicinity of others. Elias shows how social changes affect the way that individuals discipline their bodies through the emergence of table manners and the use of eating utensils. For example, he recounts how the fork, which first came into use in court society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a way to pick pieces of food from the common bowl that were then eaten by hand, was adopted for personal use in the seventeenth century. Elias demonstrates that this was not due to a development in hygiene or a prohibition to hold certain foods for health reasons, but rather due to the rise of social concern when in contact with other people. He explains that the fork evolved because people developed an aversion to getting their fingers dirty, or at least to be seen in public with dirty, greasy fingers. A sense of disgust and unease – the product of a long historical development instilled in the body – is what determines which patterns of table behaviour will be considered ‘cultural’ and which will not. Therefore, the fork is the embodiment of a certain standard of sensitivity and a specific level of distaste that became the norm in the seventeenth century. These new ‘accessories of civilization’, emphasises Elias, reflect

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Critical design in Japan the ­gradual progress of the ‘threshold of repugnance’ and in turn usher in a new standard and norm.12 Thus social values, in turn, created new types of objects, such as eating utensils or private bathrooms. Today, however, we no longer view eating utensils or privacy in the bathroom as socially constructed norms, as Dutch design theorist Wim Muller explains: ‘cutlery, crockery, table setting, and so on, do not connote by their form only a certain sociocultural meaning of eating together. It’s actual interaction with them, they also condition us to the kind of behaviour that is in keeping, including the way we make conversation with each other!’13 An additional example is provided by the historian Yuval Noah Harari, who argues that the habitus (which he calls the ‘imagined order’) exists only in the imagination of individuals, while entertaining close reciprocal relations with the surrounding material culture. Harari makes reference to the modern American ‘myth of the individual’, according to which every person possesses equal rights, including the right to the pursuit of pleasure to the best of their understanding. This value, Harari claims, acquired a material presence through the country’s network of endless asphalt roads and huge private-car industry, which was supposed to enable every American to travel wherever they wanted and whenever they wanted, without depending on others. The car, according to Harari, was a reflection of American individualism rather than of ecological or geographic necessity. The creation of the private car and network of roads, in turn, shaped American living arrangements and the structure of the American market. The proud owner of a Ford Model T thus became accustomed to living in a spacious and isolated private home in the suburbs and to travelling at any time to their workplace in the city centre, to the local shopping centre, or to the beach. 14 The rise of individualism changed not only urban planning but also the interior planning of domestic spaces. One example is the internal division of houses into numerous small rooms that reflect this value, in contrast to medieval homes where many family members slept together in large halls. The modern home, which provides each sibling with a private space for maximum autonomy, shapes the experience of children who cannot help but imagine themselves ‘as individuals’.15 In this manner, the myth of the individual left the realm of the imagination and anchored itself in material reality. A more radical view of the connection between material history and human consciousness is presented by Jonathan Crary, who has analysed the development of the human sense of vision through his study of the history of ideas. Crary has attended to important technological developments in the field of optics, arguing for their emergence not as part of a linear process of scientific development but rather as a reflection of widespread human beliefs and values at different historical moments. The stereoscope invented in the nineteenth century, for instance, was based on new tech-

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niques of representation that replaced the seventeenth-century camera obscura. Whereas the camera obscura posited an objective relationship between the apparatus and the observed object and implied an identity between the object and its representation, the stereoscope, which presents the world subjectively, was invented according to Crary not due to technological developments but rather as a result of a new paradigm of subjectivity that emerged at the time in European society and culture. 16 Every object thus encodes social values (which are at times unspoken and implicit) and a social discourse that partake of a culturally and historically specific system, even when it is integrated into material culture to the point that we no longer explicitly recognise its underlying ideological charge or the ways in which it constructs our behaviour. Material culture thus serves as a framework (Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’, or Swidler’s cave of bats) within which we organise our behaviour and emotions, even though we are not aware of the existence of its conceptual framework or the limits it imposes on our actions and on what we ‘instinctually’ perceive to be legitimate, worthy, or deserving of pride (or shame). Yet the embodiment of these norms in material forms shapes the individual’s behaviour in accordance with the values of the habitus in which they live. Building on this perception, the sociologist Daniel Miller has shown how consumption in the Western world is not motivated by hedonism, as claimed by certain critical thinkers. Instead, he argues, consumption of the most basic products purchased by women is designed to unify the family or construct social normalcy.17 The sociologist Bruno Latour, who formulated the Actor-Network Theory, similarly argues that objects not only reflect and present cultural norms and values but also shape human behaviour, much like social norms: ‘Each artifact has its script, its “affordance,” its potential to take hold of passersby and force them to play roles in its story.’18 One example he gives is that of a gun – a seemingly neutral and passive object. Yet, according to Latour: You are different with gun in hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. The gun is no longer the gun-in-the-armory or the gun-in-the-drawer or the gun-in-the-pocket, but the gun-in-your-hand, aimed at someone who is screaming. What is true about the subject, the gunman, is as true of the object, of the gun that is held. A good citizen becomes a criminal, a bad guy becomes a worse guy; a silent gun becomes a fired gun, a new gun becomes a used gun, a sporting gun becomes a weapon.19

As he further argues: The twin mistake of the materialists and the sociologists is to start with essence, those of subjects or those of objects. That starting point renders impossible our measurement of the mediating role of techniques. Neither subject nor object (nor their goals) are fixed...You are a different person with

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Critical design in Japan the gun in your hand. Essence is existence and existence is action. If I define you by what  you have (the gun), and by the series of associations that you enter into when you use what you have (when you fire the gun) then you are ­modified by the gun – more so or less so – depending on the weight of the other associations that you carry.20

According to Latour, the relations between subject and object create a hybrid actor, which is formed, for instance, by a gun and the person handling it. Describing the objects (which he calls ‘actnet’, an abbreviation of Actor-Network) as players in a network that gives rise to social behaviour, he argues that the distinction between active subjects and passive objects that exist at their service is obsolete. Another example he offers is that of on-campus speed bumps that force drivers to slow down, changing their goal from ‘slow down so as not to endanger students’ into ‘slow down and protect my car’s suspension’.21 These two goals are far removed from one another. The first appeals to the driver’s morality and propensity to abide by the law, while the second appeals to pure egotism and the desire to preserve one’s car. Most drivers, according to Latour, respond to egotism and the desire to preserve their car, and thus change their behaviour through the mediation of the speed bump. The change in behaviour that transforms a careless driver into a careful driver is thus achieved by material means that divert goals and create new forms of behaviour: the norm of driving slowly is enforced through the material presence of the speed bumps. In this context, it can thus be said that the most important function of design is to regulate our behaviour. And so we have to understand that what we need to know about design and the different technologies is not how we use them but how they use us. This understanding of design as a form of regulating behaviour is evident in various fields of design. The branding of clothing, for instance, reiterates certain cultural perceptions about the body, as well as values pertaining to social identity and to late consumer culture. The social definition of clothing as a commodity transforms it into a unit of meaning and endows it with economic, aesthetic, and ideological values. An item of clothing, its cut, and advertising image often determine the consumer’s world view concerning the ‘right’ body structure, which in turn shapes their behaviour. One can similarly think of the development and design of popular objects such as the microwave, the Walkman, or the Cup Noodle. These products have not only served human needs but also shaped a society in which people eat or spend their leisure time alone. Psychoanalysts argue that patients utter different truths when they are sitting in an armchair than when they are lying on a couch. In other words, the therapeutic setting triggers different thought processes in the same person. If we observe an advertisement poster, for instance, we see that it contains a number of values which it seeks to transmit to its viewers, including the economic values of late consumer culture and the social values of its

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target audience. Every advertising poster thus encodes the economic, aesthetic, and ideological values underlying the society in which it operates. Marshall McLuhan argues that the fact that United States’ advertising budget was often greater than the budget of its education system revealed advertising’s tremendous impact on our culture and its existence as a second education system parallel to the public system. McLuhan thus argues: ‘We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.’22 Langdon Winner presents the impact and influence of city planning, which is shaped by both explicit and implicit political purposes, on human behaviour. One example he discusses is how Haussmann’s broad Parisian boulevards were engineered at Louis Napoleon’s direction in order to prevent any recurrence of civilian violence on the streets, of the kind that took place during the revolution of 1848. Winner also shows how Robert Moses, the master builder of New York’s roads, parks, bridges, and other public works from 1920 to 1970, used urban design to promote his social biases and racial prejudices. For example, Moses planned extraordinarily low bridges over the parkways in Long Island, with many of the overpasses having as little as nine feet of clearance at the curb. The design of these parkways was aimed at achieving a particular social effect – that of discouraging the presence of buses. White automobile owners of the ‘upper’ and ‘comfortable middle’ classes, as Moses called them, were thus free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transportation, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not get through the overpasses. This strategy limited the access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach, Moses’ widely acclaimed public park. Moses further ensured this result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach. Although these bridges are an aspect of urban design, they should thus be read as part of American political history rather than of design history. Thus, Winner rightly argues that ‘the issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and transistors, nuts and bolts’,23 concluding that ‘artifacts have political qualities’.24 Peter-Paul Verbeek presents another dimension of these artefacts’ qualities by saying that design and technology mediate our behaviour and our perception and thus raise the question of ethics and morality of design objects, which he calls ‘material ethics’. For him, things carry morality because they shape the way people experience their world and organise their existence, regardless of whether or not this is done consciously and intentionally. The ethics of behaviour come in two varieties: consequentialist and deontological. Consequentialist ethics evaluate behaviours exclusively on their consequences. In this case, things are not moral

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Critical design in Japan agents but only moral instrument that incite people to morally right or wrong behaviour. Deontological ethics focus on the moral value of the act itself and the intentions behind it, regardless of the consequences. From a Kantian perspective, the morality of an action depends on whether or not the agent has sought to act in accordance with rational norms. Artefacts, of course, cannot themselves make such an evaluation and their action arises as a result of how they simply steer behaviour.25 Verbeek’s insight shows that design has two types of moral dimensions. First, designed products play a mediating role in the moral consideration of people, and second, the design process can involve moral choices with reference to this mediating role. Hence, the seemingly innocent popular material and visual objects that surround us in fact determine the identity of their users and the manner in which they are used, while actively constructing a social discourse, creating new social norms, and impeding alternative possibilities. As such, they catalyse social, economic, and political forces and influence modes of behaviour and thought. Much like norms, which are invisible entities, the significant social power of objects stems mostly from our lack of attention to their implicit power as influential agents. This view of objects as social agents endows them with an additional layer of meaning, which enables them to be interpreted in a new way. So, for instance, we understand that a kimono does not only represent a woman’s status based on its style and fabric but also dictates a refined gait and small steps, which were once appreciated as feminine. In a similar manner, small shoes deformed the feet of Chinese women for over one thousand years in the name of beauty, while in fact serving to reinforce the norms of a patriarchal hierarchy. One can also see how certain eating utensils, such as chopsticks, dictate a specific manner of cooking, serving, and consuming food. Another example is the Japanese path (roji) typical of Zen gardens, which is habitually described as embodying the aesthetic of Zen Buddhism. The irrational, asymmetrical arrangement of the stones, their simplicity, and their patina, represent the wabi-sabi aesthetics that symbolise the arbitrary workings of nature and the passage of time as well as the integration of nature and culture. This intellectual and aesthetic interpretation undoubtedly influenced the designers of these gardens. Yet the act of walking the path in a Zen garden reveals another important dimension of this design. In contrast to a paved path that one walks upon in a direct and rapid manner, with one’s eyes focused on the target ahead without observing the path itself, a roji path calls for a different kind of walking. Since the stones are ordered randomly, walker must repeatedly lower their heads to prepare for their next step. When they stand upon a stone, they raise their heads to refocus on their target and then look down again. This process slows their forward movement, while controlling their perspective so that each person walking along the path will gaze at countless points calcu-

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lated in advance by the garden’s designer. The design of the path and the disciplining of the gaze are aimed at presenting the appearance of a new landscape each time the person walks along the same path. The roji thus shapes the behaviour of the walker just as the slow bump described by Bruno Latour changes the behaviour of the driver.26 A more contemporary example can be seen in stadium design in which the football clubs leave no stone unturned in their endless pursuit of wins. This includes taking actions aimed at unnerving the other team before and during matches. Seemingly subtle changes in the design of the opposing team’s dressing room can have a meaningful psychological and physical impact. For example, the pre-match team talk with the manager is a crucial part of the preparation for the game. Thus, in the Emirates Stadium in North London the height of the table in the middle of the dressing room was set specially so that anything on it would obscure the manager’s head, while the placement of a large wooden drawer in the centre of the room could be construed as a deliberate ploy to prevent the manager from addressing the entire team.27 Similarly, London’s Stamford Bridge stadium holds arguably the most psychologically affecting dressing room in the Premier League. Not only is it smaller than standard dressing rooms, it is also strewn with various obstacles designed to disrupt the visiting team’s preparations. In a 2011 article, Jintana Panyaarvudh details different elements in the stadium designed specifically, so it seems, to undermine the visiting teams, including placing clothes hangers too high (forcing players to strain their ankles, arms, and hamstrings), fixing the team manager’s board on the back of the dressing room door, which must be kept open at all times as a fire exit, and positioning ‘slimming mirrors’ near the door, so that the players’ last image of themselves before they leave the dressing room is significantly smaller than they are.28 Many designers thus use these qualities embedded in artefacts in their design process. Fukasawa Naoto explained in an interview how each chair invites a different type of behaviour.29 He referred to the American psychologist James Gibson, whose discussion of the term ‘affordance’ reveals how objects impact human behaviour. Kuramata supported this idea that the design of stairs causes people to ascend them in a certain manner and that closet design causes people to store their belongings in a certain way. Kuramata designed chairs with a backrest that constrains people to remain erect rather than lean back.30 One can also note the influence of the Hello Kitty character (who has no mouth and whose short limbs do not enable her to move) on women who have understood that in order to be desirable, they ought to behave in a babyish manner. The same goes for Barbie, the stick-thin doll that some researchers believe causes body image problems in the lives of many girls, possibly leading even to anorexia.

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Design and visual culture: sign, style, and social identity Beyond the material structure and physical design of the object, which influence the user’s behaviour, its style and status as a visual sign also serve to construct social identity in the context of postmodern consumption. The conception and definition of design as a series of signs goes back to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s trip to Las Vegas in 1968. This field trip was followed by their book Learning from Las Vegas, which presented a new theoretical framework for understanding design. Venturi and Scott Brown’s visual semiotic methodology changed the Modernist understanding of design as a primarily functional, ergonomic, and material practice, and gave rise to a conception of design as a visual sign and of style as a social idea.31 The cultural critic Roland Barthes argued that an item of clothing that is merely functional can only exist outside of culture. The moment such an item is produced, sold, or worn within a social and cultural framework, it becomes a semiotic element, a signifier that points to other signifiers such as concepts, ideas, values, norms, and ideologies.32 Or, in the words of Umberto Eco, ‘I speak through my clothes.’33 This conception of the object as sign was also promoted by Baudrillard, who attended to the character of products in late consumer culture in his book For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Baudrillard describes how, with the rise of late consumer culture, objects lost their functional meaning and began to serve as social signs expressed by means of style. These signs serve psychological and social needs, and not merely physical, functional ones. As Baudrillard argues: ‘An accurate theory of objects will not be established on a theory of needs and their satisfaction, but upon a theory of social prestations and signification.’34 In order to explain the new consumer culture, Baudrillard deconstructed traditional economic perceptions, highlighting instead the concept of ‘sign exchange value’ and claiming that: ‘Today consumption defines the stage where commodity is immediately produced as a sign, as sign value, and where signs (culture) are produced as commodities.’35 As he continues, ‘An object is not an object of consumption unless it is released from its psychic determinations as symbol; from its functional determinations as instrument; from its commercial determinations as product; and is thus liberated as a sign to be recaptured by the formal logic of fashion, i.e., by the logic of differentiation.’36 The ‘logic of social differentiation’ concerns the way that an individual distinguishes and attains a social position and prestige through the purchase and use of consumer goods. In the new consumer culture created in the 1970s and 1980s, many products of the same category existed side by side. They thus achieved meaning and identity only via their differentiation from similar products, that is, by producing a different ‘sign value’. These products have lost their link to their original meaning, function, material

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value, and production costs. As a result, the consumer bases the purchase on branding or, in other words, on social information that the brand offers rather than on the product’s materiality or functionality. The selection of a particular product from among a wide variety of alternatives thus boils down to the selection of a sign that captures the product’s social information and social positioning. Products are positioned against one another as signs against signs, creating new hierarchies and new forms of differentiation among their producers and consumers. This process of uniting around a unique product that differentiates a person or a group from other people or groups may be described as a type of totemism which, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, inevitably shapes the structure of human society. Totemism is the human attempt to unite around an object that becomes the sign of the group. The sign provides an identity, inspiration, and strength to its followers, and protects them from the constant threat of dispersion.37 In late consumer culture, the individual declares affiliation to a group or a subculture via the lifestyle that is expressed in the brand’s sign value. According to Baudrillard, the transformation of objects from functional things to signs of identity was followed by the transformation of the postmodern city into a sphere of codes and signs. The city ceased to be the politico-industrial zone that it was in the nineteenth century – a site of industrial concentration and exploitation devoted to the production and consumption of commodities. Instead, it became a zone of the sign, the media, and the code. Baudrillard thus argues that ‘the urban matrix no longer realizes a power (labor power), but a difference (the operation of the sign): metallurgy has become semiurgy.’ He describes the city as ‘the ghetto of television and advertising, the ghetto of consumers and consumed, of readers read in advanced, encoded decoders of every message … The monopoly of this code, circulating throughout the urban fabric, is the genuine form of social relations.’38 The sign value that creates differentiation between similar products builds on an aesthetics and style that refer to specific social information and offer a specific lifestyle.39 By extension, the principle of social differentiation in postmodern society is also related to aesthetics and style. We typically view taste and style as personal issues and perceive the act of selection as intuitive and subconscious – a gift of nature. However, as Bourdieu argues, taste and style are closely linked to different positions in social space and to the system of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes.40 In his words, ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’.41 Taste and style are thus social and cultural constructions, which are acquired in a manner similar to language. They are the means by which individuals declare their affiliation to a specific class, group, or subculture, and their differentiation from other groups. This understanding transforms the definition of ‘style’ from a seemingly meaningless form

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Critical design in Japan of decoration into the guardian at the thresholds that separate various groups and categories of social status. This phenomenon can be seen throughout history. In ancient Rome, only those of or above the rank of senator were allowed to wear clothing dyed a particular shade of purple. In Imperial China, only the emperor was permitted to wear yellow. During the Middle Ages, the right to wear specific garments was enshrined in legislation known as the Sumptuary Laws, which became progressively more complex over time, extending even to the consumption of specific foods and the use of household equipment. These laws, which were passed on religious or moral grounds, were in fact designed to create clear distinctions between different social classes, as well as between genders. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, English and French courtiers and aristocrats passed laws forbidding the rising merchant class, which had become increasingly wealthy, from wearing expensive materials such as furs, velvet, and brocades. The courtiers, who were losing their economic capital following the Crusades and their ostentatious lifestyle, sought to impose these laws in order to prevent the merchant class from imitating aristocratic fashions, and thus to preserve their status.42 By the sixteenth century, the English aristocracy was so perturbed by the growing wealth of the merchant class that King Henry VIII was persuaded to strengthen the Sumptuary Laws. Ermine, sable, and miniver, as well as broad-toed shoes, could only be worn by nobles. No one beneath the rank of knight could wear a silk shirt. Purple was reserved for the king, as was cloth made of gold, although dukes and marquises were also allowed to wear these colours. Newly wealthy Tudor merchants broke these laws, even though they could be stopped on the streets for wearing a forbidden item, which would then be confiscated as a punishment.43 Such modes of distinction have become increasingly more democratic given the new consumption possibilities that arose following the Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, style continues to function as a silent social sign signifying differentiation and belonging to certain groups. The style and material makeup of a given product, as well as its sign value, are thus far from innocent or meaningless. Rather, they construct each product as a cultural unit that contains social information regarding values and norms, and represents a specific lifestyle and status. The term ‘style’, as the anthropologist Tamar El Or argues, thus unifies the fields of aesthetics, sociology, and anthropology.44 The discourse on style, which was already initiated by some of the founders of these disciplines, such as the anthropologist Franz Boas and the art historian Ernst Gombrich, continues to this day.45 The anthropologist Margaret Conkey explains that the field of sociology is concerned with style because: ‘Style is part of the means by which humans make sense of their world and with which cultural meanings are always in production.’46 The anthropologist Martin Wobst offers a comprehensive discussion of this subject, paying attention to the simulta-

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neously permissive and repressive power of style. He argues that ‘style is what reifies hegemony. But style also reifies resistance, as well as material challenges to hegemony and resistance.’47 In his work on cross-cultural stylistic influences and questions of originality and imitation, Wobst offers an in-depth definition of ‘style’, describing it as a fundamental human characteristic of both the individual and the group: ‘Style is that part of our artifactual repertoire that makes us human.’48 According to Wobst, style enables individuals to make themselves unique in accordance with (and despite) the social order: ‘Style is always there by the grace of individuals; individuals cannot easily prevent others from evaluating their talk about group membership also as talk about themselves as individuals (whether or not they want that to happen) ... Thus style always talks loudly about individuals.’49 Since it materially intervenes between individuals and between individuals and the group, Wobst describes its impact as ‘material interferences’ or ‘material signaling’, adding: ‘Within this realm of “material interferences”, style refers to aspects of form that “talk” or “write” and that are “listened to” or “read.” In contrast to artifactual form that interferes with matter or energy, “stylistic form” on artifacts interferes materially with humans.’50 In addition to sociologists, scholars of aesthetics such as Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, the authors of Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, have discussed how the style of shoes has participated throughout history in the construction of identities and socioeconomic boundaries, attesting to the socioeconomic status, cultural preferences, and sometimes even the sexuality of their wearers.51 In addition to sociologists and art historians, philosophers since antiquity were also concerned themselves with the concept of style. The aesthetic context of style was already explored by Aristotle and other Classical philosophers and is given expression, for instance, in Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime or in Horace’s Ars Poetica.52 Merleau-Ponty argues that style is a dynamic phenomenon pertaining to human expression. For him it is the initial sketch of meaning, which can be considered to be the essential structure of human existence. In this sense it resembles the Heideggerian existentiale of care (sorge), as well as the sociological perception of style as a generator of identity. According to Merleau-Ponty, style is a mixture of subject and object, an intermediate phenomenon that lies between them and that is both passive and active. As such, style is a complex, dynamic structure that unifies one’s life through meanings and experiences, while being open to the prospects of one’s future and dreams.53 These theorists all present style as a powerful tool for identity-­building that serves to forge connectivity, create differentiation, and shift the balance of power between social groups. The use of style by certain social groups can thus also acquire a political charge, becoming a ‘politics of style’ that often creates what Umberto Eco called ‘semiotic guerrilla

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Critical design in Japan ­ arfare’.54 Despite its existence throughout history, this function of style w seems to have intensified following the rise in the importance of the sign in postmodern consumer culture. For while Modernism declared itself to be beyond style, insisting on the principle of form following function, the postmodern object did not strive for authenticity or truth, but rather presented itself in advance as a sign ‘with an attitude’.55 As Glen Adamson and Jane Pavitt have noted, for the postmodern movement ‘style was everything’, leading this period to be equally defined as that of ‘the style wars’, that is, of competing stylistic narratives.56 During this period, style and the material embodied in designer products became both political and performative, enabling subcultures and individuals alike to present their attitudes in the public sphere concerning social issues such as gender, class, race, the politics of identity, and social or national affiliations. Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style demonstrates how a specific style can express a subculture’s protest against the cultural hegemony. This type of stylistic protest also appeared among groups of young people in Tokyo, who beginning in the 1970s created subcultures consolidated around a stylistic core, such as the take-no-ko-zoku or the kurisutaru-zoku. Stylistic variety, in this context, is viewed as a means of externalising both personal and collective emotions and ideologies, since in the process of consumption, consumers are collecting social signs in order to construct their social status, their affiliation to a specific group, their personal identity, and their differentiation from others. As a result, each individual functions as a guidepost saturated with signs that testify to his or her identity, social association, and status. We can also restate this by saying that whenever consumers purchase products, the actual ‘product’ that is being purchased is identity. As Clammer argues: ‘Shopping is not merely the acquisition of things. It is the buying of identity.’57 Stuart Ewen, who highlighted the blurring of boundaries between products, identity, and personal identity, quotes Robert Lynd, who labelled this phenomenon ‘commodity self ’.58 Baudrillard similarly noted that the new consumer society developing in the 1970s and 1980s was motivated by need and desire. However, in this case the need was not a materialistic one to acquire functional objects but rather a need for differentiation, which is actually a desire for social meaning.59 In the postmodern era, the need for social and psychological differentiation is stronger than the materialistic need for functional objects, and is thus the primary motivator for late consumer culture and for the way products are designed. Moreover, in this new product/­branding culture, need and desire unite to present a new social networking and social psychology in which consumers purchase signs, style, and identity. Accordingly, Baudrillard identified the ‘sign exchange value’ that is based on style as the currency of the social system in which it was created and used, as a motivating factor, and as a basis for understanding the new

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social paradigm. This theory of signs within consumer society provides us with insights on how style and design manufacture needs, desires, and values and play a crucial role in organising contemporary societies around consumer objects, needs, and practices. In order to understand the wide-ranging implications of design for society, one must take into account that objects are not innocent and that humans are simultaneously driven by symbolism and materialism. Both the material makeup and the style of objects thus function as active social agents that impact the social order and shape subjectivity on both a physical and an emotional level.

Critique and critical design Late consumer culture, which became a central ideology in capitalist countries during the postmodern period, created the concept of a ‘personal lifestyle’ as a discursive practice – one whose internal logic and meanings are produced by the consumers. Such a practice is thus joyfully embraced by consumers, and operates on the social acceptance of those who are equally oppressed by it. The system of consumer culture promises consumers to assist them in constructing their personal identity through the consumption of variously styled ‘designer objects’. These popular objects are viewed by consumers as passive entities that are controlled by their desire, and as part of the natural order of their habitus. Yet in reality, these consumers are helplessly swayed in a wild avalanche of stimuli, signs, codes, and styles that promises to provide them with an identity. Since these products do not provide functional content but rather social information that is relevant for an extremely short period of time, they lead consumers to repeatedly replace the objects symbolising their lifestyle. Most consumers are thus unable to withstand the pressure exerted by this system, or the ‘terror’ exercised by popular lifestyle brands that shape consumer behaviour. In other words, the liberal insistence on the individual’s free agency and on their power to change or impact their personal living conditions is not anchored in reality, since every individual is limited by a network of social relations and structures and surrounded by objects that activate them socially and shape their subjectivity, transforming them to a large extent into an object of social activity rather than a subject or initiator. This condition calls to mind Michel Foucault’s understanding of culture as structured around specific discourses, values, and norms that serve as powerful mechanisms of social and cultural surveillance, and enable powerful social groups to subject and control other groups.60 These discourses and values are culturally accepted as natural, while in fact embodying the hegemonic norms of the dominant group and policing us to unconsciously conform to ‘acceptable’ forms of behaviour and thought. Foucault defined this system as oppressive. Similarly, various styles and types of objects perceived as passive are in fact powerfully involved in

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Critical design in Japan shaping and policing our behaviour. One example is clothing cuts that shape the ‘right’ conception of the female body and accordingly reshape female behaviour, or brands that symbolise our social status and affiliation. Foucault not only exposed the oppressive system underlying these invisible norms but also called for a critique of it. In his eyes, a critique amounts to the presentation of the conditions that enable knowledge and power to change patterns of behaviour and control, reorganising mechanisms of power and disciplines of knowledge. As he argues: ‘Critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth.’61 This approach seeks to diverge from, change, or transform existing regimes of power. In Foucault’s words: ‘Critique will be the art of voluntary in subordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we would call, in a word, the politics of truth.’62 Foucault examined how norms are formed from a genealogical standpoint. He asked how certain conditions transform a certain event into necessary or desired, and above all into a foundational event that reshapes the behavioural patterns of regimes of power.63 Foucault did not seek a causal connection between knowledge and power, concentrating instead on the moments in which the intersection of knowledge and power renders them invisible, while also producing a discourse, value, or norm that becomes conventionally accepted by all. Foucault defined this modus operandi as an ‘effective history’ research, which provides an epistemological discussion concerning the production of a certain body of knowledge. In other words, ‘effective history’ research employs genealogical methodology that traces the creation of different values along history and the way it can be criticised and challenged.64 Using this practice, he attempts to implement radical and active change in the world that is capable of moving the subject, and to reorganise categories of thought and their relations with one another. A critique thus enables the subject to identify the systems of knowledge upon which power is predicated, to examine their characteristics, and to judge the ways in which they are activated.65 In the same way, one can examine the power of design and its critique.66 The term ‘critical design’ was coined by Anthony Dunne in his 1990 book Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design.67 This kind of design practice, however, was already initiated in the 1960s and 1970s by Italian radical design groups such as Alchemia and Superstudio, and later by the Memphis Group and by architectural movements such as Archigram in Britain and Metabolism in Japan.68 These groups protested against the social values and goals of commercial design, in parallel to the social critique theories developed during the same period. One of the challenges of these critical designers was to question what is the meaning of the term ‘design’. Particularly, they were trying to change the mean-

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ing of ‘design’ from aesthetic, decorative, or functional object to a social tool. Critical design gave rise to the term ‘cultural jams’, raising awareness to social concerns and political agendas such as the politics of the body, identity politics, class, race, production relations, and post-colonial identity. Their primary intent was to encourage user’s reflections upon a particular discourse and to affect the intellect. Critical designers examined how ideas and ideological power relations were embodied in materials or style and sought to challenge these conventions and to call for new ways of thinking about objects, their use, and their environment. They aimed to increase societal awareness, motivation, and enable action through the design device. They sought to foster change by giving rise to a new conception of reality by means of three processes: the first was the creation of a sensory form of alienation, that is, the definition of new content and a new form that were absent from the existing discourse; the second was the development of social awareness concerning the reasons for this alienation; and the third was raising the consumer’s awareness to this new world view.69 So, for instance, the deconstructive fashion of Rei Kawakubo (discussed in Chapter 3) uses materials and forms (in this case, novel cuts and conventions of fashion photography) to counter the policing of the body by fashion designers and advertisements. In doing so, she gives rise to a critique that parallels the verbal critique concerning the politics of the body, with the aim of developing critical awareness to conceptions of the body. The design of novel types of clothes is meant, according to this designer, to transform women’s perceptions of their own bodies, and thus to change their behaviour. Like critical theory, critical design builds on the post-structuralist thought that developed following the student riots of 1968, which brought both France and Japan to the verge of a civil revolution. Since the student movement in these countries was unable to give rise to a strong political leadership, it withdrew and disintegrated. The French student movement was chased off the streets and went underground, giving rise to the discourse of post-structuralist thought – a product of the mixture of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and disintegration that characterised the year 1968. Since these revolutions were unable to dismantle the state’s power structures, only theories remained. In France, post-structuralism largely remained within the walls of the academy (with the exception of small critical design groups such as Grapus), where it focused on the possibility of undermining structures of language.70 Elsewhere, such as in Britain, Italy, and Japan, the energy that erupted during the 1960s was channelled into avant-garde art or radical/critical design, since design, as argued by design historian John Heskett, is similar to language in that each is ‘a defining characteristic of what it is to be human’.71 Like language, design is inevitable, and our relationship to it – the degree to which we understand what is being communicated to us and to which we

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Critical design in Japan can express what we think, feel, and desire – has an immense influence in shaping our encounter with the world.72 Much like the central idea underlying French critical theory, namely, that the creation of a new language is a prerequisite for the creation of a new social reality, critical design sought to invent a new material and visual language and a new design language in order to create a new reality. The language of design and style sought to shatter the subjects of discourse, values, and social paradigms dictated by capitalist ideology. In doing so, it hoped to do away with the partitions, class structures, theoretical discourses, social orders, and social codes embedded in the object, and to challenge the identity and behaviour of the ‘right person’ who thinks and says the ‘right’ things and wears the ‘right’ clothes. Thus, Matt Malpass argues that ‘within design research, critical design practice ignited discussion of design as a method of cultural provocation where some designers and commentators take critical design as a starting point for discussing how social issues and political themes might enter design practice’.73 Yet in contrast to social theory, which calls for action through words, critical design presents a form of protest that makes use of the power of materials, objects, and images as units of meaning that bring together new social and economic values and a new visual style to critique existing norms, to give rise to new forms of human behaviour, and to create a new habitus. In other words, critical design practice is used as a medium to engage user audiences and provoke debate. It does this by encouraging its audiences to think critically about themes engendered in the design work. Thus, Malpass describes critical design as ‘an affective, rather than explanatory practice in so much as it opens lines of inquiry as opposed to providing answers or solutions to questions or design problems’.74 Hence, while in mainstream design, the market provides strong incentives for designers to participate in economic systems that are arguably beyond the individual’s ability to challenge, critical design includes new practices such as participatory design, co-design, design activism, feminist design, socially responsive design, and transition design. These kinds of design challenge capitalist values and establish an intellectual stance of their own. This perspective frees objects from their passivity and renders them active, undoing the dichotomy between object and subject and viewing them as jointly active agents within a social network. Critical designers are thus also aware of critical theory, as well as of the material’s power to shape values and dictate rules of behaviour. The objects produce new behavioural codes and construct a new reality. Thus, while most designers act in accordance with the dictates of capitalist and late consumer culture, the designers presented in this book see themselves as agents of social change introducing new cultural norms. Yet in contrast to critical theory, which developed in the ivory tower of academia, design-based protest is located in galleries or stores as part of the same consumer culture it seeks

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to critique. It does not protest against the capitalist system but rather uses it as a platform to instigate change. Thus, when we observe products that may appear unwearable or useless, or posters that seem to transmit no legible message, the question arises as to whether these are seductive consumer items designed to promote sales or critical objects. The answer, in this case, is both/and. As Adamson and Pavitt argue in their discussion of postmodern aesthetics, this is precisely the dichotomy that characterised postmodernism in the 1980s: at once exhilarated and critical, centred on both commodities and their critique.75 Social behaviours and concepts can be transformed not only through critical products but also through critical thinking about design. In her discussion of ‘alpha brands’, Rawsthorn discusses two companies that transformed the lives of numerous people: the electronics company Braun and the computer company Apple. According to Rawsthorn, the entrepreneurs who founded these companies, Steve Jobs and Erwin Braun, were both decisive leaders that based their companies on new and innovative forms of design, and both were part of the counterculture of their time. Erwin Braun was a member of the subversive anti-Nazi Swingjugend movement in Nazi Germany, and Steve Jobs was a member of the geeky-hippy community active in California in the 1970s, with its focus on meditation, veganism, and yoga. Both brought their critical thinking to management, requesting their designers to think ‘out of the box’ and create products that introduced people to the magic of electronics and computing in an empowering way.76 In this case, the critical thinking ethos that was translated into products and changed people’s behaviour can also be perceived as critical design.

Critical design, Japan and methodology Recent years have seen a proliferation of historical research on Japanese design, ranging from the work of Japanese scholars such as Modan Dezain Hihan (A Critique of Modern Design) by Kashiwagi Hiroshi and Nihon no Dezain Undō: Indasutoriaru Dezain no Keifu (Design Movement in Japan: History of Industrial Design) by Izuhara Eiichi to subsequent studies by European scholars, such as Anne Gossot’s work on the furniture designer Moriya Nobuo (1893–1927) and Sarah Teasley’s work on the furniture designer Kogure Joichi (1881–1943). Additional studies that have offered a critical perspective on this subject include, among others, Modan Gāru to Shokuminchiteki Kindai (Modern Girls and Colonial Modernity) by Ito¯ Ruri, Sakamoto Hiroko, and Tani E. Barlow, which examines posters and fashion design from the perspective of gender and colonial studies. A critical, postmodern perspective is similarly evident in studies of fashion design such as Japan Fashion Now by Valerie Steele, Patricia Mears, Kawamura Yuniya, and Narumi Hiroshi.77

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Critical design in Japan While some of these studies reinterpreted modern Japanese design by pointing to implicit gender-related and post-colonial ideologies in the service of prevalent cultural values, only a few of these underscored the social critique expressed by avant-garde Japanese designers, who challenged and defied the dominant values. This book attempts to present the critical social ideas embedded in the postmodern and contemporary aesthetic of specific designers, while placing them in the socioeconomic context of their time. The main working assumption of this book is that Japanese design is not an autonomous sphere that can be examined by focusing on its immanent development, with only cursory acknowledgment of its affinities with external forces such as national, class-based, gender-based, ethnic, and colonial power relations. Thus, this study sees design as a heteronomous sphere that is dependent upon, and constructed through, the values and principles structuring numerous parallel fields.78 It thus centres not only on designers and popular objects but also on the interrelations between these objects and subjective behaviours shaped by social, political, and economic conceptions. Such a discussion partakes of the post-structuralist critique that has ruptured Modernist sociocultural paradigms by revealing their implicit construction of conceptual categories through binary oppositions (such as nature and culture, reason and emotion, masculinity and femininity, white and black). The deconstruction of these oppressive hierarchies, which had created a cultural ethos based on familiar power relations (the supremacy of Logos, patriarchal thought, or Western culture), led, in turn, to the construction of new social power relations and of multiple types of relationships between different constructs. One of the binary oppositions dismantled in the postmodern era was that between subject and object, which was shaped by the supremacy of the first term over the second. As a result, objects could be extricated from the cultural morass in which they had been caught and rescued from their linguistic and theoretical status as voiceless, passive, and neutral things in the service of human beings. Instead, they came to be viewed as entities capable of activating, stimulating, moving, and constructing human subjects. Such entities evolve through a range of processes: they are created, transformed, degraded, and recycled, surviving or disappearing over time. This theoretical approach presents objects and technological developments as exerting a significant influence and creating new social paradigms. This perspective on material culture, and the desire to probe social concepts and ideologies by means of objects that arose at the turn of the twenty-first century, followed upon the rise of late consumer culture, popular culture, and the culture of brand names and designer objects in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast to the earlier approach formulated by Clifford Geertz in the 1980s, which saw culture as a form of representation and text-making existing in opposition to ‘materiality’, the current perspective views material objects as a central and vital element of

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cultural interpretation.79 This renewed interest in the social meanings of material objects represents the ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences and an interest in various kinds of material ‘beings’ known as ‘object-oriented ontology’.80 It has contributed to downplaying the power of the subject as actor and activator and has undermined the cultural supremacy of abstract, conceptual ideas over material objects. In doing so, it has sought to germinate new spheres of understanding – an active cultural ecology with no division between human and inanimate forces. Following these ideas, this study focuses on the role of design as a social practice and explores how, where, and why objects impact the construction of power relations and the creation of meaningful social systems.81 In this context, my methodology centres on identifying the mechanisms of action shaped by the aesthetic avant-garde, which formed the basis of the material and visual critiques presented by the designers. To this end, the book combines methodologies employed in the social sciences, which examine social and economic forces, with methodologies centred on ­aesthetics – thus offering a multi-layered examination of the design object. This methodology also relies on the Actor- Network Theory formulated by the sociologist Bruno Latour and the scholar of science and technology Michel Callon, which views objects as epistemically equal to human subjects.82 As already mentioned, this theory reveals how the relations between objects and people create a social network that impacts innovation in the fields of design and of scientific and technological inventions and how these innovations, in turn, influence the network.83 Network theory shapes an interdisciplinary approach that combines the distinct spheres of art, design, sociology, business administration, marketing, and history, allowing for a reading of aesthetics within the social network and in the context of the sociology of consumption. In order to understand the network in which the objects appear, I made use of several methods to collect and analyse the relevant data, including both in-depth interviews with the creators and a semiotic analysis of the objects. In addition, I studied local phenomena addressed by the designers I interviewed, such as rapid economic growth, visual culture, materials, and new technological or social paradigm shifts. These phenomena enabled me to understand the social network in which diverse creators and objects were active, as well as their social impact. Finally, after exploring the nature of design and its power to create categories and shape new social power relations as well as its research methodology, this book starts by examining the structure of the field and the postmodern socioeconomic system in Japan from the 1970s to the 1990s, including the aesthetic, economic, social, and political forces that shaped it. Chapter 1 describes how the new forces active during this period informed the construction of an aesthetic milieu of ‘super designers’ who created a new Japanese form of expression, which continues to inform ­current design practices. I then present the story of different

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Critical design in Japan designers from this aesthetic milieu, who each formulated a critical visual form of expression in a distinct field (graphic design, product design, fashion design, furniture design, and interactive design) and in a different style (ranging from minimalism to deconstruction, queer style, and digital style).84 Each chapter is devoted to a single designer, company, or studio; yet when seen together as an ensemble, these design projects exceed the limits of products associated with the proper name of any one designer. The following chapters explore the different critical ideas (feminism, ecology, body politics, the politics of identity, and more) that form the unconscious of postmodern design in Japan. I have chosen to present designers working in various fields in order to stress that a critical approach is not related to one particular field. Since these individual design projects differ from one another in terms of their style, medium, and the nature of the protest or critique they offer, I do not aim to present a single and distinct ideological approach, but rather to document the work and world view of diverse designers, as well as the long chain of social and economic institutions to which their work is related. Chapter 2 centres on the advertisement design of Ishioka Eiko and Suzuki Hachiro¯ in the 1970s, which was concerned with feminist, anti-institutional, and ecological themes. Chapter 3 presents the kawaii movement and the work of the avant-garde fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, who has been concerned with the politics of the body and of identity since the 1970s. Chapter 4 focuses on the design approach of the lifestyle company Mujirushi Ryohin, which has been using basic design to perform a critique of late capitalism, consumer culture, and branding since the 1980s. Chapter 5 presents the work of the Hironen studio, whose work during the 1980s and 1990s focused on furniture and jewellery design for galleries and presented a critical stance on otherness through a queer and decadent form of visual expression. Finally, Chapter 6 explores contemporary digital design that goes beyond objects through the work of Takram Design Studio, Nosigner, and Wakita Akira, which underscores the blurring of boundaries between object and subject, nature and culture, as well as the creation of a new kind of living environment. Some of these designers work in Japan’s economic centres of power, while others work in independent studios and exhibit in small galleries. As cultural agents active in a range of fields, they present different types of social criticism, which together offer a comprehensive picture of Japanese design culture in the postmodern era. 85

Notes   1 A. Munroe (ed.), Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York: Abrams, 1994), p. 149.   2 A. Rawsthorn, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life (New York: The Overlook Press, 2013), p. 9.

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  3 V. Flusser, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), p. 17.   4 Rawsthorn, Hello World, p. 9.   5 For more on the function of aesthetics of popular objects, see Y. Saito, ‘Everyday aesthetics’, Philosophy and Literature, 25:1 (2001), 92–3.   6 G. Julier, ‘From visual culture to culture of design’, Design Issues, 22:1 (2006), 64–76.   7 E. Illouz, ‘Big Brother: When Secrecy Becomes a Norm in Israel, It Comes With a Price’, Haaretz (2 February 2013), www.haaretz.com/.premium-secrecy-the-normin-israel-comes-with-a-price-1.5227718 (accessed 8 August 2019).   8 A. Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 30.   9 Illouz, ‘Big Brother’. 10 P. Bourdieu, ‘The Berber House or the world reversed’, Information (International Social Science Council), 9:2 (1970), 151–70. 11 P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 143–4. 12 N. Elias, The Civilizing Process: Volume 1, The History of Manners (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), pp. 69, 126–9. 13 W. Muller, Order and Meaning in Design (Utrecht: Lemma, 2001), p. 303. 14 Y. N. Harari, A Brief History of Mankind (Tel Aviv: Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir Publishing House, 2011), p. 120 (in Hebrew). 15 Y. N. Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Vintage Books, 2011), pp. 127–8. 16 Crary also draws a parallel between the development of photography in the mid-nineteenth century (a medium that captured objects which the organic eye and earlier mediums were incapable of capturing and preserving, thus supplying the first materials concerning the world’s ‘optical unconscious’) and the development of psychoanalytic theory, which during those same years began shedding light on the unconscious, the black hole in the human soul. See J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 48. 17 D. Miller, Consumption: Objects, Subjects and Mediations in Consumption (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2001), p. 306. 18 B. Latour, ‘On technical mediation – philosophy, sociology, genealogy’, Common Knowledge, 3:2 (1994), 31. 19 Ibid., 33. 20 Ibid., 32–3. 21 Ibid., 38. 22 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. xxi. 23 L. Winner, ‘Do artifacts have politics?’, Deadalus – Journal of American Arts and Sciences, 109:1 (1980), 123–4, 128. 24 L. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of Hi Technology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 20. 25 P. P. Verbeek, What Things Do (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2005), p. 214. 26 E. T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1982), pp. 153–4. 27 C. Davis, ‘Revealed: Football’s Most Devious Dressing Room Tactics’, The Telegraph (10 December, 2015), www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-united/12043399/Revealed-footballs-most-devious-dressing-room-tactics.html (accessed 8 August 2019). 28 J. Panyaarvudh, ‘Inside the Changing-Room Wars at Chelsea FC Sports’, The Nation (11 October, 2012). 29 Personal interview with Fukasawa Naoto in his Tokyo studio, 18 September 2015.

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Critical design in Japan 30 D. Sudjic, Shiro Kuramata: Essays & Writings (London: Phaidon, 2013), p. 144. 31 R. Venturi, D. Scott Brown, and S. Izenour (eds), Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001 [1972]). 32 R. Barthes, ‘Blue is in fashion this year’, in M. Carter (ed.), The Language of Fashion (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006), pp. 42–55. 33 Cited in D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 2003 [1979]), p. 100. 34 J. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. C. Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), p. 30 and note 4. (Italics in the original.) 35 Ibid., pp. 146–7. Baudrillard explained that: ‘Like the sign form, the commodity is a code managing the exchange values ... it is the code which … reduces all symbolic ambivalence in order to ground the “rational” circulation of values and their play of exchange in the regulated equivalence of values.’ See J. Baudrillard, Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 81–2. (Italics in the original.) 36 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, pp. 146–7. 37 J. Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (New York: Marion Boyars, 1978), pp. 45–50. 38 J. Baudrillard, ‘Kool killer or the insurrection of signs’, in J. Baudrillard (ed.), Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 2017 [1976]), pp. 77–8. 39 R. Goldman and S. Papson, Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), pp. 5–8. 40 On the meaning of ‘habitus’, see R. Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 74–84. See also M. Sturken and L. Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 227–8; J. Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 46–50. 41 P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 6, 169–225. Bourdieu argues that ‘the producers are led by the logic of competition with other producers and by the specific interests linked to their position. To produce distinct products which meet the different cultural interests’ (pp. 230–5). He also addresses distinctions in taste between the upper and lower classes in terms of their attitude to art and cultural consumption (pp. 260–95). Note that Bourdieu is discussing the French social classes. Japanese society does not have the same class distinctions, although it is a hierarchical society, with much importance placed on gaining social status. For example, the Japanese view the value of education in a parallel manner to the cultural capital that Bourdieu speaks of. 42 B. Payne, The History of Costume: From Ancient Mesopotamia through the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1992 [1965]), p. 308. 43 Rawsthorn, Hello World, p. 90. 44 Tamar El Or explores the wide-ranging use of the term ‘style’ in the disciplines of sociology and art. See T. El Or, Sandals: The Anthropology of Local Style (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2014), pp. 40–7 (in Hebrew). 45 The anthropologist Franz Boas described how craftspeople in the tribes he studied produced objects not only for the purpose of survival but also for the purpose of enjoyment and as a means of cultural expression through style. Boas showed how a mechanism of selection and distinction is created in a given culture through stylistic codes and rules that shape the craftsmen’s work. See F. Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover Publication, 2010 [1927]), pp. 156–60. The art historian Ernst Gombrich, meanwhile, explained the connection between the psychology of style and our awareness and response in his book Art and Illusion. He explores the divergence of styles worldwide and discusses stylistic changes in the course of

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60 61 62 63

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European history, ascribing them to the changing world views of the artists. See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1977 [1960]). For a literature review of theoretical perspectives on the term ‘style’, see M. Conkey, ‘Style, design and function’, in C. Tilly, W. Keane, S. Kuechler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (eds), Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2006), pp. 233–372. Conkey, ‘Style, design and function’, p. 360. M. Wobst, ‘Style in archeology’, in E. Chilton (ed.), Material Meanings (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999), p. 122. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 120–1. Ibid., p. 120. G. Riello and P. McNeil, Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2011), pp. 3–4, 9. R. Lowth, Longinus on the Sublime (Charleston: Nabu Press, 2012); Horace, Epistles and Ars Poetica (San Bernadino: Ulan Press, 2012). M. Almog, ‘An Inborn Complex: Modalities of Alterity in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought’ (PhD dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 2013), pp. 231–41. Hebdige, Subculture, p. 105. G. Adamson and J. Pavitt, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970–1990 (exhibition catalogue) (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), p. 13. Ibid., pp. 62–9. Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan, pp. 68–84. S. Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 71. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, pp. 92–6; H. Kashiwagi, ‘Post war history in advertising design’, in Advertising History 1950–1990 (exhibition catalogue) (Tokyo: East Japan Railway Culture Foundation, 1993), pp. 14–15 ; Goldman and Papson, Sign Wars, pp. 194–7. M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 109–33; see also M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 15–16. M. Foucault, The Politics of Truth (New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997), p. 32. Ibid. Foucault’s approach examines the complex and not always reciprocal relations between power, truth, and subjectivity as giving rise to foundational events. He saw norms as formed in the interaction between power and knowledge and examined the behaviour of subjects in relation to diverse mechanisms of knowledge and power. It is worth noting that Foucault did not argue that knowledge is a product of power in the service of the regime, even though in numerous cases we witness the exercise of power vis-à-vis those who lack knowledge. That is, Foucault opposed the reduction of knowledge to power and of power to knowledge, arguing that we must examine the way in which these two axes, knowledge and power, interact at certain historical moments. See L. Friedman, ‘The concept of criticism and the critical act’, Bezalel – Journal of Visual & Material Culture, 2 (2015), http://journal.bezalel.ac.il/ archive/3569 (accessed 2 July 2018) (in Hebrew). Postmodern philosophers like Foucault thought that it is impossible to reach a representation of truth, and so it is futile to try to achieve this goal by presenting more historical details. Moreover, they thought that the attempt to do so can be detrimental. Foucault also explored historical events and the transitions between them through the Nietzschean assumption of the existence of effective history (building on Nietzsche’s term ‘wirkungsgeschichte’). For Nietzsche, effective history is the history that becomes a ‘genealogy’, meaning, the transitions between events that

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65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

are not necessarily successive or adjacent, but nevertheless form effectiveness from the distance of years and centuries (like the links Nietzsche or Heidegger delineated between mythical events that took place in ancient Greece and the modern era). In the shift from historical research to genealogical research (which Foucault also characterised in the title of his 1969 methodological book The Archaeology of Knowledge), Foucault demonstrates the difference between structural research and genealogical research, which sets out to discover answers to questions concerning ideas and ideologies, and less in relation to historical structures that recur in different cultures. Genealogy inquires at what point in time certain terms started to create the possibility to take up positions of power in the discourse and constitute themselves as general ‘truths’. These genealogical studies allow Foucault to go back to different source materials that were deemed inadequate by historians before him, in order to understand how institutions and ideologies gained power and legitimacy in certain societies. What purpose did they serve and in whose service? Foucault’s method highlights the spheres of discourse, populations or classes that were not included in the historical studies that focused on hegemonic power structures (‘history is written by winners’). In the study of the genealogy of psychiatry, and the question of how did the distinction between ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ come about, Foucault wished to inquire how this way of labelling represented a ‘truth’ that excluded and oppressed disenfranchised communities. Foucault argued that ‘effective history’ not only looks for the knowledge in retrospect that Nietzsche sought out, but also enables him to criticise historians who downplay details that can contradict their perceptions, thus affixing their research in a specific discourse of ideology that is itself subject to power–knowledge tensions. The ideological discourse frames thought and modes of inquiry and in fact predetermines their conclusions. Like other postmodern philosophers, Foucault also disputed the presentation of a historical meta-narrative, since it erases individuality and private wishes in favour of the rule. With that, says Foucault, historical discourse is like demagoguery that celebrates the masses. For more about contemporary critical thinking see I. Rogoff, ‘Academy as potentiality’, in A. Nollert and I. Rogoff (eds), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (Berlin: Revolver, 2006), pp. 11–18. For more about thinking of design through Foucault’s theory see E. Lupton and A. Miller, ‘Disciplines of design: Writing with Foucault’, in E. Lupton and A. Miller (eds), Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design (London: Phaidon, 1996), pp. 66–7. A. Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). For more about the history of critical design see M. Malpass, Critical Design in Context: History, Theory and Practice (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), pp. 17–38. J. Ranciere, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), p. 142. Grapus was a collective of graphic designers founded in Paris in 1970, following the student revolution of 1968. Grapus designers sought to create critical design by combining the graphic arts and political action. J. Heskett, Toothpicks & Logos: Design in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 9. Rawsthorn, Hello World, p. 63. Malpass, Critical Design in Context, p. 9. Ibid., p. 41. (Italics in the original.) Adamson and Pavitt, Postmodernism, p. 70. Rawsthorn, Hello World, p. 98. For a literature review of research on Japanese design, see Y. Kikuchi, ‘Design histories and design studies in East Asia: Part 1’, Journal of Design History, 24:3 (2011),

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273–9. For a bibliography about Japanese design (in English and Japanese) in the following themes: histories of design in modern and contemporary Japan; ‘Japanese design’ as a concept; design and government policy; design methods, movements, criticism and theory; craft and industrial arts; design in visual and material culture; media technology and information design; as well as a list of journals published by art and design universities in Japan and a list of design related academic journals, see Y. Tsuji and H. Kikkawa, ‘Bibliography of design and society in modern Japan’, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 28 (2016), 40–50. Project MUSE, http:// muse.jhu.edu/article/668013 (accessed 8 August 2019). In contrast to autonomous principles, whose logic is internal to the field in question (in this case, the field of design), heteronomous principles point to the impact of forces active in other fields of power: politics, the economy, and society, which exist ‘outside the field of design’, thus revealing its dependence on them. The study of material culture is central today to numerous fields: industrial design, art history, anthropology, archeology, architecture, engineering, STS (science, technology and society), and, most significantly, the discipline of visual culture. The anthropologist Tamar El Or points to the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association, which took place in Chicago in November 2013, as marking the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology and the renewed interest in ‘being’ (see El Or, Sandals, pp. 120, 155). The study of the creation and production of objects sees design as integral to social processes, since the creation of an object partakes of the experience of social belonging. Ingold, for instance, explains that the production of objects is based on skill, which is a social capability that involves learning from and imitating others. See T. Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–16. See also T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 339–61. Other scholars, such as Marchand, note that the production of objects is part of social institutions, such as the institution of apprenticeship. See T. Marchand, ‘Knowledge in hand: Exploration of brain, hand and tool’, in R. Fardon, O. Harris, T. H. J. Marchand, C. Shore, V. Strang, R. Wilson and M. Nuttall (eds), The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology, Vol. 2 (London: Sage, 2012), pp. 261–72. In addition, the production of objects has a local cultural significance in shaping identity. See O. Goldstein-Gidoni, ‘Kimono and the construction of gendered and cultural identities’, Ethnology, 38:4 (1999), 351–70. See also El Or, Sandals, pp. 120, 155. B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 64–86. For more about the connection between technology and society, see B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1987). See also M. Callon, ‘Society in the making: The study of technology as a tool for sociological analysis’, in W. E. Bijker, T. Parke, and T. Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); and J. Law, ‘On power and its tactics: A view from the sociology of science’, The Sociological Review, 34:1 (1986), 1–38. Architects are an essential part of this milieu, since numerous architects – including Sejima Kazuyo, Ito¯ Toyo¯, Maki Fumihiko, and Ando¯ Tadao – shaped postmodern Japanese expression, and architecture is often the first point of reference in the literature on postmodernism. However, Japanese architecture during this period is beyond the scope of the current study. The objects discussed throughout the book were all created in Japan during the period in question. Significantly, during this period foreign design companies (such as IDEO) and a range of foreign designers were also active in Japan. Some of them are discussed in this book, since its methodology does not categorise designers

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Critical design in Japan according to their nationality, but rather according to the culture in which the designer acts and the values and norms that he or she communicates. The range of design fields explored in this book offer a comprehensive account of design types in Japan during this period. Additionally, I have attempted to present well-known creators who are included in the canon of this period, alongside voices that have been omitted.

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1 Postmodern critiques, Japan’s economic miracle, and the new aesthetic milieu

The social revolution that erupted in 1968 led a number of avant-garde designers and architects working in the early 1970s to take decisions that radically reshaped the course of Japanese design history. Working in Tokyo, the graphic designers Ishioka Eiko and Tanaka Ikko¯, the fashion designers Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo, the interior and product designers Kuramata Shiro¯ and Uchida Shigeru, and the architects Ando¯ Tadao and Isozaki Arata, among others, all contributed to the creation of a new conceptual and critical form of visual expression. Over the following three decades, the postmodern practices that were an outcome of the critical protest movements of the 1960s in Japan, Western Europe, and the United States1 affected almost every genre of visual culture, including art, design, architecture and cinema, as well as the new discourses in the fields of literature, philosophy, and critical theory. Concepts such as deconstruction, simulacrum, or rhizomatic structures, which originated in the context of the social protests, were given expression both verbally and visually. This postmodern aesthetic did not develop autonomously, but rather grew out of its reciprocal relations with a range of new social and theoretical constructs including post-industrialisation, post-Fordism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism, the post-human, and the new politics of gender, race, truth, identity, and otherness. Rather than forming a single, coherent language, this new aesthetic strategy was given expression through a wide range of subgenres such as radical design, ad-hocism, counter-design, trans-avant-gardism, neo-expressionism, radical eclecticism, and critical regionalism. In the context of postmodernism, Japan is an exceptional case due to the combined development of an extreme consumer culture and a new avant-garde aesthetic created by artists and designers who formulated both global and local critiques. The aesthetic shift, and the related social and economic changes that began in

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Critical design in Japan the 1960s, unfolded at the same time as similar shifts in both the United States and in Europe.

The rise of postmodern social and visual culture in Japan Despite its moniker, the ‘1968 movement’ spanned more than a single decade. The first radical postwar political protest, which erupted in 1960, arose in response to the Japanese government’s intention to extend a bilateral United States–Japan Security Treaty (nichi-bei anzen hoshō jōyaku, known as anpo) signed in 1951, which involved the maintenance of American military bases on Japanese soil in order to defend Japan against foreign attacks. In accordance with what was called the ‘Yoshida Doctrine’, Japan sacrificed a degree of national sovereignty in return for the freedom to pursue economic development, entering into what the historian John Dower has called a relationship of ‘subordinate independence’ with the United States. The demonstrations were an attempt to revise the Yoshida Doctrine and reclaim the nation’s sovereignty and neutrality. However, what started as a protest against Japan’s subordination to the United States, soon shifted to target the actions of the Japanese government, such as its involvement in the Korean War (1950–53) and the Vietnam War (1954–75), which were perceived as a reversion to Japan’s role as the victimiser of other Asian nations. Consequently, the New Left movements attacked what they considered as ‘the restrictive structure of modern society: technological rationality, utility, uniformity, and goal directedness’.2 They opposed all forms of rational debate, institutional procedures, and hierarchical organisations, and called for revolutionary acts and for a critique of internalised social evils. These movements advocated the cultivation of a sense of personal authenticity and independence, which coincided with the backlash against the restrictive structures of modern society.3 The inability to stop the renewal of the bilateral United States–Japan Security Treaty and the failure of other political struggles during the 1960s were perceived as the beginning of the end of the New Left as an effective political force and had far-reaching repercussions. As a result, artists and intellectuals were driven to sublimate the enormous emotional energies that might otherwise have been invested in political activism, channelling them instead into artistic experimentations. In an era in which political sovereignty remained out of reach, artists sought to assert a degree of cultural autonomy and independence through their work. This was one of the triggers behind the new anti-art scene that emerged with subversive art collectives such as Gutai Bijutsu Kyo¯kai (Gutai Group) and Jikken Ko¯bo¯ (Experimental Workshop) in the 1950s and Neo-Dada (NeoDadaism Organizers), Hi-Red Center, and Mono-ha in the 1960s. Using social protest tactics in public spaces, these movements struck out against traditional hierarchies, paving the way for the rise of new art forms in

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Japan.4 Taking their work outside of traditional institutional venues, they abandoned galleries and museums in favour of theatres, city streets and other public spaces, and mass media.5 As the curator Chong Doryun proclaimed, the entire city of Tokyo had become a multi-layered matrix of avant-garde production and energy.6 The Neo-Dada group arranged a series of exhibitions that were accompanied by shocking performances and guerrilla actions on the streets, and which incorporated destructive actions and ephemeral junk art. Another example was the street performance created by Nakanishi Natsuyuki of the Hi-Red Center, during which Nakanishi walked around the city with his head obscured by hundreds of clothespins, thus emphasising the body’s role as a primary artistic tool.7 Even more radical was the Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension) artists’ collective, which performed ‘rituals’ (gishiki) comprised of outstandingly unsocial behaviours (such as rolling around naked inside a shrine or wearing gas masks on the street). Undermining the regulated codes of propriety, these ‘rituals’ shocked unwitting witnesses in public spaces.8 The intention of these experiments was to define art by means of experience rather than of medium, author, or commercial value, and to protest against established art institutions, conventional beauty standards, and the corporate mentality. The artists employed unconventional materials and styles that challenged the rigid hierarchy of Japanese premodern and modern art, as well as market forces. These new art forms generated a radical shift in the relationship between art and society by cancelling the distance between artist and viewer and rupturing the boundaries between high and low art, between museums and public space, and between the body and art. By engaging with the problem of the individual in search of self-identity, they brought social and political issues into the realm of art.9 Although it is uncertain whether these art performances exerted an influence beyond the art scene of the time, they clearly generated a new energy and affected artists and designers active in other creative fields, including the avant-garde architectural Metabolism movement, photographers such as Hosoe Eiko¯ and Moriyama Daido¯, avant-garde theatres such as Angura, Red Tent Theater, and Tenjo¯ Sajiki theatre troupe, and Butoh dance.10 These artists were acquainted and inspired one another, often collaborating to blur the boundaries between different art forms. The composer Takemitsu To¯ru and the novelist Abe Ko¯bo¯, for example, began collaborating in the context of Jikken Ko¯bo¯ in Tokyo in 1951. The Butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi adapted novelist Yukio Mishima’s text Forbidden Colors (kinjiki) into a dance performance, and collaborated with the poet and playwright Tarayama Shu¯ji and with the photographers Hosoe Eiko¯ and To¯matsu Sho¯mei in the Jazz Film Laboratory (jazzu-eiga jikken-shitsu) from 1960 onwards. The film director Teshigahara Hiroshi (who adapted Abe Ko¯bo¯’s Woman in the Dunes) and his father, Teshigahara So¯fu, co-­ directed the So¯getsu Art Center, a performance venue for experimental

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Critical design in Japan Japanese and international artists. Together, these artists created a radical milieu of avant-garde art.11 Parallel to these art and architecture movements, there emerged a new subversive design scene that was given expression, for example, in the graphic works of Yokoo Tadanori and Hirano Ko¯ga, whose inimitable style blurred the boundaries between high and low and between art and design, mixing images from very different worlds by means of psychedelic colours and busy collage compositions.12 Experimental design also flourished in the work of Rei Kawakubo, who founded her fashion company in 1969 and applied critical body politics to fashion design, and in the revolutionary product design of Kuramata Shiro¯, who opened his design office in 1965. These various movements in the fields of art, design, architecture, theatre, and dance should be read as a form of visual and material protest directed at mainstream modern art and at the institutional structures that upheld it. They also reacted directly to the issues voiced by the social protests of the time – as exemplified, for instance, by the exhibition ‘AntiWar and Liberation’ (hansen to kaihō-ten), which opened in July 1968 and included works by eighty-eight artists and designers in three different galleries.13 It is important to note that such critical design practices were not unique to Japan, as evidenced by the rise of avant-garde graphic design in California and Britain and by the anti-design movements active in Italy during the same time.14 In addition to the ideological social protest movements, the 1960s ushered in another socioeconomic force – a new form of capitalism known as the ‘consumer revolution’ (shōhi kakumei). This term, which appeared in  the economic white paper (keizai hakusho) published in 1959, was quoted in newspapers on a daily basis during the early 1960s.15 This consumer revolution was led by Prime Minister Ikeda, who decided, in reaction to the sociopolitical protests in the beginning of the 1960s, to direct the people’s attention to the economy by declaring an income doubling plan (shotoku baizō keikaku). Ikeda’s new economic policy was influenced by Keynesian economics, which insisted on the need for government intervention in monetary and fiscal policies in order to keep the economy running smoothly.16 As part of this new policy, the Ikeda administration lowered interest rates and taxes for private corporations such as Sony and Honda Motor Company, and expanded the government’s investment in infrastructure development. In preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 World Expo, highways were widened, new roads were paved, high-speed railways were laid, and new subways, airports, and port facilities were built. During the 1960s, Japan became a major exporter of steel, ships, oil tankers, cars, and household appliances. The heavy industrialisation process led to the re-emergence of conglomerate groups called keiretsu, which were modelled upon the wartime conglomerates (zaibatsu) and kept foreign companies out of the Japanese industry. The power of the

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keiretsu, integrated with that of the new industrial players that produced innovative and well-designed products for the emerging consumer culture, drove Japan into the position of a world economic power, second only to the United States.17 Taken together, these developments paved the way for an era of rapidly growing affluence. By the end of this decade, per capita income had doubled, and even tripled between 1960 and 1973.18 The period of the ‘economic miracle’ (1966–69) was dubbed the ‘Izanagi boom’, a term referring to the rebirth of Japan following the total devastation caused by the war. The economic prosperity experienced in Japan in the late 1960s changed the priorities shaping everyday urban life and led in turn to changes in the field of design.19 In the late 1960s, the emphasis shifted to the individual, and people began taking an interest in their personal needs through the consumption of products representing the importance of the individual and of family life. This development was given expression by means of ‘the three Cs’ (car, cooler, and colour TV) that became popular and desirable household items.20 These products reflected the newly introduced value of the American dream, which represented a high quality of life, a new future following Japan’s defeat in the Second World War and the ensuing process of rehabilitation.21 During the 1970s, with the rise of a new world order that endowed consumption and leisure culture with a significant presence in everyday life, the middle class began purchasing brands, services, and sophisticated domestic appliances, and even vacation homes in the countryside.22 These products shaped the concept of a new family nucleus whose identity was organised around domestic consumer items such as the Libre series of kitchen appliances produced by the Sharp Company (including a juicer, coffeemaker, toaster, oven, and more). These trends also marked the transition from heavy industry to an industry focused on products for individuals and families during this period. 23 The trend expanded to include compact, well-designed electronic products for personal use, which championed the new standards of individualism. This new individual style was initiated by the collaboration between Sharp and North American Rockwell, which led to the production of QT-8D Micro Compet, the first digital calculator, in 1969. Shortly after, it was followed by the development of personal calculators by other companies, such as the one launched by Casio in 1972. The mass consumption of these calculators, which became mobile and personal (known as famicon), came to incorporate digital watches, computer games, and later even radios, transforming the Japanese lifestyle during the 1970s. Some well-known examples produced during this period were the Sanyo MR-U4 tape-­recorder, which sold some seven million units with the slogan ‘oshare na teleco U4’ (fashionable teleco U4), and mobile televisions such as Hitachi’s My 5 or Matsushita’s Trans AM 509. These products enabled people to enjoy

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Critical design in Japan watching TV alone or outside. In 1979, they were followed by the production of Sony’s iconic Walkman, which sold some 250 million units by 1981.24 The miniaturisation of products, as well as the living standards associated with the new family value of quality leisure time, extended during this period to the car industry, which in the 1970s began producing small, energy-efficient family cars such as the new Honda Civic, which was launched in 1972.25 The Japanese media defined the new home and possessions-oriented individualism as ‘my-home-ism’ and ‘my-car-ism’. The new values of individualism and the American dream were also given expression in the food industry. McDonald’s arrived in Japan in 1971, followed by additional fast-food chains selling packaged personal servings such as Lotteria and Kentucky Fried Chicken.26 In 1974, they were joined by the 7-Eleven chain, which launched the conbini store trend of individually packaged food portions. 27 The product most emblematic of this trend was the iconic Cup Noodle produced by Nissin, whose packaging and logo were designed in 1971 by O¯taka Takeshi. This product, which became an immediate hit, shaped a new social model of eating alone. Individualism also developed in the fashion industry through brands such as Renown Nishiki Co. Ltd., which was reborn in 1970; fashion magazines such as An-An, which was first published in 1970; and the magazine Non-Non, which was first published in 1971. These developments were stimulated by the rise of the advertising industry and the characters industry developed by companies such as Sanrio. The Hello Kitty character, launched in 1974 by Sanrio, was followed by other iconic characters such as Doraemon, Gundam, and Kamen Raider, which were developed by the companies Popy and Bandai. In the 1970s, the Japanese version of the American dream that had emerged during the previous decade was fused with a nostalgic wave that brought traditional products back into fashion. One example of this trend is the Mono Pro Koge company founded in 1972 by the designers Hanu Michio, Nishimura Hijiri, and Ogino Katsuhiko, which produced objects in a traditional craft style.28 Another example is Akioka Yoshio, who founded the Mono Mono movement to promote the use of traditional craft techniques in the creation of new products. During this period, the idea of DIY as a modern form of craft also gathered momentum, leading to the opening of the store Tokyu Hands in Fujisawa (1976) and in Shibuya (1978). The economic miracle that had given rise to the new consumer culture and lifestyle industry led to significant developments in the design world. Design associations such as the Association of Industrial Designers (Nippon indasutoriaru dezaina kyokai), the Art Directors Association (Tokyo ADC), and the Nippon Design Center had already been established in the 1950s. As early as 1960, the WoDeCo convention (Sekai dezain kaigi) had introduced designers from around the world to the rebirth of Japanese design. The most significant momentum gained by the design industry,

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however, occurred in the 1970s. In 1973, the World Industrial Design Conference (sekai indasutoriaru dezain kaigi) that was organized by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), which was held in Kyoto, was attended by two thousand people. Two years later, in 1975, the Okinawa design convention (Okinawa kokusai kayou hakurankai) was held as part of the Expo that took place that year. In 1978, the Graphic Design Association (JAGDA) was established under the leadership of Kamekura Yu¯saku to support the work of postwar graphic designers. As the bubble economy reached its peak in the late 1980s, the new consumer culture predicated upon the ‘logic’ of late capitalism became central to the ideology at the heart of different postmodern social practices. This ideological revolution took a radical turn in Japan, as the financial investments made by local banks inflated the Tokyo Stock Exchange, leading to a speculative economic bubble that reached its peak in 1988 for real estate and in 1989 for the stock exchange market.29 During this period, Japan was transformed from an industrial superpower into a financial superpower defined by late capitalist consumerism and the same postmodern values and social paradigms as those shaping other post-industrial countries. Yet despite Japan’s international image as a wealthy financial superpower, these years also saw the emergence of new income gaps and class differences in Japanese society. Real-estate tycoons and newly rich stock-­market investors constituted just about 10 per cent of the population. So while the top echelon of society enjoyed their luxury apartments and golf club memberships, members of the new middle class could no longer afford to buy an apartment. They compensated for this by spending more money on leisure activities and on the consumption of a wide variety of products such as fashion items, electronic goods, household appliances, and vehicles. As a result, the country’s culture of production was converted into one of excessive consumption, as the market was inundated by a wide variety of commodities. After years of austerity and saving, the younger generation that had not experienced the trauma of war and the hard work of rebuilding the nation could join the ‘bubble party’. Japan stood out as having a fast-paced curve for changes in consumption behaviour. During this time, the term ‘economic animals’ ceased to be associated with accelerated production, coming instead to refer to the ever-increasing consumption of quality products and brand names.30 This massive middle-class spending pattern, created in large part by generous bonuses received from corporate employers, also contributed to the bubble economy. The pursuit of pleasure came to define this new consumer culture, and purchases of electronic appliances and luxury brands (European classics such as Louis Vuitton and Chanel, as well as domestic luxury brands) were the norm. 31 Cars, for instance, were replaced every four years, and in 1980 Japan became the no. 1 superpower in the international car industry. In 1985, it became the first country to export industrial products. This rapidly

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Critical design in Japan ­ eveloping consumer culture promoted the design of a new lifestyle. d Japanese offices introduced word processors, facsimiles, and personal computers designed and produced by electronic companies such as Toshiba, Sharp, Sony, Canon, Matsushita, and Nintendo. The new home environment and my-home-ism trend expanded in the 1980s to include the interior design of private homes. In contrast to the traditional Japanese home and the housing projects constructed in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the efforts to rehabilitate Tokyo, the 1980s saw the construction of larger apartments, and the introduction of Western dining tables, chairs, sofas, and beds.32 One iconic house built during this period was the Esprit House, whose living room interior (including the chairs and table) was designed by Kuramata Shiro¯ in 1983. This new type of interior, which combined European and Japanese styles, was also given expression at the Koshino Junko Residence by Ando¯ Tadao, with an interior designed by Uchida Shigeru in 1981, and in the Hayashibara Residence designed by Ueki Kanji in 1986.33 The interior design of hotels similarly showed a new orientation towards leisure time. Examples include the Miyakojima Tokyu Resort designed by Kitahara Susumu in 1984, the Niki Kurabu Resort designed by Watanabe Akira in 1986, the Hotel New Hakodate designed by Ara Tomo in 1986, and the Hotel P designed by Ito¯ Toyo¯ in 1992.34 This novel type of interior design emphasised luxury, the blurring of Japanese and Western styles, and a new individual lifestyle. During this same period, established department stores opened trendy branches such as La Foret and Parco, which included small boutiques of luxury products. Significantly, these department stores blurred the line between consumerism and cultural activities: Parco, for instance, also ran a gallery and a publishing house, and La Foret boasted a museum designed by Yoh Shoei. 35 The new importance given to product design during the 1980s was exemplified by the opening of the Axis design centre in Roppongi (established in 1981). The centre included a store, gallery, and conference hall, published a magazine, and organised exhibitions such as ‘Kagu Tokyo Designer’s Week 88’ (Kagu Tokyo dezaina weku 88), which was dedicated to furniture and interior design (including architecture, graphics, and textiles) in Japan.36 This design exhibition was the biggest exhibition of its kind; held in seventeen different locations in the heart of Tokyo, it included seventy-three established designers and forty-five young designers.37 The new design scene doubled the number of industrial designers from 70,360 (in 1970) to 156,855 (in 1990).38 This Japanese version of late consumer culture, and the daily practices to which it gave rise, seemed more extreme than comparable models of consumption anywhere else in the world. In the words of John Clammer, ‘it is in Tokyo that the consumer culture of Japan has reached its apotheosis’.39 As already noted above, the process of post-industrial economic change transformed a market of scarcity into one of abundance, leading Akabane

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Makoto and Saito¯ Maki to describe this period as a ‘snow avalanche’.40 Marilyn Ivy, who researched the economic bubble period in Japan, talks about it as a time of ‘accelerated symbolic consumerism’. Ivy claims that the developments in Japan during this period differed from those in other countries in which the values of a new consumer culture were similarly emerging. In Japan, she explains, these values became extreme and sometimes even radical due to a strong and distinctly Japanese polarity between the strict and well-defined structure of government and bureaucracy and the accelerated development of stimulating consumer culture. Whereas the existing institutional structure aimed for stability and resisted change, the new consumer culture centred on pure release.41 During this period, Japan thus saw the rise of a new social ideology that promoted a more extreme version of the hedonistic, brand-based lifestyle that emerged during the same time in the context of socioeconomic changes in the United States and Europe. This lifestyle created a rupture with the ideology of Japan’s conservative establishment (which promoted tradition and hard work for the sake of society and the nation), encouraging instead the values of leisure time, entertainment, travel, and overspending. Together with popular culture, this ideology of consumption became the spearhead of the Japanese lifestyle in the 1980s. It replaced the militant and imperialist ideologies of the 1930s–40s, as well as the establishment ideology of the 1960s–70s, which supported hard work and corporate culture, leading to the protests of the 1960s. However, this new ideology, capitalism, which was perceived as a world view, was no less aggressive than its predecessors, challenging existing cultural institutions and creating new cultural possibilities and values. The culture of ostentatious consumption dictated new values and social forms of organisation, such as a different segmentation of the market, the introduction of various subcultures into the public sphere, the creation of new social classes, changes in the gender-based power balance, and an emphasis on personal identity. It created a new form of individualism, and crowned new cultural heroes. Consumer culture and popular culture also ascribed unprecedented importance to visual culture and to objects as the backdrop for innovative forms of cultural production and a new wave of critical design.

Critical design The new product culture and the new importance given to design and visual culture, which surged in the 1960s with the anti-art and anti-design movements, became established in Tokyo during the 1980s. The ­designers who founded this avant-garde trend had been students in the 1960s, had experienced the social protests of the time, and had adopted its critical ideologies. As they came of age professionally in the 1980s, with the growth of the economic bubble, their work was still motivated by passion,

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Critical design in Japan anger, and a desire to critique and change social paradigms. Paradoxically, however, it was the economic bubble that enabled them to introduce the avant-garde political thinking and subversive visual culture of the 1960s into the very heart of consumer culture in the 1980s. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, it is doubtful if these designers would have succeeded without the new economic affluence of late consumer culture. The creation of a new critical language was not the endeavour of a single designer. It was simultaneously created by designers in different fields (architects, fashion designers, product designers, graphic designers, and artists), who shaped a new avant-garde design milieu in Tokyo. This new avant-garde visual language was given expression in architectural projects such as the iconic Azuma House in Osaka, designed by Ando¯ Tadao (1976). The house had no windows, closing itself completely off from the city and creating a new concept of interior space. Other architects working in the same milieu, such as Maki Fumihiko, Ito¯ Toyo¯, and Isozaki Arata, and later also Aoki Jun and Sejima Kazuyo, combined new and traditional elements to create a postmodern Japanese architecture. The avant-garde fashion designers who came of age in the late 1970s such as Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto, and their followers Kurihara Tao, Watanabe Junya, and Takahashi Jun, created a new language characterised by the breaking of fashion codes and the introduction of concepts borrowed from the world of postmodern deconstruction.42 Their creations re-enveloped the body by shifting attention from its shape to the space surrounding it. The clothes highlighted asymmetry and random sewing patterns, resulting in sculptural objects mounted on the body.43 Avant-garde industrial designers also began to build a vocabulary of new aesthetic terms for the Japanese design world. Postwar industrial design in Japan was influenced by the International Style that had been introduced to Japan during the American occupation. In the 1970s, the primary influence shifted to Italian radical design. Designers such as Umeda Masanori, who worked in Milan with the Memphis group, and Kuramata Shiro¯, who worked for this important group in Japan, imported its influence to the country. Kuramata, one of this period’s most notable designers, created furniture, lighting, and interior design projects, as well as design installations. One example of his conceptual work was the chair ‘Begin to Begin’, which was designed in 1985 in homage to Josef Hoffmann. This chair was the product of an installation in which Kuramata took a Thonet bentwood chair designed by Josef Hoffmann, wrapped it in steel wire, and then burned the wooden chair. All that remained was a ghostly silhouette made of the surviving wire, which had been wrapped tightly enough to become self-supporting. Too fragile to actually sit on, this creation – a memory of a chair – was an artistic object rather than a piece of furniture. In his article

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for the catalogue of Kuramata Shiro¯’s retrospective at the Hara Museum, Kenji Oki wrote: ‘The burning of the chair represented the beauty of expiation seen in the charred ruins of war while its enamel coating suggested resuscitation from devastation.’44 Design curator Deyan Sudjic comments that Kuramata was inspired by the Gutai group to engage with the idea of faded beauty ravaged by poverty or found in decay.45 It also should be noted that Kuramata’s chairs blurred the boundaries between art and design and created inter-textual references by means of names such as ‘Begin to Begin,’ (a tribute to the music of Cole Porter), or ‘Miss Blanche’ (named after Blanche DuBois, the protagonist of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire). Other industrial designers began to leave their jobs at large conglomerates to establish private studios, creating one-off products for galleries and thus also blurring the boundaries between art and design. Designers such as Uchida Shigeru created unique items that quoted traditional Japanese motifs.46 Other important designers, such as Morita Masaki, who worked in Finland, were influenced by foreign trends. Uchida Shigeru comments that during the 1970s, interior and furniture design reflected the transition from the ideal of ‘humans for society’ to that of a ‘society for humans’. Shigeru and Kuramata also collaborated with the Italian architects and designers Aldo Rosi, Ettore Sottsass, and Gaetano Pesce on the Hotel Il Palazzo in Fukuoka.47 These designers developed a new language, paving the way for younger designers such as Fukasawa Naoto, Sato¯ Oki, and Yoshioka Tokujin. The innovations in printing techniques and the significance given to branding in the late consumer market paved the way for graphic designers, copywriters, photographers, art directors, and illustrators. Ishioka Eiko, Tanaka Ikko¯, Asaba Katsumi, Toda Seiju (Masatoshi), and Saito¯ Makoto created new types of avant-garde posters, logos, packaging, and advertising campaigns with new slogans and a new visual look.48 Enigmatic advertising campaigns, such as the Suntory Royal campaign by Toda Seiju and Saito¯ Makoto’s advertising posters for the Alpha Cubic, Batsu, and Hasegawa companies, broke all codes of visual communication by creating absurd or abstract messages. Their works presented social and political concepts combined with deconstructed and fragmented images that constructed inter-textual references to various verbal or visual texts via quotations, appropriations, and reproductions.49 The designers in this milieu did not work in isolation, but rather formed a rich network of professional connections and collaborations: department stores and fashion designers invited interior designers and architects to design spaces, and hired avant-garde graphic designers to brand their companies.50 Parco was the first company to commission designers such as Tanaka Ikko¯, Asaba Katsumi, and Ishioka Eiko to brand the department store. Issey Miyake also invited Ishioka Eiko and Kuramata Shiro¯ to design the interiors of his boutiques (Kuramata designed some 100 boutiques

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Critical design in Japan for Issey Miyake), and later employed Yoshioka Tokujin in the same role. Issey Miyake collaborated with many other product designers such as Fukasawa Naoto, Ishioka Tokujin, and Satoshi Wada (who designed his line of watches), as well as graphic designers Tanaka Ikko¯, Sato¯ Taku, and Sato¯ Kashiwa (who took charge of his branding).51 He also worked with the architect Ando¯ Tadao to create the Tokyo Design Museum’s exhibition ‘21_21 Design Sight’ and invited Ban Shigeru to design the exhibition ‘Irving Penn and Issey Miyake – A Visual Dialogue’ at the same museum. While working under the Issey Miyake brand, the fashion designer Takizawa Naoki collaborated with the artist Takano Aya of Kaikai Kiki studio. He then became the main cloth designer for Uniqlo, working in collaboration with the art director Mizuno Manabu to design the UT graphic T-shirt line; with Katayama Masamichi of Wonder Wall studio, who designed the interior of the shops; and with the art director Sato¯ Kashiwa, who also developed the company’s marketing strategy and branding. In 1986, Uchida Shigeru designed a Yohji Yamamoto MEN boutique in Kobe in a building designed by Ando¯ Tadao. In 2008, Yohji Yamamoto invited Ishigami Junya to design his store in New York. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons worked with the architect Kawasaki Takao, who designed her store, and with the graphic designer Inoue Tsuguya on advertising campaigns, posters, and book designs.52 Rei Kawakubo, who regularly collaborates with artists, also worked with Murakami Takashi to create their shop Magazine Alive, and with Nawa Ko¯hei to design her Dover Street Market in Ginza. Nawa Ko¯hei also owns Sandwich, a creative space for collaborations between architects, designers, and artists in Kyoto. The fashion brand TOD invited the architect Ito¯ Toyo¯ and the interior designer Sato¯ Oki (Nendo) to collaborate on the design of their building in Aoyama. Other notable collaborations were held at Mujirushi Ryohin, which was a meeting place for many designers in this group, such as Tanaka Ikko¯, Hara Kenya, Fukasawa Naoto, and Sudo¯ Reiko, for architects such as Kuma Kengo and Namba Kazuhiko, and for foreign designers such as Jasper Morrison, Sam Hecht, and Konstantin Grcic. The members of this group worked in disparate fields and styles, while all refuting Modernism and sharing a determination to create avant-garde forms of critical visual expression that bordered on art and blurred the line between daily life and the extraordinary.53 The large quantities of money channelled into the field of design enabled these designers to ask questions about the relationship between design and commercial goals, design’s ability to perform a social critique, and the development of products and a personal language that did not fit the briefs of commercial companies. The commodification of consumer culture was thus the mediating agent through which the ideology of late capitalism and the post-Fordism service culture came to collaborate, joining forces with avant-garde ideas and aesthetics.54

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Slavoj Žižek addressed this strange encounter when mentioning several companies that paradoxically branded themselves through ecological protest, initially targeting the capitalist exploitation of natural resources. He terms this new phase of commodification ‘cultural capitalism’, and describes it as having internalised both the legacy of 1968 and critiques of alienated consumerism.55 Designers in the avant-garde milieu also exploited consumer culture and the power of the media and advertising, which became no less important than the product itself. These products, which were both commodities and critiques of the commodity, photographed well and were compatible with the revolutionary ideologies of the 1960s, which had entered the mainstream by the 1980s. Avant-garde designers thus became cultural heroes and brands in their own right, and used this status to promote their political and social goals. The critical thinking that guided their ideology during the revolutionary 1960s was thus transformed into a form of cultural production, as the avant-garde, which usually operates on the margins of society, itself became a lifestyle product on the capitalist shelf – one brand among others in the brand culture of Tokyo’s fashionable centres and in other centres around the world. The Aoyama neighbourhood, for instance, was transformed in the 1980s into a prestigious international fashion centre and the seat of avant-garde fashion designers such as Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake. Design galleries in Aoyama such as E&Y featured objects that blurred the line between design and art, such as those created by Hironen. It was also a place of avant-garde graphic designers’ studios such as those of Toda Seiju and Saito¯ Makoto, and for the first Mujirushi Ryohin store. Nevertheless, it is important to note that despite the widespread publicity received by these avant-garde architects and designers in international exhibitions and publications, which presented them as emblems of ‘Japanese design’, their avant-garde products did not represent Japanese culture, or even the Japanese design world. Rather, they competed with numerous other styles and approaches to design that emerged during the same period, while comprising only a small percentage of the market. So, for instance, the fashion designers Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake did not represent the Japanese fashion world but only the niche of avant-garde fashion. In fact, the widespread publicity enjoyed by these designers, and the transformation of avant-garde visual expression into an emblem of Japan, would paradoxically not have been possible without the Japanese government, which was motivated by its own interests to provide these designers with support. With the transformation of Japan into a financial superpower in the 1980s and its increasing international visibility, avant-garde Japanese design was widely featured in magazines, books, and exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Japanese government institutions charged with spreading Japanese culture worldwide, such as the Japan Foundation, supported exhibitions and books

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Critical design in Japan in order to construct a new national identity by means of this emerging aesthetic.56 Equating the preservation of traditional techniques and materials with the preservation of tradition itself, the government supported traditional craftspeople as ‘national living treasures’, while simultaneously financing exhibitions of avant-garde designers at major American and European museums in order to construct a complex cultural story and national identity. The challenging, enigmatic, radically new visual language created by this avant-garde milieu gained universal recognition and sparked the curiosity of numerous curators, who naturally highlighted the uniqueness and otherness of avant-garde manifestations in the 1970s and 1980s, presenting them as a new type of ‘Japaneseness’. The international presentation of Japanese design began as early as the mid-1970s with exhibitions such as ‘How to Wrap 5 Eggs’ (New York, 1975), which was concerned with packaging design. Since that time, close to 100 exhibitions concerned with Japanese style have taken place around the world, and in some cases the avant-garde style was promoted under by the label ‘Japan Style’ by the designers themselves. In 1978, the Japanese Association for Industrial Design held an important design exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris on the subject of ma (empty space). In 1980, an exhibition titled ‘Japanese Style’ opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, presenting traditional Japanese crafts alongside postwar products and graphic design.57 In 1981, the exhibition ‘Japan Day’ opened in Amsterdam. That same year (1981–82), ‘The Great Japan Exhibition’ opened at the RCA in London, and in 1984, the exhibition ‘Japanese Design – Tradition and Modernity’ opened in Moscow.58 Japanese designers also participated in a range of exhibitions unrelated to Japan, such as the 1981 exhibition of the Memphis movement, which included works by Kuramata Shiro¯, Umeda Masanori, and Isozaki Shin. At the same time, exhibitions of Japanese design also began appearing in Japan. Among them were ‘Japanese Aesthetics and the Sense of Space’ (Sezon Museum of Art, 1990 and 1992); ‘Crafts in Everyday Life in the 1950s and 1960s’ (1995, Crafts Gallery, MoMA Tokyo); ‘Japan Living Design’ (1999, Living Design Center Ozone); and ‘Evolution of Lifestyle in Japanese Modern Design’ (2000, Utsunomiya Museum of Art). The catalogues of these exhibitions were characterised by an Orientalist perspective that approached the products in stylistic terms, often presenting them as an extension, citation, or appropriation of traditional aesthetics, and thus as an autonomous representation of a unique ‘Japanese style’. In this manner, the aesthetics of design contributed to Japan’s international image as the perfect stranger, an enigmatic and exotic other. In reality, however, the avant-garde look was different than anything that had previously been designed in Japan, and appeared foreign to many Japanese viewers during this time. Moreover, if we examine the wide

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range of works created by different designers in the avant-garde milieu, one can note that this form of visual expression consisted of numerous heterogeneous and conflicting styles, whose meanings often neutralised one another.59 Significantly, this stylistic heterogeneity was not unique to Japan but rather dialogued with the incoherence of the postmodern language, which consists of numerous complementary, and sometimes warring, styles. The progress of internationalisation (kokusaika) in the 1980s provided Japanese designers with a new awareness, leading them on a quest to understand how Japan could be transformed into an equal player in the global world, rather than remaining in an exotic bubble inspired by a glorious past.60 During this period, numerous designers became conceptually closer in their thinking to colleagues in London or Milan than to Japanese countryside inhabitants and were influenced just as much by the works exhibited at the Italian biennales and by European and American critical theories as they were by Japanese traditions. Most designers during this period worked internationally, collaborating with companies and designers worldwide. So, for instance, in 1973, Yamaha invited the architect Mario Bellini to design the Cassette Tape Deck, and Nikon’s Nikon F3 camera was designed in 1980 by Giorgette Gyugiaro. Avant-garde forms of expression similarly responded to foreign theories and creative possibilities. Rei Kawakubo’s and Yohji Yamamoto’s fashion designs, for instance, responded and objected to the luxury items produced by the Parisian fashion world of the 1980s and were impacted by the global critiques of the 1970s, rather than drawing their inspiration from traditional Japanese fashion.61 When interviewed, these designers emphasised not only their style of expression and their dialogue with numerous international design ­languages, but also their distance from an inherently Japanese visual ­language.62 For example, Uchida Shigeru commented that after designing a shop for Yohji Yamamoto in 1986, some foreign designers and journalists pointed out that ‘Uchida’s work is very Japanese’, because of the unfixed, unstable, and transformative nature of the space.63 When interviewed, Uchida said that this way of looking at his work surprised him, because he was not aware of it. This observation spurred him to research Japanese visual culture, since he had never felt that his work had anything to do with Japanese tradition. This approach represents an internal contradiction inherent to the work of most designers, who protested against the association of their works with traditional Japanese aesthetics and against the values of contemporary Japanese society. At the same time, however, their showcasing in Japan’s new centres of cultural power (museums, galleries, books, exhibitions, magazines, and electronic media) cast them as design stars and cultural heroes, and branded them as the creators of what is known as ‘Japanese design’ and a unique ‘Japanese aesthetics’. As such, they

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Critical design in Japan came to represent the hegemony of visual culture in Japan. This set of internal contradictions defined designers as affiliated with consumer culture while simultaneously undermining it, and cast them as opposed to national labels while nationalising them as part of the culture industry, and thus contributing to their publicity and facilitating the promotion of their agenda. The discussion of this milieu as canonical sometimes appears inconsistent with the small percentage of radical designers working in the Japanese design field, as well as with their own protest against traditional Japanese values. Moreover, the integration of the design field into the consumer culture of the time, and the intentional blurring of boundaries between high and low, and between a unique aesthetic and industrial production, further refuted the idea of canonisation. Yet at the same time, the presentation of their works in international exhibitions, and the description of Japanese design as a unique phenomenon in catalogues and books, identified these designers with the canon of postmodern Japanese design. Like any canonised milieu, this critical milieu itself became an agent of power, exerting a decisive influence on the international field of design as well as on the development of a new direction in Japanese visual culture. Within Japan, its influence stemmed from the fact that the production and consumption of haute design was a privilege restricted to a small minority defined by its social class, and sometimes also by additional social and political affiliations. The consumers of these design products created a new social and aesthetic elite defined by shared values, and gave rise to a discourse that was incomprehensible to those who were not part of it. The aesthetic ideology dictated by this elite was adopted by many Japanese celebrities, cultural figures, and trendsetters, who in turn defined the identity of numerous others. This new aesthetic standard was determined through the sign value of the social critiques that graphic designers created to represent different companies, whose brands constructed the identity of individuals, commercial enterprises, and various subcultures, and finally also a larger collective identity. These designers thus demonstrated that the role of design was not only to create products, but also to create a new consciousness. In addition to dictating an aesthetic ideology, they also trained a younger generation of leading Japanese designers. So, for instance, Hara Kenya, the president of the Nippon Design Center, was trained at the office of Ishioka Eiko before becoming an independent designer; Yoshioka Tokujin was trained at the office of Kuramata Shiro¯; Saito¯ Makoto trained with Toda Seiju; Sejima Kazuyo began her career in the office of Ito¯ Toyo¯, and later served as a mentor to architects such as Ishigami Junya; the architect Aoki Jun was trained in the office of Isozaki Arata, and himself trained architects such as Nagayama Yu¯ko; the art director Mizuno Manabu was trained by Miyata Satoru at the studio Draft; and Rei Kawakubo trained

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an entire generation of designers such as Watanabe Junya, who currently occupy the most senior positions in the fashion industry. To conclude, the members of this milieu developed a postmodern aesthetic language that brought about a visual and material revolution. Their work could be defined as representing a ‘Japanese postmodern style’, yet I find it preferable and more accurate to define them as representing different styles that all emerged in Tokyo starting in the 1970s. The range of objects and styles created by these designers represents the critical spirit of the period, as well as corresponding ideas that simultaneously emerged in the context of critical theories in other cultural centres. These styles were thus far from being decorative or embodying an inherently ‘Japanese’ form of design. Rather, they were a tool used by the designers to make sociopolitical statements concerning consumerism, race, gender, body politics, identity politics, and post-Marxist critiques, in an attempt to create a new social paradigm. These designers also considered themselves as individual creators and as agents of social change. Their attempts to shape a new visual strategy produced both consumer items and conceptual objects that expressed visual or material protest and may thus be treated as critical visual essays.

Notes   1 New social practices and postmodern aesthetics emerged above all in the active centres of the 1968 protest movement: Paris, which became the seat for the formulation of new philosophical theories that subsequently spread throughout Europe; Berkeley, where new theoretical constructs emerged in the field of comparative literature, exerting their influence throughout the United States; and Tokyo, where protests evolved into new definitions of individual rights and into a range of artistic practices.   2 The protests had been dominated by established parties and unions such as the Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam (beheiren), and the student umbrella organisations (zengakuren and zenkyōtō). See C. Derichs, ‘Japan: 1968 – history of a decade’, in P. Gassert and M. Klimke (eds), 1968: Memories and Legacies of a Global Revolt (Washington DC: German Historical Institute, 2009), pp. 89–91.   3 D. Winston, Japanese Religion and Society: Paradigm of Structure and Change (New York: University of New York Press, 1992), p. 94.   4 A. Takehara and A. Moriyama, Nihon Dezain-shi (The Concise History of Modern Japanese Design) (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2003), pp. 108–38; G. Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 258–9.   5 One example was the guerrilla performance event on the Yamanote loop line train in central Tokyo. See D. Chong, ‘Tokyo 1955–1970: A new avant-garde’, in D. Chong (ed.), Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), pp. 27, 58.   6 Ibid., p. 27.   7 Ibid., p. 63.   8 Ibid., p. 68.   9 Ibid., p. 64; A. Monroe (ed.), Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York: Abrams, 1994), p. 149.

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Critical design in Japan 10 M. Holborn, Beyond Japan: A Photo Theater (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), pp. 50–84. 11 D. Goodman, Angura: Posters of the Japanese Avant-Garde (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), p. 2. 12 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 13 The exhibition was initiated by Haryu¯ Ichiro¯, Ishiki Junzo¯, Nakahara Yu¯suke, and Takiguchi Shu¯zo¯ and was shown in Marumatsu Gallery, Chikyu¯do¯ Gallery, and Nippon Gallery. It was inspired by an American exhibition organised that same year, which was called ‘Protest and Hope’. The exhibition was organised in collaboration with Beheiren (the Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam). It included works by Japanese designers such as Ishioka Eiko and by American artists such as Ad Reinhardt. See Y. Nakahara, ‘Hansen to kaiho ten ni tsuite’ (About the anti-war and liberation exhibition), Shin Nihon Bungakukai 1946–2004, 23:10 (1968), 163–5. 14 Subversive graphic design practices developed in a number of different countries during the 1960s and 1970s. The emergence of rock ’n’ roll music scenes in California and Britain, for instance, engendered a subversive graphic design scene created by the ‘Big Five’ (Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Alton Kelly, Stanley Mouse, and Richard Griffin), who provided the bands with psychedelic posters and album covers compatible with their rebellious music. Another movement was the avant-garde architecture group Archigram, which was founded in London in 1961. Although its members presented plans and models that were not realised, their ideas planted the seeds that influenced Italian postmodern groups such as Archizoom, Superstudio, Gruppo 9999, Gruppo Strum, and later Alchemia and Memphis, which gave rise to the postmodern design of the 1970s and 1980s. Other studios in Italy included Studio de Pas, D’Urbino Lomazzi (founded in 1966), led by the designers Jonathan de Pas, Donato D’Urbino, and Paulo Lomazzi, whose pieces bridged the gap between design and art); Studio Gatti, Paolini and Teodoro, led by designers Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini, and Franco Teodoro (who worked together since 1965); and individual designers such as Gaetano Pesce and Ettore Sottsass, who focused on the destruction of objects and the creation of new objects that contradicted user expectations regarding their function. These designers countered all that was expected of furniture design and undermined the modernist belief in functionality, perfect ergonomics, and timeless design solutions. The radical Italian designers attempted to abolish gender and socioeconomic elements within the field of design, defining their works as anti-class, anti-consumer, anti-marketing, and thus also anti-design. They sought new visual strategies that redefined the role of design, the status of the designer as social agent rather than just a service provider, and the relationship between design and society. The resulting objects carried social and political messages that successfully excluded them from the capitalist system. This approach to design arrived in Japan through the new information highway created in the 1970s via revolutionary industrial designers such as Umeda Masanori and Kuramata Shiro¯. It should be noted that the subversive postmodern style was developed mainly in Europe, the United States, and Japan. For more about radical design, see S. Eskilson, Graphic Design – A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 338–9; D. Raizman, History of Modern Design (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2003), pp. 345–6; G. Adamson and J. Pavitt (eds), Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), p. 91. 15 Y. Kaji, ‘The era of individualization of expression: The 1960s’, in Advertising History 1950–1990 (exhibition catalogue) (Tokyo: East Japan Railway Culture Foundation, 1993), p. 56. 16 Many consider 1965 to be the first year in which Keynesian fiscal policy was implemented in Japan. This new economic model, considered to be a new phase of capitalism and often associated with liberal political thinking, reveals the fundamental change in thinking and perception that took place during this period. This change,

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and the related commodity boom, drove Japan not only to become a world economic power, but also to engage in a new model of consumption that significantly impacted social values. K. B. Hiesinger, ‘Japanese design: A survey since 1950’, in K. B. Hiesinger and F. Fischer (eds), Japanese Design: A Survey Since 1950 (exhibition catalogue) (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1994), p. 19. It should be noted that per-capita GNP was still lower than that of many industrialised counties. See K. Hamada, Japan 1968: A Reflection Point During the Era of the Economic Miracle (Papers 764) (New Haven: Economic Growth Center, Yale University, 1996), p. 5, www.econ.yale.edu/growth_pdf/cdp764.pdf (accessed 15 August 2019). The appearance of television in the 1960s also caused visual and social changes. Television broadcasts reached both cities and village prefectures, which until then were disconnected from one another, creating a new collective awareness built on mutual values that bridged the gaps between urban and rural areas, as well as between the various dialects spoken in different regions. The power and attraction of television subverted traditional values and boosted the popularity of the entertainment industry and of media culture. Members of the postwar generation that came of age in the 1980s developed a world view that differed from that of their parents. This generation, which was reared on television, created a culture that turned its back on its traditional Japanese roots. Some of the emerging visual trends naturally stemmed from this new collective awareness. In 1982, the Shinkansen train network started operating, creating additional connections between cities and villages. In 1964, Japan hosted the Olympic Games, which further encouraged people to purchase TVs. For the first time, television in Japan created a new collective identity. This process complemented the postwar closing of the economic gaps between different sectors in Japan due to American reforms, the dismantling of zaibatsu (financial cliques), agriculture reform, and the legislation of new labour laws. Hiesinger, ‘Japanese design’, p. 18. H. Kashiwagi, ‘Postwar history in advertising design’, in Advertising History 1950– 1990, pp. 14–15. J. J. Tobin, ‘Introduction: Domesticating the West’, in Josef J. Tobin (ed.), Re-Made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 23. Takehara and Moriyama, Nihon Dezain-shi, pp. 108–38. P. du Gay, S. Hall, L. Janes, H. Mackay, and K. Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage, 2013). Takehara and Moriyama, Nihon Dezain-shi, pp. 108–38. For more about KFC in Japan, see the documentary film The Colonel Comes to Japan (director: John Nathan), 1981. Takehara and Moriyama, Nihon Dezain-shi, pp. 108–38. The designers received the Mainichi Design Prize in 1975. After the 1985 signing of the Plaza Agreement, the Japanese government began to divert its resources from importing products to local production. The yen–dollar exchange rate strengthened Japan’s exports, triggering an expansionist monetary policy that created the Japanese economic bubble. In February 1987, the Louvre Agreement was signed by the G-5 in an attempt to stabilise exchange rates, indirectly resulting in a stock market collapse in Hong Kong and New York. Japan’s large investors (commercial companies and banks) were concerned about their market investments in the Tokyo Stock Exchange. To mitigate this risk, they turned to domestic real estate, pushing prices up to unrealistic heights. In the absence of attractive investment avenues, middle-class people put most of their money in bank savings accounts, resulting in high liquidity. The government went to great ­measures to artificially reduce real-estate and product prices, but the Gulf War in

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1991 caused a spike in crude oil prices, with prices across the economy following suite. The Japanese GNP rose by 56 per cent, and disposable income levels per capita reached those of Europe. Later in the 1990s, Japan also surpassed the per capita disposable income of the United States. Akabane notes that in 1990, 40 per cent of all shopping expenses were extraneous and unnecessary, 36 per cent were impulsive, and 24 per cent could be defined as capricious. See M. Akabane and M. Saito¯, ‘Du matériel au spiritual: Changement de société au Japon et son reflet dans la publicité après l’effondrement de la bulle spéculative’, in T. Kanehisa (ed.), Société et Publicité Nipponnes (Paris: Editions YouFeng, 2002), ch. 3, p. 4. Due to the Japanese lifestyle, which does not usually involve conspicuous displays in home interiors, the Japanese design world was shaped less around familiar design objects such as tables, chairs, and tableware, and more around industrial products, electronics, car and motorcycle design, fashion design, and luxury items. Western interior design was already customary in Japan during the Meiji Restoration and during the Taisho period. For further reading, see S. Teasley, ‘Furnishing the modern metropolitan: Moriya Nobuo’s designs for domestic interiors, 1922–1927’, Design Issues, 19:4 (2003), 57–71. Another example of this new style is the kitashinagawa no ie (Kitashinagawa House) designed by Togashi Katsuhiko in 1991. See S. Uchida, Sengo Nihon Dezain-shi (Postwar Japanese Design History) (Tokyo: Misuzu shobo, 2011), pp. 263–71. Another example of a hotel interior created at the time is the lobby of the Kyoto Hotel designed by Uchida Shigeru in 1994 and the Mojiko Hotel designed by Uchida Shigeru in 1998. Uchida, Sengo Nihon Dezain-shi, p. 297. The Axis building was established by Hamano Yasuhiro (who also established Tokyu Hands and From 1st). The building featured a design store, gallery, and the offices of a design magazine, as well as the showrooms of leading designers such as Kuramata Shiro¯, Sudo¯ Reiko, and Uchida Shigeru, which drew a large number of visitors and created interactions among the designers. See ibid., p. 286. Kagu Tokyo Designer’s Week 88 was held in the Roppongi, Ginza, Shibuya, Aoyama, and Wangan neighbourhoods. Exhibitions in Roppongi featured works by Kuramata Shiro¯ and Umeda Masanori (Axis Gallery); ‘Chairs’ by Awatsuji Hiroshi; Sugimoto Takashi; Abe Kozo, Ohashi Teruaki, and Kita Toshiyuki (Tokyo Designers Space); Igarashi Takenobu, Seguchi Hidenori, and Wakita Aijiro¯ (Yamagiwa Inspiration); Iijima Naoki, Suzuki Ryo¯ji, Takeyama Hijiri, Mizuno Masahiko, and Nakagome G. (OXY Oyogizaka 6F Studio); and Ikegami Toshiro¯ (Yotsubo Gallery). Exhibitions in Ginza featured works by Kawakami Motomi, Kawasaki Takao, Kitahara Susumu, Kurokawa Masayuki, Tsukahara Seiichi, Mori Hideo, Yano Hiroshi, Nishinuki Yukio, Ara Tomo, Senda Mitsuru, and Nishioka Toru (Matsuya Ginza 8F); Oshinomi Kunihide, Kurokawa Tetsuro¯, Shimizu Tadao, and Nishimura Masatsugu (G Gallery); Takatori Kunikazu, Sakaizawa Takashi, Motozawa Kazuo, and Yokoyama Naoto (Koyanagi Gallery); Ono Miyoko, Fujie Kazuko, and Mitsuhashi Ikuyo (Yurakuchi Seibu Creator’s Gallery). Exhibitions in Shibuya Aoyama featured Isaka Shigeharu, Irie Keiichi, Kuwayama Hideyasu, Takasaki Masaharu, Takiuchi Takashi, Togashi Katsuhiko, Yamada Kenichiro¯, Okamoto Teruo, Kin Sochin, Guen Bertheau-Suzuki, Ishigami Shinhachiro¯, Emoto Fumio, Shimizu Fumio, Hisada Shuji, and Wakabayashi Hiroyuki (Seibu Hyakkaten Shibuyaten B Kan 8F Forum); Yoshida Yasuo (Shido 1F); Kawasaki Kazuo and Mihara Sho¯hei (Alphabet Gallery); Suzuki Edward, Okayama Shinya, Morita Masaki, Kondo¯ Yasuo, and Tamakatsu Shin (Hillside Plaza); and Yoh Sho¯ei (High Bell). The exhibition in Wangan district featured Ito¯ Toyo¯, Kitaoka Setsuo, Oki Kenji, Watanabe Kisako, Ito¯ Takamichi, Kitagawara Atsushi, Hikosaka Hiroshi, Shinohara Kazuo, and Watanabe Makoto (Daiko Lighting Labo). It was supervised by Uchida Shigeru (executive committee chairperson) and by the

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designers Kuramata Shiro¯, Awatsuji Hiroshi, Kurokawa Masayuki, and Sugimoto Takashi. Committee members included Ara Tomo, Iijima Naoki, Emoto Fumio, Okamoto Teruo, Oki Kenji, Kin Sochin, Kondo¯ Yasuo, Takiuchi Takashi, Tsukahara Seiichi, Terazaki Naoko, Togashi Katsuhiko, Kizuno Masahiko, Morishita Shinko, and Watanabe Kisako. See Uchida, Sengo Nihon Dezain-shi, p. 286. Takehara and Moriyama, Nihon Dezain-shi, p. 108. J. Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 69–70. Akabane and Saito¯, ‘Du matériel au spirituel’, ch. 3, pp. 1–28. M. Ivy, ‘Critical texts, mass artifacts: The consumption of knowledge in postmodern Japan’, in H. D. Harootunian and M. Miyoshi (eds), Postmodernism and Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 43. See D. Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 55–8; Y. Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), pp. 125–50; S. Frankel, ‘Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Junya Watanabe, Jun Takahashi, Tao Kurihara’, in A. Fukai, B. Vinken, S. Frankel, and K. Hirofumi, Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, ed. C. Ince and N. Rie (London: Merrell, 2010), pp. 145–225; V. Steele, ‘Is Japan still the future?’, in V. Steele, P. Mears, K. Yuniya, and N. Hiroshi (eds), Japan Fashion Now (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 17–26, 64–96. Uchida, Sengo Nihon Dezain-shi, p. 291. I. Tanaka (ed.), Shirō Kuramata (exhibition catalogue) (Tokyo: Fondation Arc-enCiel, 1996). D. Sudjic, Shiro Kuramata: Essays & Writings (London: Phaidon, 2013), p. 103. Uchida, Sengo Nihon Dezain-shi, p. 289. Built in 1989, Hotel Il Palazzo was the first international collaboration in the arena of Japanese hotel construction. The architecture was designed by Aldo Rossi; the art direction was undertaken by Uchida Shigeru; and the interior was designed by Uchida Shigeru and Mitsugashi Ikuyo. Some interior design elements, such as the Four Bar, were created by Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce, and Aldo Rossi from Italy, Morris Adjmi from the United States, and Kuramata Shiro¯ from Japan. The culture complex in the basement was designed by Alfred Arribas from Spain. Visual signs were created by Tanaka Ikko¯; the graphic design of the Four Bar was created by Yahagi Kiju¯ro¯. The lights were designed by Fujimoto Harumi. The furniture was designed by Studio 80; and the architecture was designed by Mitsuru Kaneko and Tsuboi Yoshitaka. See Uchida, Sengo Nihon Dezain-shi, p. 267. A large number of famous works featured in this visual revolution. These included Asaba Katsumi’s ‘yumekaido’ series of Suntory advertising campaigns and his advertising poster for TDK featuring Andy Warhol, as well as Sato¯ Koichi’s Fuji series of advertising posters ‘Yuroparia 1989’ and ‘Shabondama tonda uchū made tonda’. Other iconic designs created at the time were the cover designs for RyukoTsushin magazine and the Sharaku movie poster by Nagatomo Keisuke. Another notable designer is Tanaka Ikko¯, whose works included posters such as the poster for the Nihon Buyoh performance in the United States, exhibitions such as ‘Sogetsu sōzō no kūkan’ (So¯getsu Kaikan, 1982), exhibition catalogues, and a magazine created by the Morisawa company and Fujii Mitsuko titled Tategumi Yokogumi e. Other designers who participated in reshaping the visual culture of this era were Nakanishi Motoo, who specialised in corporate identity; Kimura Katsu and Kanome Takashi, who focused on package design; Sugiura Ko¯hei and Hirano Ko¯ga in the field of poster design; and Kikuchi Nobuyoshi in the field of magazine and book cover design. See Uchida, Sengo Nihon Dezain-shi, p. 242. For more about the visual strategy of these designers, see O. Bartal, Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture and the Tokyo Art Directors Club (New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), pp. 79–130.

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Critical design in Japan 50 The practice of networking among Japanese creators was presented in the exhibition ‘A Japanese Constellation: Toyo¯ Ito¯, SANAA, and Beyond’ (2016, MoMA, New York). The exhibition presented the network of architects that grew around Ito¯ Toyo¯ and SANAA, and showed their influence on a new generation of architects. This exhibition thus suggested an alternative model to what has been commonly described as a system of individual ‘stars’ in the context of contemporary Japanese architecture. Curator Pedro Gadanho said that his original intention was to curate a solo exhibition for Ito¯ Toyo¯, but Ito¯ explained that his work would be better understood by showing his buildings alongside other projects by different Japanese architects with whom he was affiliated. 51 For more about the connections between fashion designers and interior designers, see Uchida, Sengo Nihon Dezain-shi, p. 257. 52 Ibid., p. 282. 53 Ibid., p. 234. 54 Adamson and Pavitt, Postmodernism, pp. 69–77. 55 S. Žižek (ed.), Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 285. 56 The Japan Foundation supports presentations of Japanese art and design outside of Japan by curating independent exhibitions, financially supporting Japan-related exhibitions in museums around the world, and supporting travelling exhibitions. Among the exhibitions organised by the Japan Foundation were ‘Japan Style’ (1980, London) and ‘Avant-Garde Arts of Japan 1910–1970’ (1984–1987, Paris), ‘Japan’s Traditional Crafts Spirit and Technique’ (1990–1991, Helsinki, Oslo, Gothenburg, Aalborg), ‘Visions of Japan’ (1991–1992, London), ‘Japan Today’ (1995–1997, Oslo, Turku, Stockholm), ‘Wa the Spirit of Harmony and Japanese Design Today’ (2009– 2011, Paris, Budapest, Essen, Warsaw, Saint-Étienne, Seoul, Tokyo). 57 I. Tanaka (ed.), Japan Style (exhibition catalogue) (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1980). 58 M. Conte-Helm, The Japanese and Europe: Economic and Cultural Encounters (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 121. 59 So, for instance, the colourful psychedelic palette of Issey Miyake and Yokoo Tadanori, and the style of neon advertisements on Japanese streets, exist alongside the minimalist, reductionist style of Ando¯ Tadao, Ito¯ Toyo¯, Sejima Kazuyo, Sato¯ Oki, Tojujin Yoshioka, Hara Kenya, or Mujirushi Ryohin. Moreover, individual creators sometimes worked in several different styles. Kuramata Shiro¯, for instance, created numerous streamlined, reductionist works such as ‘Glass Chair’, alongside colourful, kitschy works such as ‘Miss Blanche’. Collaborations such as those between Rei Kawakubo and Louis Vuitton or Yohji Yamamoto and Hello Kitty further underscore the presence of an eclecticism that cannot be reduced to a single style or movement. 60 M. Aoki, ‘Japan in the process of institutional change’, Glocom Platform: Japanese Institute of Global Communications (2002), www.glocom.org/opinions/ essays/200201_aoki_japan_process/ (accessed 29 January 2019). 61 Some researchers saw Kawakubo’s clothes as constituting an aesthetic link to Muromachi era traditions, which developed and expressed the ideology of Zen Buddhism through monochromatic colouring, the beauty of the incomplete, and the aesthetics of wabi-sabi. However, as I argue in Chapter 3, the work of Rei Kawakubo was influenced more by foreign ideas and global trends than by traditional Japanese aesthetics, and her clothes carried an ideological message that challenged traditional Japanese values. In order to understand her ideology, we must understand the new visual culture that developed in postwar Japan, as well as the ideologies and behavioural patterns that penetrated Japan in the 1970s, releasing Japanese visual expression from traditional techniques, colours, and the reliance on national foundations. In an interview with Dorinne Kondo, Kawakubo explained that her work is avant-garde and has nothing to do with Japanese

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­culture. See Kondo, About Face, pp. 55–8. For further discussion of Rei Kawakubo, see Chapter 3. 62 It seems that the designers themselves often feel misunderstood when the media or design exhibitions group them together within the same aesthetic framework based on their national affiliation, or when their contemporary works are related to traditional Japanese styles and located on a single aesthetic continuum with traditional works. This subject arose in interviews with designers who declared that they did not identify with any one particular style, or with the images associated with various designers in this milieu. Most of them emphasised that their design language was a personal language that dialogued with traditional, contemporary, and foreign influences. 63 The boutique in question was the Yohji Yamamoto Men boutique in Kobe, which was designed by Uchida Shigeru in 1986.

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Critical design in Japan Ory Bartal

Published by Manchester University Press Bartal, Ory. Critical design in Japan: Material culture, luxury, and the avant-garde. Manchester University Press, 2020. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/73969.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/73969

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

2 The 1968 social uprising and subversive advertising design in Japan: the work of Ishioka Eiko and Suzuki Hachirō

The economic miracle of the 1960s gave a boost to the commercial advertising and graphic design industry, leading to what can be considered the first golden age of graphic design and advertising in postwar Japan.1 At the beginning of the decade, advertisements were heavily influenced by the International Style of the 1950s. However, the atmosphere changed after the 1965 exhibition of Belle Époque posters curated by the collector Katsumie Masaru, which featured over 300 posters from the collection of the Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The significance of this exhibition stems mainly from its impact on designers, which inspired a shift from Modernist styles and the dogmatic Swiss school towards a more personal and romantic expression.2 Another factor that changed the course of Japanese design was the adoption of the American dream in Japan as the epitome of an affluent society and the consumption of designed products as a demonstration of the new lifestyle. This new consumer culture generated a fierce rivalry between companies, big conglomerates, and department stores such as Suntory, Shiseido, and Seibu (known as the ‘three S’s’ of advertising). The competition led to a new style of advertising strategy that centred around the corporate image of the manufacturer instead of presenting the actual products, which was the custom at the time. Looking for sophisticated branding that would help them reshape their corporate image, these companies commissioned young graphic designers who were given a stage to showcase fresh creativity and aesthetics that mirrored the new marketing ideas of the time. These young graphic designers created the companies’ branding including logos, packaging, and advertising posters that depicted the lifestyle and values of the era and, in fact, portrayed the identity of the first modern consumer society in Asia.

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Along with the new commercial graphic design, a new national style, created by designers such as Kamekura Yu¯saku and Katsumie Masaru, was presented via posters for the 1964 Olympic Games and for the 1970s Expo. These posters added a new official image of Japan at the time. 3 On the margins of this newly emerged advertising industry, a group of graphic designers such as Yokoo Tadanori, Kaneko Kuniyoshi, Kushida Mitsuhiro, Uno Akira, and Hirano Ko¯ga created the new wave of avantgarde posters that depicted the turbulent spirit of the social revolutions of the time. Their posters were part of the new subversive visual culture that emerged during the 1960s. They blurred the boundaries between low and high, art and design, with an inimitable style created from a cacophonous semiotic collision of premodern and modern, Japanese and foreign images in intensive psychedelic colours and collagist compositions.4 Their use of collage, montage, and superimposition, coupled with the extensive deployment of bright synthetic colours, allowed these artists to interfuse new fragmentation and the accidental encounters of visual signs to create fields of semiotic scramble. For example, in the poster for Hijikata’s dance performance Á la maison de M. Civeçawa (At the House of Mr. Shibusawa) Garumera Shōkai (Garumera Company) in 1965, Yokoo Tadanori traced and transposed fragmented ready-made photos from newspapers, juxtaposing them with photographic reproductions, assembled to form an intriguing composite of visual signs (see Figure 2.1). The poster is a collage of the famous painting Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters (c. 1594) by an anonymous artist of the Fontainebleau School with a fragment of Under the Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai and images of the rising sun and the Shinkansen bullet train.5 This kind of design challenged Modernist prewar graphic design, the International Style that prevailed in Japan after the Second World War, and the advertising posters that depicted the new lifestyle and the official image of Japan in the 1960s. This new graphic design was inspired by avant-garde art movements like Dada, American graphic designers like Push-Pin Studio, Milton Glaser, and the ‘Big Five’ of Psychedelia, who created posters in San Francisco for the rock-and-roll bands that performed at the legendary Fillmore club, as well as the British designers associated with London’s Punk movement in the 1970s.6 In Japan too, these posters were first created for the music and dance scene as well as for avant-garde theatres such as Waseda Little Theatre (Waseda Shōhekijō), the Black Tent Theatre (Kuro Tento), and the Freedom Theatre (Jiyū Gekijō). This subversive graphic design was highly expressive and erotic. Writing on Yokoo’s work, novelist Yukio Mishima pinpointed the effect of the collision between Yokoo’s inner world and the images of the external world, noting that: ‘[Yokoo’s] work has all the unbearability of the Japanese. His work angers people and scares them, with its vulgar colors.

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Figure 2.1  Yokoo Tadanori, Á la maison de M. Civeçawa, 1965.

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It’s scary how much his [common billboard] colors resemble the Coca-Cola ones. Yet while average people don’t want to look at them. It makes them look.’ Mishima continues: In the darkness of these bright colors, there is something deep ... What makes Yokoo’s work not just the art of a madman is his interest in the world around him. For example, the parody he achieves through the brutal treatment of the common. In this ruinous working of his inner world, the vulgar is scorned. It is not just the inner world, however. In exploding outwards, it becomes a parody and makes us laugh. It is this that makes it healthy.7

As part of the new subversive visual culture of the time, these ­designers worked together with artists from other creative fields and explored the boundaries between graphic design and fine art. Yokoo Tadanori, for example, collaborated with the conceptual group Hi-Red Center, with the novelist Yukio Mishima, and with Terayama Shu¯ji, the director of the experimental theatre troupe Tenjo¯ Sajiki.8 Yokoo also created posters that did not serve any company and crossed the line between art and graphic design. One of his posters, featured in the exhibition ‘Persona 65’, was titled ‘Having Reached a Climax at the Age of 29, I Was Dead’. The poster depicted Yokoo’s life and death. In the bottom left corner Yokoo placed his photograph as an eighteen-month-old baby and in the bottom right corner a photograph of himself at school. In the middle of the poster he presented himself committing suicide with a hanging rope, clutching a rose in his hand, against the backdrop of the rising sun’s rays. An erupting Mount Fuji and a bullet train decorate the top corners. On the night of the exhibition opening, Yokoo and his friends arranged a conceptual art performance of a mock funeral at a Tokyo cemetery. The climax referred to in the title was the ‘Persona’ exhibition itself. As a way of dealing with fear of success, Yokoo figuratively killed himself both in the poster and in the associated art performance.9 Yokoo’s work was a protest against design that served the new consumer culture of the time: It would be better if designers clarified the themes and problems of their own lives ... it is fine for a designer to recognize that design and economy cannot be separated, but then he should reject it. When the designer is working, there should not be any consideration whatsoever of the commercial aspects. The designer should, within the small frame in which he or she works, explore his own themes, his own life, his own thoughts.10

As innovative as these types of new visual ideas and advances were, they took place primarily on the counterculture margins of society or for entertainment-related events and had very little influence on mainstream commercial advertising poster design of the time. However, two major art directors – Suzuki Hachiro¯ and Ishioka Eiko – transformed advertising design by breaking the boundaries between commercial and subversive style and presented the new critical spirit of the time in the very heart of

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Critical design in Japan the mainstream consumer culture. This is reflected in the revolutionary advertising campaigns they devised for Fuji-Xerox and Parco.11

Suzuki Hachirō and the Fuji-Xerox campaign The Fuji-Xerox new advertising campaign was launched in 1969 when the company inserted the Fuji-Xerox logo into Japan Railway’s ‘Discover Japan’ posters. This campaign was ineffective, because the target audience did not understand whether the slogan and the images were related to Japan Railways or to Fuji-Xerox. Kobayashi Yo¯taro, the first president of Fuji-Xerox, approached Suzuki Hachiro¯ to plan a new advertising campaign. Suzuki was a graphic designer who had just graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music the previous year, and would go on to become one of Japan’s most famous independent art directors in the following decades. The revolutionary campaign that Suzuki created for Fuji-Xerox’s copy-machines was launched in 1970 and represented the start of a new era in corporate branding and in the aesthetics of visual communication.12 Suzuki presented his ideas in this campaign not only via images but also with texts which relied on critical theories without showing the product. The campaign, known as ‘Xerox Beautiful’, consisted of ten newspaper advertisements, fifteen street posters, one television commercial, and stickers that carried the word ‘beautiful’. The print advertisements appeared in the Asahi and Nikkei newspapers from May to December 1970 (nine times each), the stickers were handed out to passers-by in the Shinjuku area in Tokyo, and the television commercials were broadcast on JNN News.13 In order to market an American product to a nation that was actively protesting against its subordination to the United States and the American presence in Japan, Suzuki linked the product to issues, notions, and images associated with the internal anti-American social protest that prevailed at the time in the United States. In one of the ads, which represents black and white as opposites by depicting the faces of a black man and a white woman, the black male’s face is presented as a realistic three-dimensional image, looking straight at the camera, while the face of the white woman is depicted in semi profile, as a flat, almost stencil-like cut-out, extending the white space of the advert’s margins.14 The image is followed by the slogan ‘Black is beautiful, white is beautiful’, echoing the ideas of the American civil rights movement, while simultaneously alluding to the black and white of Fuji-Xerox photocopies. Other Fuji-Xerox adverts by Suzuki addressed feminist ideas. One advert portrayed a man washing dishes with the slogan ‘25% of men today challenge the prejudice of what is women’s work and what is men’s work’.15 Another black and white advert depicted a woman enveloped in a halo, clad in a simple sweater with unkempt hair, sticking out her tongue at the viewers, with the slogan: ‘Women should be mad at advertisements

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of photocopy machines that show only female models’ (see Figure 2.2). The advert contains an additional text that reads: While men are used in computer advertisements, women are often used in advertisements for photocopy machines, as if women are just accessories. Copying is a tedious job, so it is a job given to women. While most of our work at Xerox is to copy, we do not concur with this. We are sorry that we have created such advertisements in the past … Not because Xerox is feminist, but because we believe that it is not at all strange for a president or a manager to make copies himself. Sometimes this is more efficient, and we know that women can do more than just photocopying. This is the whole story. We live in a male-dominated society: men create, men engage in politics, men make advertisements. This makes women angry. Before you too get angry about what is being said in the name of Women’s Lib, we here at Xerox suggest: Let’s think about each other. Xerox has made all office work, from copying to collating, fast and automatic to benefit the use of our surplus time.

This ground-breaking branding, which associates Fuji-Xerox with the new subversive American social ideas, presented the American product as revolutionary, and as such, one that can be purchased with a clear conscience, as it was congruent with anti-American Japanese sentiments. The anti-American protest was part of the 1960s’ social uprising instigated by the New Left movement in Japan, which opposed the Japanese government’s intention to extend its bilateral security agreement with the United States (the Yoshida Doctrine) that kept American military bases on Japanese soil and thus made Japan sacrifice its national sovereignty and neutrality. The anti-American and anti-government protest soon shifted to a call for social revolutionary actions inspired by subversive American left movements which led the fight for civil rights during the 1960s. In the wake of the American and European movements, the Japanese New Left movements stood up against the restrictive norms of modern Japanese society, criticising Japan’s internalised social evils and advocating the cultivation of a sense of personal responsibility and independence.16 The Fuji-Xerox campaign also advocated a form of social protest. However, in contrast with the New Left movements that focused on political issues, this campaign branded a commercial company by protesting against the ramifications of the increased industrialisation brought about by the government’s new economic policy, known as the ‘consumer revolution’ (shōhi kakumei). Thus, in contract to commercial design of the big conglomerates, which sported beautiful and glamorous models as well as images of new products and new lifestyles, the Fuji-Xerox campaign branded the company by presenting a critical view on social issues.17 The most notable of these issues, besides women’s equality, was environmental, namely the extreme industrial pollution of urban areas, which caused the ‘four largest pollution diseases’ (yondai kōgaibyō) that included the itai-itai and the Minamata diseases. Victims and their families brought

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Figure 2.2  Suzuki Hachirō, Women Should Be Mad at Advertisements of Photocopy Machines that Show Only Female Models, 1970.

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the cases of poisoning caused by pollution to different courts in Japan,18 and environmental activists such as Ishimure Michiko published books and newspaper articles about the effects of industrial pollution.19 These incidents had a strong impact on Japanese society, as court rulings and public opinion started to demand that the government and large companies balance the objectives of economic growth with environmental standards.20 This attitude was reflected in Suzuki’s campaign for Fuji-Xerox, in a print advert that depicted a blue sky with a white cirrus cloud surrounded by a white frame, with the slogan ‘Make the sky beautiful, make business beautiful’, in direct reference to the alarming rise in pollution of Japan’s urban areas on the heels of rapid industrial development during the 1960s (see Figure 2.3). In an interview, Suzuki reflected: ‘I wanted to cut out a piece of clear sky and put it on my desk.’21 Another advert addressed the pollution of Japanese rivers by depicting a section of a blue river, presented as a two-dimensional blue square within a white frame. In the upper right corner, a three-dimensional water strider interrupts the cleanness of still water. The legs of the strider resemble the X of ‘Xerox’. The slogan in the poster stated, ‘Make that which flows beautiful, make business beautiful’ (see Figure 2.4). A bolder advert featured a three-dimensional violet-coloured planet Earth against a two-dimensional grey background, with Japan protruding above the surface of the planet, like a boil or a growth, with a slogan that reads: ‘Hey, Japan, what are you going to do?’ (see Figure 2.5). The poster also included the text: Japan has grown bigger and bigger, frantically running ahead without glancing to its sides. The speed Japan has produced is remarkable in human history. No other runners have run such a distance at such high speed. However, how long can our bodies sustain this speed? While obtaining material wealth, we have lost important things. This unprecedented expansion might itself be a disease. This era marks the world’s highest growth and the highest environmental pollution. We need to diagnose our way of thinking that has given preference to material over mankind and nature.

An even more daring poster, bearing the slogan ‘From intensive to beautiful’, addressed another by-product of the ‘economic miracle’: the pressing social issue of the wellbeing of employees. With the rise in income, the Japanese standard of living was allegedly recalibrated: taking their cue from the American dream, the Japanese reshaped their lives with new, desirable household items and cars.22 However, Yale University economist Hamada Koichi notes that although the Japanese enjoyed material amenities, many of them were frustrated with Japan’s traditional institutions, which they felt stood in the way of a more meaningful life.23 For example, working long hours benefited companies and banks, and increased GNP, but left individuals with little or no leisure time. This

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Figure 2.3  Suzuki Hachirō, Make the Sky Beautiful, Make Business Beautiful, 1970.

­celebration of collective values such as responsibility, endurance, and hard work, promoted by the government in favour of commercial companies and national growth, was criticised in the Fuji-Xerox campaign.24 The advertisements addressed the employees’ new awareness of the disparity between what they were doing and what they would like to be doing, and their lack of optimism about the future. The first ad depicts seven nude men and women running through the mist, followed by the red rear lights of a car with a license plate carrying the numbers ‘70’ ‘71’, which leaves

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Figure 2.4  Suzuki Hachirō, Make That Which Flows Beautiful, Make Business Beautiful, 1970.

behind a red trail indicating the car’s speed, with the slogan: ‘Good-bye! Frantic labour’ (see Figure 2.6). The advertisement included additional text that reads: The age of speeding has passed. We now shift to the age of health, beautiful nature, but more than that, to an age that cherishes human beings. We shift from the 1960s, in which we frantically worked, were frantically tired, frantically produced, and frantically polluted the environment, to the 1970s, which recognize real human wealth.

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Figure 2.5  Suzuki Hachirō, Hey, Japan, What Are You Going to Do?, 1970.

Another black and white advertisement presents a group of nine nude young people splashing in a pond at night. A slogan in English says, ‘Beautiful 70s’ (see Figure 2.7). The advertisement also contains the text: What is happiness for human beings? Is it wealth achieved through tired bodies? Is it material wealth gained by polluting the environment and ruining our health? The 1960s were an age in which everyone hustled in pursuit of wealth. Free yourself from intensive labour. Human beings should live like human beings. Let’s make the 1970s an era in which we slow down and look for our humanity.

The campaign conveyed an unprecedented, clear, and poignantly critical view of the 1960s’ work ethic, targeting the new employees who worked hard and intensively to reach the collective aim of national growth while

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Figure 2.6  Suzuki Hachirō, Good-Bye! Frantic Labor, 1970.

ignoring their personal needs, only to realise that they themselves were not leading a ‘beautiful’ life. Furthermore, the Fuji-Xerox campaign made a direct reference to street demonstrations, with an advert that featured a demonstration in which protestors – men and women who look like salaried employees – march holding blank signs. The man in the front holds a sign with the question: ‘What would you write to live a beautiful life?’ (see Figure 2.8). The text in the advert calls upon viewers to think about what they would have written on a protest sign: ‘Beautiful’ is a protest; a call to live as human beings should, a protest against seeking wealth over human dignity. ‘Beautiful’ is a claim; a claim for a beautiful sky, beautiful rivers, beautiful nature, a healthy body, and leisure time; a claim not to neglect the most basic and important things for human beings. Move from intensive labour to real wealth with flowers and fruits. Now is the time to make our claim and think about each and every one of us. What would you write?

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Figure 2.7  Suzuki Hachirō, Beautiful 70s, 1970.

Created in 1970 by Suzuki and the copywriter Masuda Ko¯ji, the FujiXerox campaign resonated strongly with consumers in Japan and received two prestigious design awards.25 The campaign name, with its explicit eschewing of Japanese in favour of the English word ‘beautiful’, expresses a clear shift from the emphasis in the 1960s on intensive labour to the new foreign-style values of the late 1960s and 1970s that spoke of comfort and beauty.26

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Figure 2.8  Suzuki Hachirō, What Would You Write to Live a Beautiful Life?, 1970.

Ishioka Eiko and the Parco campaign The Fuji-Xerox campaign of 1969–70 was followed by another critical campaign, that of Parco in the early 1970s. Parco Department Store opened in Ikebukuro in 1969 by the Seibu group, which envisioned Parco as a compound space for culture and commerce.27 Featuring small boutiques, gourmet restaurants, quality bookshops, a publishing house, and a gallery, Parco sought to provide customers with the possibility of consuming ­cutting-edge cultural experiences alongside fashionable goods.28 By blurring the line between merchandise, leisure, and cultural consumption, it transformed shopping into a recreational experience.29 Parco was established in the wake of the bankruptcy of the Ikebukuro branch of the Marubutsu Department Store, which was absorbed by the Seibu Department Store of the Seibu

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Critical design in Japan Retailing Group, managed at the time by Tsutsumi Seiji.30 Parco was then set up as a company within the Seibu Retailing Group,31 as a part of Seibu’s new image in keeping with the new wave of Tokyo’s ‘local’ department stores such as To¯kyu¯, To¯bu, and Odakyu¯. These local stores competed with older traditional department stores such as Mitsukoshi, Takashimaya, and Matsuzakaya, which had branches all over the country, as well as in the luxurious Ginza quarter of Tokyo. To create a new consumer base that would be loyal to the Seibu brand name, Seibu built its marketing strategy around the concepts of lifestyle, individualism, and diversification, which were trendy in local marketing practices during the first half of the 1970s. As a way of positioning the department store in the eyes of the public and creating a consumer base, Seibu group opened the Parco Department Store and the Seibu Museum of Art, and from the mid-1970s launched a campaign to present a new corporate image through advertising, information pamphlets, and cultural events.32 To complement the unique nature of this commercial endeavour, in 1971 Parco’s managing director Matsuda Tsuji hired Ishioka Eiko, a young graphic artist who would later go on to achieve tremendous international success and acclaim in art direction, staging, and costume design for Hollywood and for private clients such as the singer Bjork.33 Instead of using big advertising companies or in-house advertising departments, as Suntory and Shiseido did, part of Seibu’s strategy for achieving corporate image was hiring external, cutting-edge art directors like Tanaka Ikko¯, Asaba Katsumi, and Ishioka Eiko who created the advertising campaigns according to a general strategy developed by Seibu’s sales promotion department.34 Ishioka was given the task of creating a ground-breaking advertising campaign that would target the young generation of women in Japan who belonged to the post-Second World War baby boom generation. Most of these women joined the workforce en masse in the late 1960s and 1970s, while still primarily living at home with their parents. This turned them, in effect, into a sector with massive purchasing power within Japan and one of the wealthiest worldwide.35 This demographic group was divided by Parco into different segments: a youth group called Parco Youth (Parco named these groups in English), a chic group (relatively wealthy with chic taste) called Parco Chic, a culture group (culturally oriented and educated) called Parco Culture, and a small family group called Parco Family (a name that was given to the complex’s roof garden and restaurants).36 Parco did not sell one brand in particular, but instead rented out spaces to different boutiques and included an art gallery, a bookstore, and a theatre. And so, the only guidelines given to Ishioka were to promote the corporate identity of the Parco shopping complex. Ishioka met this challenge by launching an advertising campaign that painted the department store in an avant-garde light, with the aim of establishing Parco as a place where powerful women could express

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their personalities, engage in cultural activities, and fulfil their fantasies of independence, leisure, and travel.37 This campaign was part of a larger advertising campaign called ‘The Age of Women’ (onna no jidai), created for Seibu by Tanaka Ikko¯ and Yamaguchi Harumi with copywriter Itoi Shigesato.38 The campaign appeared in women’s magazines and in ­posters displayed in the department store. The posters conveyed female power not through images of glamorous models but rather by drawing attention to female roles that had previously been unacknowledged as work, such as motherhood or housework, on the one hand, and career woman on the other hand. The campaign also tackled the issues of ‘otherness’ and race; first by presenting women in a non-industrial society (Ishioka was the first art director in Japan to present women of colour in natural settings) and then by showing African-American career women. One advert that bears the slogan ‘My dear superstar’ shows an African Maasai woman clad in a tribal pink and red costume and wearing colourful bead jewellery. The woman has a very short haircut and is presented as a big, strong woman – masculine even – who occupies the entire frame. Although she is carrying her baby (and, in another poster, breastfeeding it), she does not look at the baby, as in conventional Japanese or European visual representations of motherhood, but rather gazes at a distant point, as if looking towards a better future (see Figure 2.9). Another poster presents three Indian women in the Thar Desert in Rajasthan carrying their babies. Again, like the Maasai woman, they are not looking at their babies but turn their gazes directly towards the camera. The slogan states ‘Starting point’. Another poster portrays Moroccan women wearing ethnic costumes and carrying tree branches on their backs with the question: ‘Are they career women?’ In these images, Ishioka offered viewers an authentic look at the status of women in developing countries, where the ideas of women’s rights are not acknowledged. Other posters raised the issue of career women and race, like the poster that bears the slogan ‘The nightingale sings for no one but herself’, which depicts the black model and actress Doris Smith in a crouching position, her eyes returning the gaze of the viewer (see Figure 2.10).39 Like the Fuji-Xerox campaign ‘Black is beautiful, white is beautiful’, in these posters a black woman serves as the carrier of the message and presents the ‘other’ in the public sphere, bestowing Parco with the image of the patron of the avant-garde. The choice to present black models was explained by the cultural historian Taylor Atkins in his analysis of the nationalist jazz discourse of the late 1960s and 1970s. According to Atkins, the postwar Japanese jazz community favoured black musicians over white musicians because they considered themselves a ‘coloured’ race like people of African descent and therefore felt a natural affinity with ‘coloured’ races over the white race.40 Thus, depicting black models could be read as presenting an alter ego that viewers identified with for its

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Figure 2.9  Ishioka Eiko, My Dear Superstar, for PARCO, 1978.

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Figure 2.10  Ishioka Eiko, The Nightingale Sings for No One but Herself, for PARCO, 1976.

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Critical design in Japan ­counter-hegemony statement. Another reason for presenting black models in adverts can be attributed to the new postmodern interest in the subversive style of the exotic other with its critical standpoint.41 The campaign challenged social conventions not only by presenting black models but also by invoking ideas and messages steeped in radical feminism and social protest of the early 1970s. This was known as the ‘second wave of feminism’,42 which, as literature scholar Julia Bullock notes, endeavoured to change the self-restricting perceptions of women and break down the traditional notion of the ‘good wife and wise mother’ (ryōsai kenbo) that drove them to remain full-time housewives.43 In his book Japan’s New Left Movements: Legacies for Civil Society, sociologist Ando¯ Takemasa claims that the New Left influenced women to turn their attention to ‘everydayness’ (i.e., their own sexuality, their jobs, and their relations with their partners) rather than to political institutions or public policies.44 This discourse of ‘everydayness’ reverberates through Ishioka’s campaign, which targeted women who joined the workforce in the late 1960s yet failed to see any real improvement in their own social status.45 In her discussion of three prominent feminist (women) writers of the 1960s, Bullock suggests that ‘it may be time to rethink histories of feminism that privilege explicitly political speech over other methods of ­feminist ­discourse’.46 Such implicit feminist discourse was also raised by women artists of the time.47 Following this line of thought, I would like to argue that Ishioka was one of the pioneers who, along with other c­ reative women, blurred the line between the personal and the socio­ political, setting the scene for Japanese feminist activism by choosing to express avant-garde ideas visually rather than in violent street protests.48 We may think of these creative women as the forerunners of the second wave of Japanese feminism. After thirty years of feminist silence, they pursued independent careers and engaged with distinctly feminist issues, such as body and identity politics as well as sexual freedom. The intensity and audacity with which they addressed these issues are remarkable and unparalleled in the first wave of feminism in Japan. In the same vein as Suzuki’s Fuji-Xerox campaign, which was inspired by the political protests of the time and directed its protest specifically against the government’s economic actions, Ishioka’s works drew on feminist protest, but took a new direction. In contrast with the radical feminist movements that fought for equality and women’s rights, Ishioka, who as an agent of the market powers was part of the system, devised an offer for women ‘to be individualists’. Ishioka recalls her time at Shiseido: ‘Until I came along, all advertising had been done by men. They portrayed women as dolls that never looked into the camera and walked three steps behind men. I wanted a woman who looked healthy, who could look men in the eyes, who had power, who had the confidence to live alone.’49 The campaign posters proposed: You can go to university, you can have an inde-

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pendent career, you can have an independent bank account, and you can determine who you will marry, without having to depend on the head of the ie household system and the community.50 The adverts offered women the opportunity to free themselves from the shackles of communal traditions (like subordination to familial authority) through commercial fashion. However, this was by no means an invitation to strike out against the state or a call for equal rights as was advocated by radical feminist movements of the second wave of feminism in the early 1970s, such as ūman ribu (the women’s liberation movement), Tatakau Onnatachi (Fighting Women), and other New Left movements; this was an agenda that sought to bolster the state and market powers that could sustain the systems of education, health, welfare, employment, insurance, pensions, and security, thus taking these responsibilities away from the head of the family or the traditional household system.51 With the dissolution of the power of families and the communities they lived in, women could gain independence, as exemplified by the personal biography of Ishioka, who made her personal decision when she attended university and led an independent career. Like other participants in the women’s movement, Ishioka sought independence and freedom for women, but the strategy she adopted was that of liberal feminism, a feminism that differs from radical or socialist feminism and that focuses on women’s rights through the capitalist notion of individualism. Thus, management researcher Sato Toyoko argues that the Parco campaign presented fashion not only as what one wears, but also as a manifestation of one’s way of life. For Sato, the Parco campaign clearly addressed women’s identity via fashion and thus presented fashion as a mode of thought. This idea, Sato argues, did not exist before and its employment by the Parco campaign therefore represents an event of unique significance.52 It should be noted that Ishioka discussed fashion in a broader context than just clothes. In one advertisement, she raised the issue of the male gaze in fashion photography. The advertisement, with the slogan ‘A model is more than just a pretty face’, juxtaposed an image of a model dressed in fashionable clothes, posing provocatively like in conventional fashion photography (see Figure 2.11). By directly communicating with the thoughts that the image conjured up in the viewer’s mind (rather than referring to the subject displayed in the advert), the slogan changes the meaning of the image in the advert and challenges the perception of women as mere clothes hangers or sex objects for the male gaze. Ishioka dared to present female nudity by showing the French actress Aurore Clément standing topless on the beach without hiding her body’s natural imperfections, driving home the message that seemed to state defiantly: ‘Don’t stare at the nude, be naked’. This slogan again challenged the male and female gaze by referring directly to their thoughts while looking at the poster (see Figure 2.12).

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Figure 2.11  Ishioka Eiko, A Model Is More Than Just a Pretty Face, for PARCO, 1975.

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Figure 2.12  Ishioka Eiko, Don’t Stare at the Nude, Be Naked, for PARCO, 1975.

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Critical design in Japan Later, Ishioka went on to present male nudity in a poster that featured the male pop star Sawada Kenji (known as ‘Julie’ because of his self-professed adoration for Julie Andrews) in the nude (see Figure 2.13). In the poster, he is seen raising his hands under a shower, with a spotlight shedding light on his upper body, illuminating only his chest and face and keeping his genitals in the dark. His body seems somewhat feminine, challenging conventions of male beauty. The poster bears the slogan: ‘The day to talk about men came’. Another poster, which advertised the opening of a new Parco branch in the Kichijo¯ji neighbourhood, portrayed the actress Ann Reinking (a white woman) with black dancers (four men and three women). Some of the male dancers sported skimpy erotic costumes typically worn by women. The slogan, ‘All that jo¯ji!’ was of course a play on the title of the film All That Jazz, which Reinking starred in (see Figure 2.14). The poster reversed the feminine–masculine roles played out in the film and instilled the image with erotic undertones, theatricality, and interaction between the black and white dancers. All these posters present people who pursue individual careers and dare to perform unconventionally for Ishioka’s camera. The Parco campaign was carried out over a full decade, yet the innovative nature of the posters never faltered and continued to be expressed both through visual graphics as well as slogans such as: ‘Man, be beautiful for women’ and ‘Women, be ambitious’. The posters, which did not showcase products, were of course open to interpretation and left viewers wondering, ‘What is the product?’ Sato argues that the commercials, rather than dictating a meaning, instead asked, ‘Who are you? Can what you wear represent who you are and will be? Be yourself!’53

Between social protest and consumer culture Both the Fuji-Xerox and the Parco campaigns should be understood in the context of the great polarity that characterised the era, between the energy of counterculture movements expressed in avant-garde visual culture and the revolt against modern art and institutional structures. The counterculture movements sought to present anarchic, chaotic, erotic, postmodern Japanese sensibility and protest against the rigid structures of family, government, and bureaucracy as expressed in the consumer revolution. These two forces are clearly reflected in Ishioka’s and Suzuki’s innovative campaigns, as both were aware of the new avant-garde visual culture and political thought, yet were also active, as part of the commercial firms that hired them, in the new emerging consumer culture. As a discipline rooted in economy as well as aesthetics, advertising design of the time was able to present these subversive messages within the capitalist system despite its obvious critique of the system itself. Ishioka worked for Shiseido and Seibu and designed the main poster for Expo ‘70; Suzuki Hachiro¯ worked at Dentsu¯ and created campaigns for

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Figure 2.13  Ishioka Eiko, The Day to Talk about Men Came, for PARCO, 1979.

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Figure 2.14  Ishioka Eiko, ALL THAT JŌJI!, for PARCO, 1980 25/02/2020 08:24



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Coca Cola, JR, and Apple Computers, as well as the poster for the opening ceremony of the 1972 Winter Olympics. The conflictual positions of the two art directors, who worked on the backdrop of the revolutionary forces of the 1960s, yet were a part of the era’s established conglomerates, gave both Ishioka and Suzuki an understanding not only of the potential and efficacy of avant-garde social politics, feminism, and ecological issues, but also of their seductive power in advertising. The introduction of this avant-garde political thought and visual culture into the very heart of consumer culture was enabled by the new economic values of late consumer culture, which were characterised not by the need to fulfil a function but rather by the need to convey social status, prestige, identity, and differentiation through purchasing and using the lifestyle offered by the brand signs.54 The products in late consumer culture had been, thus, released from the Modernist ‘form follows function’ framework and acquired the postmodern ‘form/design follows emotions’, in which objects were transformed from functional items to ones that were charged with emotions and humanistic ideology, and thereby provided their user with a sense of identity. In Ishioka’s and Suzuki’s campaigns, the signified were the companies (Parco and Fuji-Xerox). However, the signifier was not associated with these companies but rather with social issues that challenged the rules and boundaries that were the norms of the time, thus providing the company/product with a social identity and position and conveying the message that the commercial company and its products were agents of social change. This type of brand-making departed from the modern ‘form follows function’ branding tactic and did not discuss the product and its functions but rather translated subversive social ideas such as feminism or ecology into a brand sign value. By doing so, it shifted the focus away from the objects (i.e., the functional value of the product) to the subject matter (i.e., consumer’s social values). These advertisements, tapping into the new awareness of the young generation in Japan that took part in the social protests of the 1960s, gave consumers the feeling of being part of a new way of thinking and participating in ecological or feminist struggles. This advertising strategy also reflected the new differentiation between needs and desire (or rather the need for social meaning in lieu of functionality) and the establishment of sign value for brands/ products in the consumer culture of Japan in the late 1960s. By producing social ‘sign value’ for a department store and a photocopier, both the Parco and the Fuji-Xerox campaigns skilfully manipulated avant-garde aesthetics, social discourse, and subversive social struggles into a sign value in the capitalist system. This was a dramatic departure from previous commonly employed modern advertising strategies, as Ishioka explained: ‘At that time many companies tended to use famous personalities for hard-sell testimonial advertisements – for example, movie stars would hold a beer bottle. That is a primitive form of advertising

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Critical design in Japan employing a traditional technique, well known even in the Meiji and Taisho eras – my father’s generation was very familiar with this approach.’55 In an interview with the anthropologist Marilyn Ivy, Fujioka Wako, a high-level advertising executive, referred to the Fuji-Xerox campaign as belonging to the new genre of advertisements that eschews actual product display and instead invokes consumer values. He labelled this category of advertising ‘deadvertising’ (datsukōkoku), presenting a break from past marketing approaches.56 The copywriter Shimizu Keiichiro¯ called this genre, which offers consumers a lifestyle rather than a product, ‘living proposal advertisements’ (seikatsu teian kōkoku).57 Although this kind of pretension might sound preposterous or naive when looking back from a reality entrenched in the logic of late capitalism of the twenty-first century, in the late 1960s and early 1970s Suzuki and Ishioka deeply believed in their ability to create a new social reality via the medium of advertising. As Isamu Noguchi wrote about Ishioka’s work: ‘Commercial work’s purpose is to sell merchandise, but Eiko used it to fight a battle, to move a message into society – to subvert consumerism.’58 The Fuji-Xerox and Parco campaigns were a meeting point for many forces that shaped the era: the social revolutionary forces, the avant-garde aesthetics of the anti-art and anti-design movements, as well as the economic miracle and the new values of the late consumer market. These campaigns paved the way for many Japanese conglomerates who successfully established stronger corporate identities via artistic, emotional, and ideological ‘sign values’ in the following decades. The new signs within consumer society provide us with insights into the role of designers who created needs, desires, and values that played a crucial role in organising contemporary Japanese society, assimilating and projecting them on consumer objects and practices, a process that started in the late 1960s and reached its apex in the bubble economy of the 1980s. Thus, while Suzuki and Ishioka were not members of any avant-garde group and Ishioka never felt an ambassador of the feminist movement, the way they set about breaking the boundaries between two different ideologies of the era by infiltrating messages of social protest into the heart of the capitalistic system, framed their work as critical design and cast them as important social participants in the protest movement era.

Notes   1 Y. Kaji, ‘The era of individualization of expression: The 1960s’, in Advertising History 1950–1990 (exhibition catalogue) (Tokyo: East Japan Railway Culture Foundation, 1993), p. 56.   2 R. Thornton, Japanese Graphic Design (London: Laurence King, 1991), p. 230.   3 Ibid., p. 97.   4 D. Goodman, Angura: Posters of the Japanese Avant-Garde (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), pp. 1–13.

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  5 M. Hayashi, ‘Tracing the graphic in postwar Japanese art’, in D. Chong (ed.), Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), p. 107.   6 The ‘Big Five’ of Psychedelia were Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Alton Kelly, Stanley Mouse, and Richard Griffin. See S. Eskilson, Graphic Design – A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 338–9 and Goodman, Angura, pp. 1–13.   7 M. Kinser Saiki, 12 Japanese Masters (New York: Graphis, 2002), p. 166.   8 Ibid., p. 164.   9 The funeral was fully documented in Yokoo Tadanori’s book The Posthumous Work of Tadanori Yokoo (Tokyo: Shuppan Hanbai company, 1968). See Thornton, Japanese Graphic Design, p. 115. 10 Kinser Saiki, 12 Japanese Masters, p. 166. 11 This chapter is based on discourse analysis of personal interviews with Suzuki Hachiro¯ (conducted in his studio in 2005), analysis of interviews with Ishioka Eiko, published in J. He (ed.), Eiko Ishioka (Singapore: Page One Publishing, 2006) and content analysis of the advertisements. 12 Suzuki Hachiro¯ created the Xerox campaigns while working for Dentsu¯ after graduating from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. 13 W. Fujioka, Fujioka Wakao Zen Shigoto 2: Moretsu Kara Beautifuru He (All Work by Fujioka Wakao 2: From Intensive to Beautiful) (Tokyo: PHP publishing, 1984), pp. 50–1. 14 See this advertising poster in http://8ro.jp/works%20pictures/xerox03.html (accessed 21 August 2019). 15 The slogans and texts of the advertisements in this chapter appeared in Japanese and were translated by the author. 16 D. Winston, Japanese Religion and Society: Paradigm of Structure and Change (New York: University of New York Press, 1992), p. 94. 17 This new identity of Japan as a modern consumer society was based on prewar branding practices of the newly emerging national Japanese corporations in the 1930s. See G. Weisenfeld, ‘Publicity and propaganda in 1930s Japan: Modernism as a method’, Design Issues, 25:4 (2009), 13. 18 Among the pollution cases brought to different courts are the itai-itai disease, caused by cadmium waste from the Mitsui Metal and Mining Company, and the Minamata disease, caused by eating fish and shellfish polluted by mercury contained in waste from the New Nippon Nitrogen (now Chisso) Company in Minamata Bay, as well as the Showa Denko Company in Niigata and Yokkaichi. Another condition, asthma, was caused by air pollution from petroleum refining companies in Yokkaichi. See K. Hamada, Japan 1968: A Reflection Point During the Era of the Economic Miracle (Papers 764) (New Haven: Economic Growth Center, Yale University, 1996), p. 5, www.econ.yale.edu/growth_pdf/cdp764.pdf (accessed 15 August 2019). 19 Ishimure Michiko, an activist who worked to expose the industrial pollution and interviewed many of the victims of Minamata disease, has written two books that focus on the toxic effects of mercury poisoning in Japan: Cruel Tales of Japan: Modern Period (Japanese title, Kibyō: Minamata Byō no Ruporutāju 6. Sākuru Mura 3, no. 1, 1960) and Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease (Japanese title, Kugai Jodo: Waga Minamata Byō) trans. L. Monnet (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2003 [1969]). She also organised a photography exhibition in order to expose the horrors of the disease to the world. See T. S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000). 20 In 1967, a basic law was legislated to prevent pollution. In 1968, the Ministry of Welfare recognised both the itai-itai disease and the Minamata disease as symptoms caused by industrial pollution as defined by the new law. 21 Taken from a personal interview with Suzuki Hachiro¯ that was conducted in June 2005 in his office in Ginza.

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Critical design in Japan 22 K. B. Hiesinger, ‘Japanese design: A survey since 1950’, in K. B. Hiesinger and F. Fischer (eds), Japanese Design: A Survey Since 1950 (exhibition catalogue) (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1994), p. 19. 23 Hamada, Japan 1968, p. 5. 24 The Japanese themselves pointed to these positive moral and collective social values (kireigoto) as part of their identity. This point of view of Japanese culture was documented in academic research literature in which Japanese culture was described as homogenous, with a nationalist ideology that emphasises the collective public matters of society. This generalistic view, with its widely painted strokes of Orientalism, is known as Nihonjinron (theory of Japanese society). See P. R. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986) and K. Iwabuchi, ‘Complicit exoticism: Japan and its other’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Popular Culture, 8:2 (1994), 49–82. 25 The Xerox Beautiful campaign won two grand prizes (Nikkei Advertising Awards in 1970 and the Tokyo ADC Grand Prize in 1971). See Fujioka, Fujioka Wakao Zen Shigoto 2, p. 36. 26 K. Shimizu, ‘When advertising was transformed: The 70s’, in Advertising History 1950–1990 (exhibition catalogue) (Tokyo: East Japan Railway Culture Foundation, 1993), p. 98. 27 The team that envisioned Parco included Matsuda Tsuji (who was dispatched by the Seibu Department Store to the troubled Marubutsu Department Store as executive director) and Ishikawa Fukuo (who oversaw the sales promotion staff at Marubutsu). 28 Parco was not conceived of as a traditional department store that sold only products but also established a publishing division as part of its corporation. At first, Parco published pamphlets for its theatre programmes, but later on expanded on these themes. Parco publishing division identified several visual culture lines that were used for its pamphlets (these were not books just pamphlets) such as an American nostalgia line (e.g., art books about Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper), an art student line (Bauhaus, Surrealism, and Pop Artists like Andy Warhol), an urban line (Antonio Gaudi and Rudolf Steiner), and a female artists’ line (Tamara de Lempicka, Judy Chicago, and Kusama Yayoi). In addition to art-related books, Parco Publishing also published a local magazine for Shibuya called Bikkuri Hausu (Surprising House). See C. Ueno, ‘Seibu Department Store and image marketing: Japanese consumerism in the postwar period’, in K. L. MacPherson (ed.), Asian Department Stores (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), p. 203. For more about Parco’s identity see T. Sato, ‘Organizational identity and symbioticity: Parco as an urban medium’, Journal of Management History, 16:1 (2010), 46–7, 51. 29 Department stores in Japan were used for recreational activities as in the case of Mitsukoshi Department Store. For department store culture in Japan, see B. Moeran, ‘The birth of the Japanese department store’, in K. L. MacPherson (ed.), Asian Department Stores, pp. 159–61. 30 Seibu Saison Group was a Japanese holding company considered one of Japan’s most aggressive postwar conglomerates. The group renamed itself the Saison Group in 1990, when the conglomerate consisted of twelve core groups with a total of 200 companies and more than 110,000 employees. See Sato, ‘Organizational identity and symbioticity’, p. 54. 31 Ibid., p. 57. 32 From the mid-1970s, companies in Japan started shaping their corporate image. Seibu Department Store, for example, started promoting their new corporate image in 1975 by creating an overall image strategy (from a new logo to a company museum). This image strategy not only formulated a new corporate identity but served as a vehicle that revolutionised store practices, created a sense of independence, and educated the clientele and the staff at the same time. Ueno, ‘Seibu Department Store and image marketing’, pp. 183–7.

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33 Ishioka Eiko graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1961 and started working at Shiseido that same year. She moved on to work in New York where she designed set decoration and costumes for movies and theatre. She received an Academy Award for costume design for the film Dracula directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1992. Ishioka published several books and her works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She died on 21 January 2012. 34 Ueno, ‘Seibu Department Store and image marketing’, p. 195. 35 For women working in Japan during the period, see K. Kelsky, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 85 and B. Moeran, ‘Homo Harmonicus and the Yenjoy girls: Production and consumption of Japanese myths’, Encounter, 72:5 (1989), 19–24. 36 Sato, ‘Organizational identity and symbioticity’, p. 57. 37 The Parco campaign was so successful that a new slang word, Paruko-teki, was coined at the time in the Shibuya area. Literally ‘Parco style’, the term came to mean something sophisticated, complicated, and difficult to understand. 38 Ueno, ‘Seibu Department Store and image marketing’, p. 189. 39 E. Guthmann, ‘Japan high priestess of graphic design’, in He (ed.), Eiko Ishioka, p. 122. 40 Atkins treats the development of jazz in Japan as a case study for the importation, assimilation, adaptation, and rejection of American popular culture and the identity anxieties that such a process provokes. He presents an interview with the writer and Jazz music critic Yui Sho¯ichi, who explains that both Japanese and black Americans share a history of cultural humiliation in the face of white Euro-American accomplishments, which forced the Japanese to discard their traditional customs and absorb those from overseas. For Atkins, this affiliation with black culture is one of the authenticating strategies that Japanese jazz players used in order to counter powerful psychological, institutional, and sociocultural forces that have continually cast doubt on the authenticity of the art of Japanese jazz musicians as ‘jazz’ and as ‘Japanese’. T. Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 10, 251–2. 41 In an interview Suzuki explained that he asked the copywriter and Fuji-Xerox to make a connection between racial discrimination and the monochromatic copy. According to Suzuki, the Fuji-Xerox representative hesitated and then answered, ‘It is too early for us, a mere enterprise, to raise such an issue.’ Suzuki then explained to them that the attention to black culture was a trend in Paris and that he had personally seen a beautiful black dancer dancing in front of the Tiffany store on Fifth Avenue in New York City at the time. Suzuki seems to have been in tune with the new and rising postmodern interest in the ‘other’ and wanted to bring this cutting-edge trend from Europe and the United States to the Fuji-Xerox campaign. After the copywriter and company agreed, Suzuki had to search for a black model, and as there were no black models in Japan at the time, he used an American sergeant from the Tachikawa military base. 42 There is a debate in current literature as to whether Japanese feminism began in Japan or arrived from the United States. For further reading, see S. Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. xxii, and S. Buckley, Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 11. 43 Women took an active part in the social-political demonstrations and protest organisations of the 1960s, but these organisations were highly gendered. Reinforcing the role division in mainstream Japanese society, women were directed to perform ‘traditional’ tasks such as making rice balls, typing letters, or even serving as sexual partners for male activists. See J. Bullock, The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), p. 159;

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K. Tanaka, ‘The new feminist movement in Japan, 1970–1990’, in K. Fujimura Fanselow and A. Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future (New York: The City University of New York, 1995), p. 345; S. Martin, ‘Japanese women: In pursuit of gender equality’, in M. L. Palley, and J.  Gelb (eds), Women and Politics Around the World: A Comparative History and Survey, Vol. 2 (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2009), p. 404; V. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 147. T. Ando¯, Japan’s New Left Movements: Legacies for Civil Society (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 159–60. Tanaka, ‘The new feminist movement in Japan’, pp. 343–4. Bullock refers to the authors Ko¯no Taeko (b. 1926), Takahashi Takako (1932–2013), and Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005) and argues that each of them may be viewed as having challenged the dominant stereotype of femininity, which they felt to be overly reductive and restrictive, thereby promoting a broader conceptualisation of what it meant to be a woman in Japan during the 1960s. It is on the basis of this subversive intent that Bullock characterises these three authors as feminists. See Bullock, The Other Women’s Lib, p. 166. Among these creative women were Japanese women artists who had been admitted to national art universities as early as 1946 (before the war almost no school except Joshi Bijutsu Gakko – now Joshi Bijutsu Daigaku or Women’s Art University – accepted female students) and participated in exhibitions and reviews since the 1950s. Yet, similar to other occupational fields, their success did not necessarily lead to a dramatic change in their position in the Japanese art world at large. Frustrated by how slow moving change was in established art institutions, progressive women artists sought alternative ways to exhibit their artworks, and many opted to remain independent or exhibit in circles of the newly formed artist collectives that were relatively democratic, like Tanaka Atsuko in Gutai or Tabe Mitsuko in Kyu¯shu¯-ha. Tabe was a central figure in Kyu¯shu¯-ha, which unlike other postwar avant-garde collectives seems to have treated its male and female members as equals. See M. Yoshimoto, ‘Women artists in the Japanese avant-garde: Celebrating a multiplicity’, Woman’s Art Journal, 27:1 (2006), 28. However, in most instances women did not receive equal treatment even in art collectives, as in the case of Kishimoto Sayako (1939–88) of Neo-Dada, ibid., 28–9. Street demonstrations by women were held in the early 1970s, the first by Tatakau Onnatachi (Fighting Women) on 21 October 1970, and others organised by ūman ribu (the women’s liberation movement) in 1971. M. Kinser Saiki, ‘Eiko Ishioka: Exceptional Eiko’, in He (ed.), Eiko Ishioka, p. 28. The Japanese ie means a household and refers to both the physical home and property and to the family lineage and kinship. The ie system symbolically refers also to the family structure and inner dynamics including the economic, hierarchical relationships, and socio-religious functions that take place within the family. The Meiji civil code of 1898 denied women legal rights, and the introduction of the household (ie) system subjugated them to the will of the heads of the household. The head of the ie – which was established as only male in the Meiji period – had full authority in all matters, from marriage to property ownership. From this rigid and structurally reinforced discrimination rose the first wave of feminism in Japan, which focused on women’s equality. After the Second World War, the legal position of women was redefined by the occupation authorities, who included an equal rights clause in the new constitution and revised the civil code in 1948; however, even then women were still not treated as equals. K. Tachi, ‘Women’s suffrage and the state: Gender and politics in prewar Japan’, in V. Mackie (ed.), Feminism and the State in Modern Japan (Melbourne: Japanese Studies Centre, 1995), p. 21; M. S. Anderson, A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 53, 189–90.

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52 Sato, ‘Organizational identity and symbioticity’, p. 53. 53 Ibid., p. 54. 54 For more about the meaning of brand signs in late consumer culture see Baudrillard’s description of the new consumption as a system and ‘sign value’ as the currency of the new social capitalist system in the ‘Design and visual culture’ section in the introduction of this book and in J. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, Myth and Structures (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998 [1970]), pp. 87–98; and J. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. C. Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), pp. 146–7. 55 H. Steiner, ‘Eiko Ishioka interviewed by Henry Steiner, May 17th 1993, NY’, in He (ed.), Eiko Ishioka, p. 53. 56 In an interview with Marilyn Ivy, Fujioka states that the primary aim of these kinds of campaigns is not to sell things but to disseminate cultural and social values. He explains that this new genre of advertising does not seek to serve companies, business executives, or product producers but rather the social and cultural consciousness. Ivy notes that Fujioka deftly countered her objections about this new form of advertising and insisted that his motivation was purely altruistic and had nothing to do with calculating profit. He offers the Fuji-Xerox advertisements as an example of presenting the public with ‘information of values’ (kachi aru jōhō). See M. Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 45–8. 57 Shimizu, ‘When advertising was transformed’, p. 100. 58 I. Noguchi, ‘New-York Mood-o’, in E. Ishioka (ed.), Eiko By Eiko (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1990).

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3 From cute to Rei Kawakubo: fashion and protest

The 1968 violent student riots that brought Japan to the verge of a civil revolution would be remembered for bringing to the fore the New Left political movements and philosophical critical thinking advocating human rights, women’s equality, and racial equality. These movements pointed to the prevalent social norms as oppressive. They protested against capitalism and the hierarchical class society it engenders and asked of individuals to assume moral responsibility for their lives and the society in which they live. However, Japanese political protest of the time was not limited to street riots and demonstrations, it was also manifested through other channels that expressed the new values of the young students, as recounted in an anecdote by sociologist Ueno Chizuko in her book ‘Watashi’ Sagashi Gēmu (The Game of Searching for Myself).1 Ueno describes a scene that took place at the end of the winter of 1970, while the student protest movement was waning; the police arrested a few radical female students. These women were dressed in the latest fashions, including long coats that reached down to their ankles, super short miniskirts, and bee glasses. The following day, their photographs graced the front pages of the major newspapers. The fact that these radical women were committed to revolutionary ideas but nevertheless wore fashionable clothes that were at odds with leftist asceticism and anti-materialism did not seem to intrigue anyone. Rather, what drew considerable attention was the fact that they were holding a copy of the recently launched women’s magazine An An (first published in March 1970). In retrospect, it has been suggested that these fashion-conscious yet radical young women might have donned their outfits precisely to make their way into the newspapers. The whole thing might have also been an An An marketing ruse. However, cultural critic Michal Daliot-Bul suggests that this was a crucial moment in Japan’s postwar cultural history, a moment in which

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eccentric fashion was starting to replace political radicalism as a means of self-expression.2 Of course, social protest expressed via fashion is not exclusive to Japan, and the way in which alternative or oppositional fashion style has subverted traditional identities and politics has been heavily theorised.3 In their article ‘Cloth and the organization of human experience’, Schneider and Weiner make the point that while cloth is an economic commodity it is also a ‘critical object in social exchange, an objectification of ritual intent, and an instrument of political power’.4 Many articles present case studies for this assumption. Stuart Cosgrove, for example, presents the 1943 zoot suit riots in which Mexican-American youths negotiated the identity of their subculture by using the zoot suit as a symbol of pride in their ethnicity and as ‘a spectacular reminder that the social order had failed to contain their energy and difference … The zoot suit was a refusal; a subcultural gesture that refused to concede to the manners of subservience.’5 Shehnaz Suterwalla, who studied four different groups of women (women who were punks in the late 1970s, women who lived at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s, black women in the hip-hop community in the 1980–90s, and British Muslim women who have adopted the hijab since 2001), explains: Countercultural dress that used the body as the critical site of resistance since the 1960s has refashioned the personal and the political as well as the personal as the political. In particular, it is through style as anti-fashion, as a rebuke to the fashion system, that evidence of the productive operations of dress in creating difference becomes pronounced. Oppositional dress has challenged power hierarchies to expose issue of class, race and gender, of history itself.6

This can also be seen in Japan, when during the 1970s the Modernist social paradigm collapsed and a process of departure from a homogeneous culture and collectivism emerged, with people seeking new frames of reference. Groups of various affiliations began to form in Tokyo: the karasu-zoku (raven tribe) who wear only black clothes, emerged as a parallel to the British Punk movement. Alongside the karasu-zoku was the an-nonzoku, a young and fashionable ‘tribe’ consisting of women who enjoyed reading the magazines An-An and Non-No (see Figure 3.1). The idea of tribes forming around style and fashion became even stronger in the 1980s in Yoyogi Park, situated in the heart of Harajuku neighbourhood, with the emergence of the take-no-ko-zoku (bamboo tribe), whose rebellion against the establishment was manifested by smoking cigarettes, using grease in their hair, and dancing in the streets. They vacated their place in the mid-1980s to the bando-zoku (bands tribe) and the Rockabillies, who played and danced in the streets in Harajuku neighbourhood on Sundays, dressed in an American 1950s’ look, complete with

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Figure 3.1  Rockabilly Subculture, Tokyo. 25/02/2020 08:24



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black leather jackets and motorcycle pants, dark denim and greased-back hair. These were followed by the visual-kei-zoku and the Gothic Lolita tribe, who together were known as harajuku-zoku. Additional tribes formed among the young women of Tokyo, including the ganguro-zoku (Ganguro tribe) that developed in the Shibuya and Ikebukuro neighbourhoods, the otaku-zoku (otaku tribe) in Akihabara and the kurisutaru-zoku (crystal tribe) in Aoyama. These new styles not only reflected the values of the new generation but also created the idea of youth culture as a new social category in Japan.7 By the 1980s, fashion, according to Akabane Makoto and Saito¯ Maki, had taken the role of a new religion for the young generation. The total spending on clothing in Japan grew from 376.6 billion yen in 1988 to 826.5 billion yen in 1990.8 Influential graphic designer Yokoo Tadanori argued that in the 1980s, in a crowded homogeneous society, people in Tokyo sought to express their personality and social status by using fashion brands and labels and thus fashion emerges as a ‘major influence on Japanese life’.9 It seems that in Japan, since products such as cars, houses, furniture, or interior design are not flauntingly displayed in the typical Tokyo lifestyle, fashion became the most relied upon signifier for consumers to form their social and personal identity. Consequently, fashion and brand names took the role of an identity generator to the extreme and many Japanese consumers became ‘fashion victims’. Thus, for instance, Tsuzuki Kyo¯ichi photographed fashion collectors who dedicate entire apartments to their collections, similar to art collectors in other countries. He named his book Happy Victims – Kidaore Hōjōki, pointing to the link between style and the new social identity.10 Patricia Mears claims that in Japan, the importance of fashion goes beyond trendiness or consumer products, and that the Japanese think that the design of objects or clothes can lead the user to intellectual and spiritual places.11 From the wide spectrum that exists on Tokyo’s streets, I focus on two specific styles that emerged in Tokyo in the 1970s, and culminated in the 1980s. The first is the Harajuku Lolita style, which came from the streets and displayed the kawaii style by appropriating the historical French late Baroque and Rococo styles. This style offers a colourful and ‘fluffy’ protest against the dreary everyday life of sararīman (salarymen) who worked in Japanese conglomerates and represented the values and norms of the generation that grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Alongside, and in contrast to, kawaii style I present the material and conceptual protest of the haute couture fashion company Comme des Garçons, led by the designer Rei Kawakubo, who engaged with body and identity politics in the 1970s and defied the values of the fashion world that displays an imaginary ‘ideal’ female body and dictates rigid ideals to women around the world. At their core, these styles present different ideological concepts of femininity in

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The cute protest The 1970s rebellion of Japanese youth against Japan’s rigid social codes was most visibly manifested by girls who expressed themselves in the form of childish behaviour, speech, and writing, and by surrounding themselves with cute products designed in a childish style.12 Japanese youth saw adult life as gloomy and full of compromises, in which most of the day was dedicated to hard work for big companies and in which people were burdened with obligations to the nation, to social codes, and to the family. These youngsters wished to free themselves from this burden and assumed that being a child brings freedom. The youth claimed that through this childish style they could communicate directly, which they interpreted as being pure and unfiltered, as opposed to adult communication, which they perceived as indirect, false, shallow, and with pretence. This style was dubbed kawaii, which originally meant ‘cute’ and adopted a wider connotation of childishness that evoked naivety, purity, simplicity, and vulnerability. Kawaii culture dominated Japanese popular culture through the 1970s–80s, and kawaii was the most prevalent word in the Japanese language during those years. Sharon Kinsella revealed in 1990 that most Japanese youths were not sure of their political affiliation or to which social class they belonged. However, they knew with certainty that they belong to the kawaii culture, which defined their identity.13 Unlike a typical teenage revolution, in which teens struggle for adult rights and independence, this childlike movement was a type of revolt in which young Japanese women presented a way of life in which they do not accept responsibility or independence as an alternative for maturity. As opposed to the worldwide postwar protest movements (Punk, Rap), kawaii ideology was led by women. Cultural anthropologist O¯tsuka Eiji explained that this behaviour began first among young women who refused to grow up, surrounding themselves with cute childish objects, and in this manner, prolonged their adolescence and postponed the role of wife and mother. These young women preferred fantasy over reality since it protected them from the difficult and fixed role of women as determined by traditional Japanese social codes.14 As such, while very different from core feminist ideas of women’s independence, it can still be perceived as a form of feminist protest. Even though kawaii style was supposedly created with an air of lacking awareness (since this is an important part of childishness), part of the young women’s protest was manifested in an over consumption of products, which presented a life that revolves around their own personal pleasure. In the 1970s, young Japanese women had recently joined the

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workforce, but by and large they lived at home with their parents. This left them with disposable income and turned them into the richest sector in Japan and a powerful consumer group.15 Their exaggerated consumption was perceived as anti-social, immoral, and irresponsible (thus childish) since it flew in the face of their commitment to family and society. Thus, in order to correctly understand the rise of kawaii, we have to analyse it in the context of the ideology created through late consumer culture. The kawaii style was created on the margins, but enterprises quickly recognised the market potential concealed in the new trend and converted it into a commercial channel. They created products that targeted this audience of young Japanese women, who then followed the trend that was dictated by the companies and furthered the development of the style, which overtook Japanese visual culture in the 1980s. These products were characterised by a saccharine look or fairy-tale style, devoid of any power or sexual attributes that alluded to maturity. This commoditisation process brought the style from the margins to mainstream consumers. For example, in 1971 the Sanrio Company started marketing writing utensils, school bags, and lunch boxes dripping with the cute style. These products bore the likeness of characters (including Hello Kitty) that were small, soft, childish, suckling, round, obsequious, with short limbs (that restricted their movement) with no mouth (dumb), devoid of any sexual identity – helpless images that hinted at a lack of self-confidence. These images reflected precisely the behaviour and the ideals that the Japanese youth were attempting to achieve. Sanrio claimed that their products were ‘social communication goods’, in other words, objects that were meant to strengthen interaction, giving a simple and non-verbal expression to their heart’s desires.16 The new consumer culture and the attempt to express a new femininity via cuteness and sweetness brought prosperity to fashion houses such as Milk, Pink House Ltd., and Angelic Pretty, which offered fantasy and fairy-tale like clothes in the Harajuku neighbourhood. They latched onto and reinforced the trend of young women dressed in Lolita clothing, which became famous worldwide as a signifier of ‘cool Japan’ through the book series Fruits by Phaidon Press. These fashion houses produced clothes that were meant to give the wearer a feeling of cuteness: predominantly white and pink, with ribbons and fringes that hinted at French Rococo style. The Lolita style extolled not only the Marie Antoinette Rococo style as illustrated in manga for young women (shōjo manga), but also the original clothing of Marie Antoinette as designed by Marie Jeanne Rose, considered the first celebrated French fashion designer.17 The style is a cute and non-threatening translation of the Rococo style of the Versailles court combined with the sexy and aggressive character of Marie Antoinette. The premier fashion house of this trend was Milk. Established in 1970, it quickly became ­synonymous

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Critical design in Japan with the Gothic Lolita (gosu-rori) fashion trend, which was characterised by darker clothing and make-up than the Sweet or Classic Lolita. Another fashion house that flourished in the 1980s was Pink House, which engendered a trend of young women wearing pink called the Pink House Movement. The designs from Pink House imitated children’s clothes, but used stretch materials that enabled expansion of up to three or four sizes. This way, teens and young adults could purchase ‘kids’ clothes and have a closet that looked like the closet of a younger girl. But it was Angelic Pretty, opening as a store in Harajuku named PRETTY that specialised in different Lolita brands in 1979 and becoming an independent brand in 2001, which played the central role in the establishment of the trend (see Figure 3.2). This fashion house offered a cute, Lolita-like fashion style, promising to make a girl’s dream come true. Angelic Pretty provided adorable clothing replete with lace, frills, and ribbons, like that of a fairytale princess. In the words of the company’s motto, it marketed itself as ‘a brand for girls who want to keep that dream [of fairy tale princesses] alive’.18 In the 1980s, alongside the emergence of the amateur manga industry (dōjinshi manga), the cosplay culture (abbreviation for costume and play) developed. This was a type of performance art in which people dressed as characters from the manga world. Gender shifting was an important concept for cosplayers. As a result, the Rose of Versailles manga enjoyed a resurgence among the cosplayers, partially because of the narrative and partially because of the meticulous details of Rococo-period clothing. In 1989, a new fashion magazine named CUTiE was launched, reaching a circulation of 600,000 per issue at its peak between 1995 and 1999. This magazine transformed the childish look into one of humorous chic, androgynous, and as eccentric as that of children’s fairy tales. The magazine, whose tagline was ‘for independent girls’, changed the direction of this fashion trend by portraying the young girls as simultaneously cute and bad, framing them as individualistic women rebelling against responsible adult culture. Part of the new direction that the magazine laid out was the music industry visual-kei band trend. A major part of these rock and metal bands led mostly by men was the performance and visual elements such as flamboyant costume and sometime androgynous aesthetics. The members of these bands, such as Color, D’erlanger, Buck-Tick, and Versailles, dressed in a unique style that was often influenced by manga and was imitated by their fans. One of the more famous bands, the Malice Mizer, adopted a stage style influenced at first by the French classic style and later on by the Victorian Gothic. The band’s leader, Mana, used to dress in women’s clothes as part of the androgynous look popular at the time, coining the term EGL (Elegant Gothic Lolita). Later, Mana created his own fashion brand called Moi-Même-Moitié, which combined the dark and the sweet styles (see Figure 3.3).

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Figure 3.2  Fairy tale style Lolita by Angelic Pretty.

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Figure 3.3  Elegant Gothic Lolita by Moi-m^eme-Moitié.

Originally a colourful protest against Japanese rigid social codes, the style reached maturity in the 2000s in the designs of Hiroko Naoto, the designer of the successful ‘h. Naoto’ line (see Figure 3.4). This fashion line specialised in subculture styles deriving from the Gothic and Punk Lolita style. Naoto, who made this style highly commercial, moved the style away from a protesting one and explained that this fashion helps his ­customers to escape from reality.19 Thus the kawaii culture ended up supplying its believers with a fantasy, an escape from life and from the traditional Japanese cultural codes through appropriation of French historical style and children’s fairy tales.20

COMME des GARÇONS and the avant-garde fashion A different form of protest via clothes was evident in the deconstructive fashion of Rei Kawakubo, which represents the complexity of the new avant-garde visual culture. It was based on a new conceptual platform that goes against both Japanese and European traditional aesthetic values and, most of all, against the aesthetics of the fashion world in which Kawakubo serves as a cultural hero.

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Figure 3.4  Fantasy style Lolita by h.NAOTO.

Kawakubo broke into the international fashion world in 1981 in Paris. Her fashion shows, which featured clothes characterised by subversive aesthetics, defied the strict rules and codes of the European fashion world of that time, which presented perfect cuts that followed the ‘ideal’ woman’s body and high quality materials that stressed glamour and wealth. In contrast, Rei Kawakubo’s clothes re-wrapped the body in a way that did not consider the shape of the body but rather the space surrounding it. The clothes presented asymmetry and random sewing patterns, resulting in sculptural objects draped on the body. The garments were mistakenly perceived by fashion journalists, who at the time were accustomed to glamorous models and luxurious fabrics, as a ‘poor look’ and thus received ice cold reviews, such as ‘Les Japonais jouent Les Misérables’ (the Japanese

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Critical design in Japan play Les Misérables).21 These aesthetics, which fashion critics identified as ‘poor’, drew their style and concepts from the new subversive visual culture developed by art collectives, designers, and architects in postwar Japan.22 The new art scene, as already mentioned, created new visual strategies such as performances and guerrilla actions that emphasised the body as a primary artistic tool.23 Interestingly, many of the women artists who were active in these avant-garde movements chose to address the issue of body politics through the medium of clothes.24 Tanaka Atsuko’s Electric Dress from 1957, composed entirely of light bulbs of all shapes, sizes, and colours and a plethora of connected electrical cords is one notable example.25 Another example is Yoko Ono’s famous performance Cut Piece (So¯getsu Center, 1964) (see Figure 3.5). During this performance, Ono knelt on stage wearing a black dress and invited the audience to cut her clothes, remaining completely still as they approached her, one by one cutting her dress to pieces. Via the medium of the ‘little black dress’, Ono raised the thorny issue of the reciprocity between the aggressor and the victim. Another active artist who battled sexism and racism, initiated anti-war protest in America during the 1960s and returned to Japan in 1973 was Kusama Yayoi. Her conceptual work was made out of thousands of tiny dots obsessively repeated across her body or large installations without regarding the edges of the body or gallery spaces. One of her famous performances was The Anatomic Explosion (New York Stock Exchange, 1968) in which Kusama directed four professional dancers (two women and two men) to strip and frolic to the sounds of a conga drum while she was painting polka dots on their naked bodies. This pop-up protest was accompanied by a press release saying: ‘The money made with this stock is enabling the war to continue. We protest this cruel, greedy instrument of the war establishment’ (see Figure 3.6). Another famous performance was Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead (MoMA New York, 1969), in which she painted dots on participants’ naked bodies in the fountain of the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The performance was unknown and unauthorised by the museum and created a scandal. The ‘infinity net’ of dots with no edges blurred all boundaries between the body, objects, and the surrounding environment. Her installations were often described as art that presented obsession and otherness. These experimental performances of Ono, Tanaka, and Kusama generated a radical shift in the relationship between art and society by breaking the boundaries between high and low and between body and art, bringing to the fore the issue of body politics.26 The subversive visual expression of these performances constituted a dramatic departure from what was considered art, with their use of simple, everyday materials, and emphasis on concepts rather than craft. Thus, the visual expression of their art seemed somehow

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Figure 3.5  Yoko Ono, Cut Piece performance, 1964.

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Figure 3.6  Kusama Yayoi, The Anatomic Explosion happening at New York Stock Exchange, 1968. 25/02/2020 08:24



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Figure 3.7  Rei Kawakubo, Lace Sweater, 1982.

to be poor. An interesting example of the possible influence of these performances on Kawakubo’s work can be seen in the Lace Sweater of 1982, a sweater with asymmetric holes torn in it, like Yoko Ono’s dress in Cut Piece, which was sometimes nicknamed ‘Hiroshima bag-lady look’ (see Figure 3.7). Kawakubo claimed that knitting machines create boring ­unified uniforms. The only interesting form, in her opinion, is hand knitting, which exposes the touch of the person doing the knitting, with inconsistency and individualism. In order to transfer this concept

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Critical design in Japan of ‘handmade’ into industrial production, she fed the instructions into the machines, but loosened their screws, so they could not perform a standard job, resulting in the production of a different knitting design by each machine.27 The deconstructive strategy towards the body as an artistic tool and the subversive use of public spaces was manifested in other contemporaneous creative fields besides the avant-garde fine art scene, including architecture, photography, theatre, dance, and design such as the grotesque graphic design created by Yokoo Tadanori at the time or Kuramata Shiro¯’s postmodern furniture and interior design.28 These artists and designers deconstructed modern and traditional forms and sought to abolish concepts of gender, race, and other socioeconomic elements. When this deconstructive visual strategy entered the fashion world, it used clothes as a form of visual protest against the dominance of Modernist fashion that produced finely finished patterns to fit and define the human body. Deconstructed fashion offered silhouettes that concealed the body rather than displayed it and presented seemingly undone, unravelled, or tattered clothes. The pieces looked like a juxtaposition of asymmetrical, mismatched parts, joined into what could almost be considered wearable sculptures, paying attention to the space that surrounded the body rather than accentuating, flattering, or enhancing the body of the wearer. These were radically incongruous with Parisian high fashion, which prided itself on impeccable draping designed with the ‘ideal’ body in mind. While deconstructive fashion could also be found in Britain at the time, Kawakubo formalised and appropriated it in full, leaving no Modernist fashion dictate unchallenged, prompting a French fashion journal to dub her ‘Le Destroy’. Indeed, her clothes presented a poor look in contrast to the Parisian fashion. However, this new look, based on so-called devastation and degradation, should be seen as part of an ideological protest and in the context of Japanese, Italian, and British anti-art, avant-garde architecture, anti-­ design, and deconstructive fashion of the period.29 However, from the very beginning, Kawakubo’s path was different from that of Yokoo Tadanori’s psychedelic style or Kuramata Shiro¯’s postmodernism, since she never acquired any formal design or fashion training. Kawakubo studied philosophy and literature in Keio University, at a time when the humanities scholarship was heavily influenced by deconstructive theory, and so her skills, according to Patricia Mears, are not in her hands but rather in her ability to engage in a theoretical discourse.30 And so, in contrast with other designers in the anti-design scene who broke down conventions with material, colour, or shape, Kawakubo began to design (and claims to follow this strategy to this day) through words. In an interview with The New York Times Kawakubo described this stage in her process:

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I start every collection with one word. I can never remember where this one word came from. I never start a collection with some historical, social, cultural or any other concrete reference or memory. After I find the word, I then do not develop it in any logical way. I deliberately avoid any order to the thought process after finding the word and instead think about the opposite of the word, or something different to it, or behind it.31

This description clearly presents the intellectual foundation of Comme des Garçons, rooted in the critical deconstructivist practice, which engages in the deconstruction of the text’s fixed meaning.32 The deconstruction of the text, performed through the rejection of its initial meaning and the presentation of its inherent difference, illuminates the imperfection and incoherence of the rational tradition. This theory had a huge impact on the visual world, as demonstrated by the anti-art and anti-design movements, and as Mears rightly observed, this was the driving force behind Kawakubo’s work. Like other subversive visual expressions of the time, Kawakubo’s protesting clothes were characterised by their defiance of Modernist design codes. Her clothes protested even against the modern feminist concept of Coco Chanel, who freed women from exhibitionistic Belle Époque clothes and dressed them in a comfortable, modern, and modular wardrobe, and the concepts of Yves Saint Laurent who dressed women in trousers and men’s clothes to demonstrate equality. Rei Kawakubo’s avant-garde concepts were expressed concretely in her rejection of standard patterns typical of the designers who imagined women with perfect proportions and a sexy appearance. European designers of the 1970s and the 1980s not only presented fine materials and faultless finish, but also patterns that relate to a body with the ‘right’ and ‘perfect’ proportions, which were drafted mathematically. Using the platform of clothes, Rei Kawakubo raised the issue of body politics and fought against the aesthetic discourse of the fashion world. Body politics offered a counter discourse to the aesthetic discourse generated by the fashion world and the media, which shaped the idea and the image of the perfect body, manifested in a uniform physiology as a model for display and emulation, and for the creation of unity through uniformity and to the dominant discourse surrounding beauty ideals. This ‘classic’ imaginary body was defined as the timeless shape that excludes any other body types – too short, overweight, too old, or disproportional – from the world of fashion. The fashion world’s approach at the time viewed these as bodies whose faults should be fixed, blurred, or covered by clothing.33 Furthermore, these notions associated a beautiful, sexually attractive body with positive personal attributes, positioning all people on an aesthetic scale that puts those with perfect bodies at the top, followed by the ‘other’, ‘unaesthetic’ people, whose bodies are flawed, unfit, disproportional, or imperfect. This discourse presented

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Critical design in Japan those whose body type was culturally perceived as desirable as ‘better’ and superior to those whose bodies did not fit the dominant ideals.34 These ideals have existed throughout history, since the financially, politically, and socially dominant group has often set its own ethnic features as the conventional standards of beauty.35 However, they were taken to new extremes in late consumer culture that engendered, more than ever in human history, an obsession with the body involving excessive control over its appearance. This control is manifested through diet and exercise regimens, and similar addictive and even destructive behaviours. In her book The Myth of Beauty, Naomi Wolf conceptualised this myth as a powerful control mechanism that Western culture imposes on women through the circulation of images that present a universal beauty ideal, pushing women to ‘inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work’.36 Wolf demonstrated that while women overcame social and legal obstacles, the image of beauty continued to restrict their progress in an uncompromising and cruel way. ‘Recent research consistently shows’, says Naomi Wolf, ‘that inside the majority of the West’s controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret “underlife” poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.’37 This aesthetic discourse has become such a powerful mechanism in culture that those subject to it do not question it, since the cultural construction of the body’s aesthetics is perceived as natural and indelible. To challenge and protest against these aesthetic concepts, Kawakubo’s clothes presented the entire spectrum of the human body, especially the woman’s body, which in most cases does not match the proportions dictated by fashion designers and dress patterns. In order to do so, Kawakubo designed her clothes in one size that envelops the body rather than shows it off. This one size look flew in the face of the highly sexualised silhouettes that are normally associated with the taste of the 1980s. Her perceptions invert our notions of the highly sexualised body. 38 As such, her fashion was a tool to raise and design a new body ideology. In order to do so, Rei Kawakubo’s work generates questions about Modernist patterns, the mask created by fashion, the masculine perception of the female body as well as more general questions such as ‘What is beauty? What is our perception of the human body?’ and disturbing questions on the glam ideology of the fashion world. These questions laid the foundation for an alternative ideological avant-garde style fashion line based on a new and defiant conceptual platform for women who refused to comply with the masculine perspective. In the vein of other radical artists and designers of the time, Kawakubo set out to undermine rigid social values and cultural codes (in this instance, those of the fashion world) and to re-examine the social status and meaning of design as an agent dealing with the concepts of social class and

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gender, by deconstructing modern ways of thinking and the institutional structures that upheld them. And so, the innovative garments of Kawakubo and their patterns that reconstruct the body are not merely aesthetic acts. They are ideologies, which protest against the rigid social construction of the perfect body and beauty ideals that were established in our consciousness for many generations by the fashion world, magazines, and advertisements.39 Over the years, the conceptual aesthetics of Kawakubo changed in accordance with different deconstruction practices that extended from the foundations of the deconstructivist position. These practices were directed against centralist and oppressive discourses, aiming to break down common outlooks and distinctions, like the distinction between feminine and masculine or between centre and margins.40 One of the outcomes of these deconstruction practices was the uncovering of ‘the other’ on several levels – the other body, the other gender, the other culture, or the foreign elements within us. These subjects recur in Kawakubo’s work through the media of clothing and fashion photography. One notable example is the Spring/Summer 1997 collection entitled ‘Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress’ (see Figure 3.8). The hunchbacked dress collection, made of stretchy, synthetic fabrics printed in pink or blue gingham, had pockets into which she placed down-filled pillows. But rather than pad the breasts to enhance the feminine form, Kawakubo used padding to disproportionally exaggerate the volume of the neck, upper back, hips, and rear end, challenging the fashion world’s exclusion mechanisms in defiance of the distorted, different, and ‘other’ body.41 The gingham pattern of the dresses echoed the grid – a core concept in Modernist aesthetics rooted in machine aesthetic and the idea of ‘form follows function’. This idea of the grid was also the basis of the ideal body model and ideal dress cut. Kawakubo’s dresses, however, distorted the shape of the body and broke the traditional grid in order to challenge our idea of the ‘ideal’ body of women. This highly controversial dress collection explicitly expressed what Kawakubo had tried to demonstrate throughout the years: instead of hiding the different body, it showcased it. The construction of a different space around the body represented an alternative to the beauty ideals of the European fashion world and protested against the harsh determinations of ‘correct’ body proportions for a woman.42 This avant-garde aesthetic also challenged the distinction made between Japanese and Western style, specifically the Orientalist perception of Kawakubo’s clothes by some Western critics as rooted in Japanese traditions (influenced by the wabi-sabi aesthetics and adopting the volumes of the kimono), or Japanese and Western critics who perceived them as belonging to the Western deconstructive fashion genre.43 Therefore, the collection also blurred the perception of Japan as a cultural ‘other’, typical of post-colonialist theories.

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Figure 3.8  COMME des GARÇONS, ‘Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress’, 1997 SS.

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A comment on the notion of ‘the other’ is also expressed in the name of the company Comme des Garçons (‘like boys’), and those given to its products such as the unisex perfume GIRL. These names not only insinuate Kawakubo’s perception of gender equality and cancellation of the binary separation between men and women, but also strive to alter the basic concept that fashion creates power relations in which the woman dresses for the male gaze and tries to seduce him with a sexy appearance. Kawakubo claimed at the time that she wished for women who wear her clothes to be financially independent and strong women with a sense of self-worth, who are interested in emphasising their strength and attracting men with their intellect and power rather than with a sexy appearance. In an interview, she reiterated, ‘We must break away from conventional forms of dress for the new woman of today. We need a new strong image, not a revisit of the past.’44 These concepts, elaborated from body politics to identity politics discourse, were presented in the 2006 Autumn/Winter collection entitled ‘Persona’, again a name that blurs the binary concept of men and women (see Figure 3.9). In this collection, Kawakubo addressed the notion of ‘performativity’ taken from Judith Butler’s gender theories that discuss the socially constructed aspect of gender, which obscures the inner contradiction and instability of any single person’s gender act.45 The ‘Persona’ collection showcased the different ways we present ourselves to the world by fusing tailored menswear with more feminine elements, such as corsets and floral dress fabrics. By combining the feminine with the masculine, the collection challenged binary gendered categories and the distinction between sex and gender, while presenting the social atypical. Through subversive cuts, Kawakubo presented the self-aware freak as a strategy for an act of mending and engendering a new social and political tolerance. These are just a few examples for Kawakubo’s ideological standpoint and its development. However, Comme des Garçons not only deconstructs fashion and aesthetics but also offers its customers a new viewpoint on capitalism. Like any other fashion brand, Comme des Garçons simultaneously embraces and operates along two distinct marketing routes: the first deals with aesthetics and the other deals with the commercial or economic aspect. The interaction between these two forces guides and affects the final product. Comme des Garçons, which was established in 1969, was from its very beginning a meeting point of the many forces that shaped the era: the 1968 violent social uprising and the background of counterculture forces, the avant-garde aesthetics of the anti-art and anti-design movements, and the rise of deconstructive theories, as well as high-speed affluence, known as the Japanese economic miracle and the new values of the late consumer market. Nurturing a company at a time of great polarity between two main forces – capitalism and counterculture – created a new avant-garde brand

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Figure 3.9  COMME des GARÇONS, ‘Persona’ collection, 2006–2007 AW.

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that operates in keeping with, and in defiance of, the rules of the visual world and marketing world while merging the two. Growing up in those two different cultural forces probably enabled Kawakubo to understand not only the potential and efficacy of the progressive radical body politics and avant-garde aesthetics that flourished at the time, but also their seductive power in fashion. In an interview Kawakubo explained: I’ve always said I am not an artist. For me, fashion design is a business. It’s just one of the ways of doing business … but I also stem perhaps from wanting people to be free and independent … It’s a convenient and simple way of giving that independence because everybody has to wear clothes … For me fashion design is just an expression of what I feel about life. But it is also commercial.46

The dual skills in design and business administration presented in her words should remind us that in addition to philosophy studies (1962– 64), Kawakubo also arrived to fashion through training at the advertising department of Asahi Kasei Textile company (1964–67), which undoubtedly instilled in her the importance of advertising and branding to a fashion company. Theoretical philosophical perceptions on the one hand and mechanisms of advertising in the capitalist system on the other hand (two subjects that usually are not a part of fashion design students’ curriculum) allowed her to look at the social struggle through an economic prism and examine how it is possible to continue this struggle via the wardrobe of urban affluent men and women. Thus, Comme des Garçons is not a small fashion brand on the margins of the fashion world, but displays its clothes with their destroyed appearance at the world’s prestigious fashion centres and its prices are among the highest in the world. The company, which has an eminent position in one of the leading commercial industries, manufactures diverse fashion lines (Comme des Garçons Noir, Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, Comme des Garçons SHIRT, Comme des Garçons Tricot, Play Comme des Garçons, etc.) and employs an army of independent designers such as Watanabe Junya, Kurihara Tao, Fumito Ganryu, and Kei Ninomiya. It has a global network of shops, and collaborates with global fashion companies such as Levi’s, Speedo, Nike, H&M, and Louis Vuitton. Therefore, we may say that unlike designers and artists who created a new visual expression in the wake of the deconstructivist theory, Kawakubo took this theory one step further when she skilfully manipulated the avantgarde and subversive aesthetic, deconstruction discourse, and social subversive struggle, into a luxurious sign value within the capitalist system. In an interview with The New York Times, Kawakubo commented: ‘It is true that I “design” the company, not just the clothes.’47 In order to explain the conflictual position of the company as anti-­ fashion within the global fashion industry and as an avant-garde company that sells luxury goods, I would like to use Slavoj Žižek‘s term ‘cultural

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Critical design in Japan c­ apitalism’, which presents a new phase of commodification that has internalised the legacy of 1968 and the criticism of alienated consumerism.48 Comme des Garçons is an interesting case study for this cultural capitalism, as it translated social campaigns into sign value by using the possibility provided by late consumer culture, in which each style can become a ‘product’ in the supermarket of ideas, attitudes, and references of late capitalism. The translation of subversive visual language into a brand sign value was performed by applying a subversive visual strategy to commercial products, such as company advertising and shop interiors, as well as entitling garments, and creating provocative runway shows and legendary stories. Beyond the creation of commercial products based on an avantgarde aesthetic, the company also shaped an avant-garde consumption experience, like opening guerrilla stores at venues that are not fashion centres, including Reykjavik, Warsaw, and Beirut, or not including mirrors in the company’s first shop, since Kawakubo wanted women to buy clothes because of how they felt rather than the way they looked. All these actions add up to marketing strategies, public relation campaigns, and a narrative that can be consumed via fashion magazines that mediate the language of fashion to consumers and turn products into style-bearing signs. As part of these sign building activities, a major emphasis was given to the company’s graphic design, advertisements, and printed publications. The avant-garde graphic work that art director Inoue Tsuguya designed for the company during the 1990s embodies how the Comme des Garçons brand was framed by an avant-garde visual content. One poster created an enigmatic visual expression by presenting fragments shooting up in the air without portraying any articles of clothing (see Figure 3.10). The photograph in the poster was taken from an explosion that takes place in the last minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point, which told the story of the counterculture movement in the United States at the time. Another enigmatic image was used in the poster and invitation for the 1998 Spring/Summer fashion show. The image on the invitation, a photograph by the Swiss artist Roman Singer known for his action sculptures, performed through explosions, collisions, or accidents, depicted a sculpture made of water erupting from a pair of boots, creating an ephemeral formless body (see Figure 3.11). This sculpture of an amorphous body that is not masculine or feminine, made of a material that is not used for sculpting, challenged the world of material and body perceptions alike. Another graphic product designed by Inoue was a calendar that displayed nine years (1990–99) simultaneously. The calendar is composed of two separate posters, each measuring 1.5 by 1.0 metre. One featured a repeated pattern of a whale’s tail, and the other poster featured a grid of 3,285 numbers to represent every day of the year between 1990 and 1999.

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Figure 3.10  Inoue Tsuguya, A House Organ, COMME des GARÇONS, 1996.

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Figure 3.11  Inoue Tsuguya, COMME des GARÇONS 1998 Spring/Summer fashion show invitation poster, 1997.

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The image of the whale’s tail – the animal whose body is furthest from the fashion world – presents the ‘other’ body found in Kawakubo’s work (see Figure 3.12). At the same time, the image of the tail also showcases the different and unique characteristic of each whale, since the tail’s pattern is what distinguishes each whale in the school. As such, the poster stressed the differences between animals of the same species, revealed in unusual places. This calendar undermines the perception of time as well as body perception, two critical issues in the fashion world. These are just a few of many characteristic examples. The printed materials used in the label’s advertising campaigns and catalogues do not present glamorous models or a narrative with which the consumer can identify. Moreover, they often do not make any direct reference to clothes or fashion, offering in their place an image that conveys the spirit of the collection. By not depicting clothes or other saleable products, these posters challenge the expectation of what fashion photography and advertising should be. Therefore, I would like to suggest that not only does Comme des Garçons offer radical aesthetics, it also offers a radical ideology of consumption as the act of ‘shopping’ goes beyond the aesthetic of the specific products, for consumers also shop for what the company represents (its sign) as shown in the fashion photography and advertisements. This consumerism is inextricably entwined with the protest against consumer culture that sanctifies the beautiful, the luxurious, and the brand system. It thus offers a consumption ideology that we could call ‘subversive consumerism’. In order to promote this radical consumerist practice in the global fashion industry, Kawakubo had to take this aesthetic away from its natural place on the margins, and place it in the centre of the fashion world. These processes started as early as 1981, when Kawakubo presented her avant-garde fashion line in Paris in the same context as conventional fashion luxury products, bestowing the subversive aesthetics with the same esteem as haute couture fashion designs. Kawakubo also positioned her designs as luxurious by adopting a strategy of blurring the line between design and art. Already in the 1980s, her design products were exhibited in museums: one of her earlier exhibitions was a show of the company’s fashion photography (entitled ‘Mode et Photo’ by the photographer Peter Lindbergh) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1986. The show featured the famous photo of her 1982 Lace Sweater, which shaped the company’s deconstructivist image more than the actual sales of the garment. 49 In 1988–91 Kawakubo published a print magazine titled Six (created by the art director Inoue Tsuguya and the editor Kozasu Atsuko) that supplemented the Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter collections with conceptual artworks by artists and designers who are not directly involved with the fashion industry.50 This was an entirely new way to communicate the brand’s direction in a way that no other fashion company had done

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Figure 3.12  Inoue Tsuguya, COMME des GARÇONS calendar 1990–99, 1990. 25/02/2020 08:24



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before. This tactic was extended to fashion photography in 1994–95, when Kawakubo provided Cindy Sherman with clothing to be photographed in any manner Sherman wished (see Figure 3.13). The collaboration produced images that were a far cry from conventional fashion photography, in which the clothes took a backseat to grotesque characters and deformed mannequins shaped by Sherman. The photographs were used as advertisements sent in a direct-mail campaign for the Comme des Garçons Autumn/Winter 1994–95 collection, and were also displayed at the company’s Soho boutique as artworks, which were later printed in limited editions. The collection ‘Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress’ inspired a dance performance choreographed by Merce Cunningham. It also gained a graphic dimension through a series of posters designed by Inoue, one of which juxtaposed the face of a lobster with a mannequin that had been deliberately deformed (by adding pillows to the body) to allow the design of the pattern for the garment (see Figure 3.14). The advertisement surprisingly portrayed the design process rather than the final product through the notion of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, shrouded with ambivalence as to who was the beauty and who was the beast. It also presented an unconventional shape of the natural body such as that of the lobster. This advertisement was featured in the book Visionaire No. 20, which Comme des Garçons published in a limited edition of 2,800 individually signed copies and sold as a work of art. The book presented a collection of different fashion photographs under a headline that asked ‘What do you make of this?’ This type of graphic work demonstrates the importance that Kawakubo ascribes to advertising and fashion photography. Great importance was also attributed to the way the clothes were sold, blurring the lines between art and commerce in the positioning of stores like the Trading Museum, which is a museum–retail hybrid store in Tokyo, or the Seoul concept store that includes a gallery. In addition, Kawakubo created one-off pieces that incorporated hand craft in mass production, creating a new type of mass-imperfection. All these innovative design practices and marketing strategies create an aura of eccentricity and exclusivity for the brand, positioning its products as unique and luxurious goods.51 However, it is important to note that while luxury is central to the branding of Comme des Garçons, it is disguised by being presented in the form of its denial. As is her practice, while Kawakubo positioned the company’s sign as luxurious, she adopted a strategy of deconstructing the very meaning of ‘luxury’ in the fashion industry. By repositioning avant-garde aesthetics and protest at fashion centres, she represented the clothes in terms that linked them with a repudiation of the excessive luxury associated with mainstream fashion labels. This offers a new luxury sign that is not defined by means of wealth manifested as exclusive

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Figure 3.13  Cindy Sherman, costume designed by Rei Kawakubo, 1993–94. 25/02/2020 08:24

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Figure 3.14  Inoue Tsuguya, poster for COMME des GARÇONS, Visionaire No. 20: Six ¼, 1997.

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Figure 3.15 Launching COMME des GARÇONS perfume at Shinjuku Isetan department store, autumn 1994.

elements in the human experience; elements which are foreign to us and at the same time most intimate to us, like blood, menstruation, faeces, and urine. The abject, which is concealed from any fashion discourse, already entered the world of art with the emergence of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century (Dada and Surrealism) but was manifested in full force in the 1960s and 1970s in the Neo-Dadaist Fluxus or Punk scene countercultures that engaged with body art, from the ranks of which Kawakubo came.55 The genealogical foundations of the discourse

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Critical design in Japan of abjection can also be found in Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Fountain, and in Pop Art, which introduced the ready-made to artistic representation, incorporating everyday, commercial, and ‘other’ objects into the art world. Andy Warhol addressed the notion of abjection in his homage to Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism with a series of works entitled Oxidation Paintings (1977–78) in which he urinated on oxidising copper plates. Kawakubo corresponds with this art and further develops the aesthetic sensibility it adopts, when she presents the seductive luxury perfume as urine. The ambiguity created between perfume and urine echoes the same mental state in which the sublime and the abject switch roles, as Kristeva describes it. The installation also undermines the conventional meaning of perfume in the fashion world as sexually seductive and alluring, since Kawakubo reminds us that smell has the power to conjure up repressed thoughts and memories, thus linking the perfume with a new function that corresponds with Kristeva’s psychoanalytical discussion. The installation was ground-breaking in the visual world and in the marketing world alike, as it performed a displacement and located the avant-garde expression not in a gallery, where one might expect to find a fringe avant-garde installation, but at the luxury centre of the world, which doubles as a commercial site – the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Isetan department store and the Aoyama fashion centre. And so, in a clever shift, the artistic installation becomes a story that will be told in fashion magazines, blogs, and fashion websites, and will help build the sign value of the company. This performance presents the blurring of boundaries between culture and economy by blurring the distinction between design products and art, while presenting the theoretical concept (the abject) as a sign value and shifting the display venue of the avant-garde. Thus, Kawakubo translates a critical statement into a sign of luxury in the fashion world, while at the same time anchoring the product in the commercial economic world. In other words, the installation presents a work that undermines the values of the fashion world, within the frameworks that the fashion world rules allow. The complex work of Kawakubo, who designs clothes alongside interior design, graphic work, and branding, while using the capitalist space as a platform for presenting radical opinions and aesthetics, should be understood at the intersection of several discourses. On the one hand, it represents the development of a visual avant-garde expression that offers a new body perception and identity politics that smashes hierarchies and categories and breaks down values involved in body perception, femininity and masculinity, consumption, and identity, which have been cultivated by the fashion industry over decades. On the other hand, it is an invitation for a radical consumerism that opposes the consumption of identity through products with luxury aesthetics, as is customary in late consumer culture. The design invites the consumer to be critical of the society and the capitalist ideology that surrounds us, while challenging both Modernism

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through innovative patterns, and late consumer culture by offering a new consumerist ideology. This chapter presented both street and elite fashion in Japan that served as a medium of protest against Japanese norms and values as well as against the norms and values dictated by the global fashion world. It is important to note that although both protests evolved in Japan, they were created in dialogue with French culture: the cute and fanciful Rococo Lolita style inspired by the Japanese fantasy of the style and fashion of Versailles in the eighteenth century and the hyper-feminine fashion of Marie Antoinette, and Kawakubo’s avant-garde fashion that draws inspiration from the deconstructivist theory that was formulated in France.56 She gave her company a French name and defied the ideal women body presented by French fashion designers. These two opposing fashion statements – the kawaii style and the deconstructive style – triggered social, economic, and aesthetic forces which together dictated new values, initiated a new social paradigm, and brought to the fore various concepts of femininity and thus established a new discourse in Japan. In other words, via means of style, materials, and patterns, these fashion trends created new social ideologies, generated a new visual culture, and at the same time established Japan’s new identity in the postmodern era, between ‘cool’ and ‘avant-garde’.

Notes   1 C. Ueno, ‘Watashi’ Sagashi Gēmu: Yokubō Shimin Shakairon (The Game of Searching for Myself: On Society of Desiring Private Citizens) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1987).   2 M. Daliot-Bul, ‘The formation of “youth” as a social category in pre-1970s Japan: A forgotten chapter of Japanese postwar youth countercultures’, Social Science Japan Journal, 17:1 (2014), 53.   3 For the connection between fashion and social identity, see J. Eicher, ‘The cultural significance of dress and textiles’, Reviews in Anthropology, 30:4 (2001), 309–24; C. Hendrickson, Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemala Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). For the global context of counterculture and fashion theory from 1970 to 2000, see D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 2003 [1979]); S. Hall and T. Jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Harper Collins, 1976); S. Suterwalla, ‘Cut, layer, break, fold: Fashioning gendered difference, 1970s to the present’, Woman Studies Quarterly, 41:1–2 (2013), 267–84. For specific counterculture fashion in Japan, see O. Bartal, ‘Feminist ideologies in postmodern Japanese fashion: Rei Kawakubo meets Marie Antoinette in downtown Tokyo’, in S. Rose-Marzel and G. Stiebel (eds), Dress and Ideology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 137–52.   4 J. Schneider and A. B. Weiner, ‘Cloth and the organization of human experience’, Current Anthropology, 27 (1986), 178.   5 The zoot suit riots were a series of conflicts that occurred in 1943 in Los Angeles between US servicemen and Mexican-American youth who wore zoot suits and were called zoot suiters. The zoot suit consists of a broad-shouldered drape jacket, balloon-leg trousers and a flamboyant hat. See S. Cosgrove, ‘The zoot-suit and style warfare’, History Workshop, 18 (1984), 78.

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Critical design in Japan   6 Suterwalla, ‘Cut, layer, break, fold’, 267.   7 Daliot-Bul, ‘The formation of “youth”’, 41–58.   8 M. Akabane and M. Saito¯, ‘Du matériel au spiritual: Changement de société au Japon et son reflet dans la publicité après l’effondrement de la bulle spéculative’, in T. Kanehisa (ed.), Société et Publicité Nipponnes (Paris: Editions You-Feng, 2002), ch. 3, p. 3.   9 Cited in R. Thornton, Japanese Graphic Design (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1991), p. 179. 10 K. Tsuzuki, Happy Victims – Kidaore Hōjōki (Kyoto: Seigensha, 2008). 11 P. Mears, ‘Formalism and revolution: Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto’, in V.  Steele, P. Mears, K. Yuniya, and N. Hiroshi (eds), Japan Fashion Now (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 152–5. 12 S. Kinsella, ‘Cuties in Japan’, in B. Moeran and L. Scov (eds), Women, Media and Consumption in Japan (London and Honolulu: Curzon and Hawaii University Press, 1995), pp. 220–1. 13 Ibid. 14 O¯tsuka Eiji cited in M. Matsui, ‘Beyond the pleasure room to a chaotic street’, in T. Murakami (ed.), Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New Haven: Japan Society at Yale University Publishing, 2005), pp. 208–12. 15 K. Kelsky, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 85; B. Moeran, ‘Homo Harmonicus and the Yenjoy girls: Production and consumption of Japanese myths’, Encounter, 72:5 (1989), 19–24. 16 Another interesting translation of the kawaii style at the time can be seen in the establishment of many pastry and ice cream parlors (both were considered children’s food) as well as the launch of Licca (the Japanese Barbie). 17 Marie Antoinette is considered to have solidified, refined, and intensified the Rococo fashion style that was created by Madame de Pompadour, who was Louis XV’s favorite mistress. What Marie Antoinette added to her predecessor’s style vocabulary were the concepts of fantasy, luxury, and exoticism. 18 The official brand concept is taken from the company website. 19 Naoto graduated from Bunka Fashion College in 2000 and built a fashion empire that includes twenty-nine different fashion lines. For example, h. Anarchy is a line specialising in Gothic style, h. Blood is a line specialising in elegant black Gothic style, Dark Red Rum is an occult Gothic style, and the Frill line is white Gothic Lolita style, Naoto7 is a Gothic style art mode. See V. Steele, ‘Is Japan still the future?’, in Steele et al. (eds), Japan Fashion Now, pp. 96–7. 20 This new escapist kawaii style can be seen in the movie Kamikaze Girl (Shimotsuma Monogatari, 2002), in which the main character from a small Japanese town walks in the rice fields dressed in a pink frilly dress, describing her wish to have been born in France during the Rococo period. The movie begins with a recollection of the eighteenth-century Palace of Versailles, with the protagonist imagining herself walking around the gardens of Versailles with the women of the palace. The hedonistic scene looks like sweet and dreamy candy. 21 Mears, ‘Formalism and revolution’, p. 158. 22 In 1954, the Gutai group launched as the first postwar avant-garde art movement. They created experimental art installations and performance art that combined movement and sound. This was followed by the Neo-Dadaist anti-art movement in 1959, which created conceptual art and pop art. In parallel, the Butoh movement developed in the 1960s, led by the dancers Ono Kazuo and Hijikata Tatsumi, who protested against Western rationalism and the conventions of the Japanese art world and challenged the boundaries of dance and body. Mono-ha was formed in 1968, which emphasised the materialism of the work and planted the seeds for contemporary art in Japan. See D. Chong, ‘Tokyo 1955–1970: A new avant-garde’,

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25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33

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in D. Chong (ed.), Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), pp. 58, 64, 68; G. Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 258–9. This avant-garde art scene was described in detail in Chapter 1. For more information, see Chong, ‘Tokyo 1955–1970’. Japanese avant-garde movements were relatively more accessible and open to women, who were only admitted to Japanese art academies and exhibitions since the 1950s. See M. Yoshimoto, ‘Women artists in the Japanese avant-garde: Celebrating a multiplicity’, Woman’s Art Journal, 27:1 (2006), 28. However, in most cases, even in the art collectives, women did not receive equal treatment, as in the case of Kishimoto Sayako (1939–88) of Neo-Dada. See ibid., 28–9. N. Kunimoto, ‘Tanaka Atsuko’s Electric Dress and the circuits of subjectivity’, The Art Bulletin, 95:3 (2013), 465–83. Chong, ‘Tokyo 1955–1970’, p. 64. Mears, ‘Formalism and revolution’, p. 187. New subversive movements developed during these years in Japan. For example, the avant-garde architecture movement Metabolism, the photography of Moriyama Daido¯ who presented the dark side of urban spaces, avant-garde theatres such as Angura, Red Tent Theater and Tenjo¯ Sajiki theatre troupe, and Butoh dancing. See M. Holborn, Beyond Japan: A Photo Theater (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), pp. 50–84. The radical Italian design arrived in Japan via designers such as Umeda Masanori and Kuramata Shiro¯ who worked and exhibited with the Memphis group in Italy. Mears, ‘Formalism and revolution’, p. 162. S. Menkes, ‘Positive Energy: Comme at 40’, The New York Times (8 June, 2009), www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/fashion/09iht-fcomme.html (accessed 4 February 2019). In his essay ‘Letter to a Japanese friend’ in which he explains how the term ‘deconstruction’ should be translated, Jacques Derrida claims that this position is not a method or a strict doctrine. He maintained that there are different words to describe it such as différance, supplement, and displacement, which are terms that create a definition that eludes fixed naming. Y. Taragan, ‘Altering the “basics”: Basic patterns and basic assumptions in fashion’, Protocols: History and Theory, 16 (Modes of Creation: Jewelry and Fashion) (2010), http://journal.bezalel.ac.il/he/protocol/article/3136 (accessed 28 January 2019) (in Hebrew). K. Dion, E. Berscheid and E. Walster, ‘What is beautiful is good’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24:3 (1972), 285–90. D. Jones, ‘The Evolutionary Psychology of Human Physical Attractiveness: Results from Five Populations’ (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1994). N. Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: Harper Perennial (2002 [1991]), p. 16. Ibid., p. 10. Mears, ‘Formalism and revolution’, p. 161. Roland Barthes claimed that fashion products are not merely functional but are rather a semiotic element that signify and point at other signifiers such as concepts, ideas, and ideologies, see R. Barthes, ‘Blue is in fashion this year’, in M. Carter (ed.), The Language of Fashion, trans. A. Stafford (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006), pp. 42–55. In feminist theory, for instance, ‘the other’ is a strategy of criticism, since the woman symbolises the other to the male subject, but also a liberating component that enhances the difference (différance) within the female subject herself. Kristeva views femininity as a flag of protest against the patriarchal and symbolic male order. From a post-colonial point of view, the other is any culture not identified with

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41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50

51 52

53

European culture, such as Japan, which offers a cultural alternative to the European one. See: J. Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Reproach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). For further reading about the collection ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’, see Mears, ‘Formalism and revolution’, p. 163. Ibid. The Japanese tend to distinguish between Japanese clothes (wafuku) and Western clothes (yōfuku). For readings of Kawakubo’s work by Western and Japanese researchers, see A. Fukai, B. Vinken, S. Frankel, and K. Hirofumi, Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, ed. C. Ince and N. Rie (London: Merrell, 2010), pp, 161–81; Y. Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford and New York: Berg Press, 2004), pp. 125–51; B. English, ‘Fashion and art: Postmodernist Japanese fashion’, in L. Mitchell (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Fashion from Japan (Sydney: Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, 2006), pp. 29–40; Mears, ‘Formalism and revolution’, p. 141–208. Mears, ‘Formalism and revolution’, p. 183. J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 179. J. Sims, ‘Rei Kawakubo’, in T. Jones (ed.), Rei Kawakubo (Köln: Taschen, 2012). Appears also in: J. Sims, ‘Comme Undone’, i-D the Expressionist Issue (Nov. 2004), pp. 117–23. Menkes, ‘Positive Energy’. S. Žižek (ed.), Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 285. Kawakubo’s work has been celebrated in many museum and gallery exhibitions, such as ‘Mode et Photo’, an exhibition of Comme des Garçons photography at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1986); ‘Three Voices: Franco Albini, Kris Ruhs, Rei Kawakubo’, Paris (1993); and the ‘Essence of Quality’ exhibition of Comme des Garçons Noir with the Kyoto Costume Institute, Kyoto, Japan (1993). She also held a furniture exhibition at the Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan. In 1995 she participated in the ‘Mode and Art’ exhibition in Brussels, Belgium. In 1996 she participated in the ‘Art and Fashion’ exhibition at the Florence Biennale Internazionale dell’ Arte Contemporanea in Italy. Her work was also featured in the ‘Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, and Rei Kawakubo’ exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, in ‘Radical Fashion’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2001, and in Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017. The first edition of Six magazine reproduced a work by the Hungarian photojournalist André Kertész from 1938, entitled ‘Rockefeller Centre, New York’, which Comme des Garçons adopted for their 1988 Spring/Summer campaign. Issue number two, which was published along with Comme des Garçons’s 1988 Autumn/Winter collection, presented works by the German photographer and sculptor Karl Blossfeldt, as well as reproductions of Gilbert and George’s works of art. Other magazines featured works by Fischli and Weiss, Kishin Shinoyama, Louise Nevelson, and Boyle Family. P. McNeil, ‘Old empire and new global luxury: Fashioning global design’, in G. Adamson, G., Riello and S. Teasley (eds), Global Design History (New York: Routledge, 2011), p, 147. For more about the term ‘ostentatious poverty’, see B. Dicks, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visibility (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), p. 50. Bourdieu explains how people use style and taste to signify their own positions in social space. For more about Bourdieu’s work regarding taste and social class, see the ‘design and visual culture’ section in the introduction of this book. The ideas regarding symbolic inversion are inspired by Christine Guth’s article

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‘Import substitutions, innovation and the tea ceremony in fifteen and sixteen ­century Japan’, which deals with the rise of wabi taste in ceramic design and commerce during that period. Although Comme des Garçons’s aesthetics are not inspired, in my opinion, by wabi aesthetics, it seems that its branding as a luxury product shares some similarities with the repositioning of wabi aesthetics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as described by Guth. See C. Guth, ‘Import substitutions, innovation and the tea ceremony in fifteen and sixteen century Japan’, in Adamson, Riello and Teasley, Global Design History, pp. 50–8. 54 J. Kriseva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 10, 14–17. 55 See works of art such as Artist’s Shit (1961) by Piero Manzoni. 56 It is important to note that Kawakubo’s success in Japan was driven from her success in Paris and from her acceptance by the European fashion scene. Still today, the exhibition ‘Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion’ was first shown in London and Munich, so that it would then be accepted in Japan.

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Critical design in Japan Ory Bartal

Published by Manchester University Press Bartal, Ory. Critical design in Japan: Material culture, luxury, and the avant-garde. Manchester University Press, 2020. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/73969.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/73969

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

4 Mujirushi Ryohin and the absence of style

Mujirushi Ryohin is a lifestyle brand entrenched in Japanese consumer culture, which in 2012 was dubbed by the Japanese lifestyle magazine Brutus Casa a ‘lifestyle operating system’.1 However, the company’s first incarnation was as a very modest yet critical food and household product line in Seiyu Stores supermarkets. Wishing to offer consumers inexpensive quality products, the company adopted a new initiative based on the use of waste and untapped raw materials, simplifying the production process, and eliminating the elaborate packaging that was common in Japan – an initiative that was both economic and ecological. In the wake of the exceptional success of the product line, Mujirushi Ryohin evolved into an independent company within the Seibu Group. Today, Mujirushi Ryohin stores offer some 7,500 products (from stationery to household items, electrical appliances to bicycles, clothes to food, furniture and kitchenware to outdoor products), all designed with a functional starkness in natural colours, devoid of ‘splash’ and decorative values, and eschewing unnecessary patterns and details. The launch of a selection of their products in New York’s MoMA store in 2002 (six years before Mujirushi Ryohin opened its first US store in New York) marked an interesting shift for the company, which was known in Japan for its value-for-money quality, and established the company’s strong reputation outside Japan for its ‘Japanese’ design style. This Orientalist perception of its products wrongly associated the ascetic and unobtrusive aesthetic design with traditional Japanese minimalist aesthetics. However, the company’s design and style have little to do with Japanese traditions and it does not attempt to represent ‘Japaneseness’. For example, while the company works with the finest Japanese ­designers, including Hara Kenya, Yoshioka Tokujin, Fukasawa Naoto, and Sudo¯ Reiko and architects like Kuma Kengo and Namba Kazuhiko, it also collaborates

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with international designers such as Sam Hecht, Jasper Morrison, and Konstantin Grcic, blurring the lines between Japanese and contemporary global style. However, Mujirushi Ryohin’s ingenuity extends beyond challenging traditional cultural categories of design. Hara Kenya, the company’s art director, claims that Mujirushi Ryohin’s design blurs the binary principle underlying consumer culture, in which products are either idiosyncratic and expensive or ordinary and cheap.2 According to Hara, the products of Mujirushi Ryohin belong to neither of these groups, nor to the minimalistic school, which is often a high and inherently arrogant style. Rather, in contrast with these product categories, Mujirushi Ryohin’s style gives birth to a new sense of value and aesthetics from within a ‘simplicity’ that rendered it a protest style.3 Initially set up to compete with other no-brand lines that were already sold in Japanese supermarkets, it developed into a protest against, and an alternative to, late consumer culture and brand-oriented culture, which were becoming the dominant ideology at the time. The basic, plain, and timeless products, which do not change with the seasons or from year to year, stress the use value and functionality as an alternative to the logic of changing fashion – one of the pillars of late consumer culture, in which products are made with a built-in obsolescence and use style and branding to create a consumer identity. Therefore, in this sense, Mujirushi Ryohin’s products and the ‘simple’ style can be seen as part of the Anti-Branding and No-Logo movements that emerged in Europe and the United States in the 1980s in response to ‘the society of the spectacle’ of late capitalism. These anti-consumerism and anti-corporate political movements were a direct extension of 1960s counter movements, which took on issues of racial, gender, and sexual discrimination and political inequality, and in the 1980s expanded to a war on corporate power, the absence of labour rights, the exploitation of workers in developing countries, and overexploitation of the earth’s natural resources that raised awareness of ecological problems. These movements engendered a network of activists who exposed human rights violations in developing countries by corporations from developed countries. The protest was also fuelled by environmental activists who exposed the ecological ravages behind the veneer of the society of the spectacle and the fictional world portrayed in ads.4 The anti-corporate movement of the 1980s introduced political activism with a new direction – a socioeconomic orientation, which to some degree returned to the identity, race, and gender struggles, considering that the new capitalist system created brands that provided consumers with a social, gender, and class identity. In this chapter, I wish to present the ideological consciousness and protest style of Mujirushi Ryohin, which today is part of the capitalist system while simultaneously challenging the system’s brand-oriented culture.

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The birth of Mujirushi Ryohin Mujirushi Ryohin was born as a private line of Seiyu Stores Ltd5 – a supermarket chain established in Japan during the 1950s along with other supermarkets (such as its main competitor Daie, established in 1957).6 These supermarkets sold products by national brands like Morinaga Nyugyo, Nisshin Shokuhin, Yukijirushi Shokuhin, and Kyupi. In order to create differentiation from other supermarkets, each chain also set up private brands, which were simply the same products created by national manufacturers, repackaged with different product names, different packaging, and different quantities, which displayed both the manufacturer as well as the supermarket’s name on the product.7 In order to maintain their strong market position, in addition to their private brands, in October 1975 Seiyu launched their Product Science Research Centre (shōhin kagaku kenkyujo). The research centre developed many brand names and product concepts that were then sold in Seiyu supermarkets, including: Shufu no Me (housewives’ eyes), Shoko no Sachi (food abundance), N-10 Series, Color Box, and Furusato Meihin (hometown special products) as well as the Seiyu Line.8 Wishing to compete with these lines, in 1977 Daie supermarket launched no-brand products alongside their private brands. The idea of no-brand products, imported from the United States and Europe, flourished in Japan and was launched in 1978 by Nichii and in 1979 by Ito-Yokado supermarkets.9 Seiyu Stores did not set up their own no-brand line, partly due to the success of the Seiyu Line, but also because Tsutsumi Seiji, the president of Seibu Ryutsu Group, was sceptical about no-brand products, which were criticised for their low quality and for not displaying the manufacturer’s name.10 Instead, Tsutsumi approached Iguchi Yukiaki – head of the product development section, who was responsible for the development of the phenomenally successful ‘Material Cans’ (sozai kanzume) in 1977 as part of the Seiyu Line – and asked him to develop a new product line that would be both useful and inexpensive but not low quality like the no-brand products.11 Trying to meet this brief, Iguchi Yukiaki pitched an idea in 1980 that was originally developed in the Product Science Research Centre but had not yet been realised. The idea was based on the waste he witnessed while visiting companies as part of the research for the ‘Material Cans’. The first product he proposed was ‘dried shiitake mushrooms’. While researching the high price of dried shiitake mushrooms, Iguchi saw sixty people sorting shiitake and throwing away the broken mushrooms, even though these could be used for cooking. Since only shiitake with perfect caps were considered saleable merchandise, many mushrooms that were dried in an uneven shape or broken in the drying process were thrown away. As shiitake is usually minced for cooking, Iguchi proposed to repackage the ‘discarded’ shiitake of a high-quality manufacturer in the Oita prefecture as

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a low-priced yet high-quality dried shiitake product. In the same vein, he also proposed to make salmon flakes out of the heads and tails of salmon fish, which were considered waste. The third product was the curvy end of spaghetti, which is essentially the leftovers created in the process of drying the pasta on a pole. This part of the spaghetti was thrown away in the production process, but could be repackaged as ‘U-shaped spaghetti’. These product ideas were different from other product lines, not only because of their ecological merit, but also because this was the first time that Seiyu ordered a product directly from the manufacturer and designed its packaging, as opposed to only dealing with the retail aspect of manufactured products. This production process, in which the design, monitoring of production, and packaging were all in the hands of Seiyu, ensured cheaper products due to savings in production process and mediation costs, as well as high-quality products that were not offered by the competition.12 The new product concept held a particular appeal to Tsutsumi, who was fascinated by socialist theories and believed that the consumer society was changing its ethics in the aftermath of the oil shock.13 He was convinced that consumers would stop pursuing the American dream with its luxurious and fashionable products and that retailers would stop pursuing the ‘logic of capital’ (shihon no ronri) aimed at maximising the profits of the seller and start emphasising the ‘logic of the human’ (ningen no ronri) that aims to satisfy the needs of the consumer.14 Thus, for Tsutsumi, these new products had the added-value of ‘anti-establishment products’ (hantaisei shōhin) that serve as an antithesis to consumer society principles. Koike Kazuko remembers that Tsutsumi saw this as another way to serve his customers, similar to his initiative to build the Seibu Museum of Art, which displayed contemporary and popular art, as a statement against the museums that featured only high and classic art exhibitions.15 Fascinated by the idea, Tsutsumi gave Iguchi’s proposed products list to Mishima Akimichi, head of public relations, and asked him to discuss the concept and naming of the new products with Seibu Ryutsu Group’s advisory board, which included: art director Tanaka Ikko¯, creative director and copywriter Koike Kazuko, copywriter Higurashi Shinzo¯, graphic and package designer Kojitani Hiroshi, and interior designer Sugimoto Hiroshi.16 Tsutsumi asked the advisory board to consider the new product concepts through the following questions: why do brand name products sell better than products of the same quality with no branding? What is the role of advertising? What do people really need in their daily life? How can Seiyu produce better products by investing in their essence and quality rather than in their name and branding?17 Koike Kazuko recalls that Tsutsumi emphasised the fact that this was a consumer movement, and that consumers had a voice that should be heard through the products.18 The advisory board decided that these new no-brand products should not be simply ‘against brand’, as the anti-consumerism movement

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Critical design in Japan ­ dvocated, but rather should focus on humanistic values and transact the a true value of the products in a fair price for the consumers. Koike Kazuko recounts that already in their first discussion, they contemplated ‘what is a healthy product for everyday life?’19 The board defined the new product lines as high-quality products for daily use and stable supply, yet 20–30 per cent cheaper than national brands. The board also recommended that the reason for the low prices would be communicated to consumers.20 After the new product line was defined, Koike Kazuko suggested that it be called Mujirushi Ryohin, combining the translation of the English terms ‘no-brand’ (mujirushi) and ‘good quality products’ (ryōhin) into Japanese.21 Koike Kazuko attested: ‘We were against the additional value that a logo would emphasize, and wanted to be true to the product, so we insisted on no-brand good products.’22 Tanaka Ikko¯ added that Seiyu initiated this line quite late in Japan, after no-brand products were already established in other supermarkets, and so they had to invent a Japanese name in order to present the idea that the new line offered a different and original value in no-brand products. Alongside the name selection, art director Tanaka Ikko¯ also suggested a monochromatic image for the new product line by creating a two-tone packaging based on the colour of recycled craft paper with a matching maroon colour. This was an important design decision, which established the product line’s colours and singularity. Koike Kazuko explained: ‘Tanaka, who pointed out that Japanese package design was becoming excessive, seemed to have decided from the start that if he were to develop a product line, monochrome packaging would be best, as it made a very strong statement against an overly ostentatious era.’23 In a strange twist, the use of recycled paper for packaging also served as a trigger for creating more products and adding new ecological values to the products. According to Nishikawa Hidehiko, Tanaka Ikko¯ asked Iguchi to use recycled and unbleached paper. However, as recycled paper costs more than bleached paper, Iguchi ordered large quantities of recycled paper to lower its price. Nakata Tetsuo, who was in charge of product development, asked the sales planning department to create posters and suggested producing a notepad as a way of utilising all this excess material. His idea expanded to the production of notes and folders, opening the door for Mujirushi Ryohin’s stationery goods, imbuing the line with values of an ecological and simple life.24 Eventually, on 5 December 1980, Mujirushi Ryohin launched nine household products and thirty-one food products (see Figure 4.1). The launch of the first products was accompanied by ads, designed by art director Fukuda Shigeo and copywriter Koike Kazuko, with the slogan ‘Lower Priced for a Reason’ (wake ate yasui) (see Figure 4.2). The campaign went against the grain of fashionable ads in the 1980s and tried to educate consumers to look for the essence of the product rather than its

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Figure 4.1  Mujirushi Ryohin’s first forty products.

name or packaging. It lacked colour and looked like an information page. The first ad read: ‘Seiyu produces food products that taste good and daily necessities that are first and foremost practical. We think it is important to choose “the thing” itself without relying on brand name and the packaging. This choice connects us to the robust way of life.’ The ads presented the reason for the low price of each product. For example, the by-line of the ‘freeze-dried instant coffee’ explained: ‘We omitted the process of oil coating, which protects the grain from breaking. The size of each grain is different, but the taste is the same.’ As for the ‘broken dried shiitake’, the ad explained: ‘You can see that each of the shiitake is a different size, and some are broken. They are cheap because we cut down the expenses of

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Figure 4.2  Tanaka Ikkō, wake atte yasui, advertising poster, 1980.

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the process of sorting out good-looking shiitake from the broken shiitake. Mujirushi Ryohin. We can offer low price products for a reason.’ The first products were sold in 220 Seiyu shops, 6 Family Mart shops, 11 shops of Seibu Hyakkaten, and another 6 related shops. The new product line was an immediate success and earned 5.5 billion yen, exceeding the sales target of 3 billion yen. The second phase of product development (in which three household items and nine food items were added) was inspired by the new canned salmon product, encouraging shoppers to re-examine the food production process, in which food was often overlooked or discarded. Tanaka Ikko¯ asked illustrator Yamashita Yu¯zo¯ to design a poster that would capture this theme, for which Koike Kazuko created the slogan that read ‘A Salmon Has an Entire Body’ (shake wa zenshi shake nanda) (see Figure 4.3). The ad, which was printed in newspapers in 1981, showed the head and tail of a salmon (which were discarded in the manufacturing process) with the text: ‘The head and tail are also salmon. Their shape may be uneven, but the salmon flakes are made from the most delicious parts of salmon.’ At the bottom of the ad appeared the name of the line: Mujirushi Ryohin, which is made up of four Japanese characters – 無印良品 – and the spaces between them were filled with the three reasons behind the inexpensive price of the products: selection of materials, streamlining the process, simplification of packaging.25 Then, the ad presented the different products in the product line, detailing the explanation for their low price. Although the product line initially targeted supermarket shoppers, following its success, in 1981 Tsutsumi came up with the idea of opening a dedicated shop for Mujirushi Ryohin products. The directors of Seiyu rejected the idea, preferring to sell Mujirushi Ryohin products to supermarkets wholesale rather than shift to retail. Tsutsumi explained: When we came across the question of ‘how to sell’ those products, we realised that the merit of the large volume sales business at that time was just low prices and convenience. However, as Mujirushi Ryohin values were different, we thought of having a ‘model shop’ somewhere … Seiyu management thought that a large volume sales business should be in a cheap location with a large car park. But I objected, thinking that we should position the company differently from Daie, Ito-Yokado, and Jusco and focus on quality and not only on quantity.26

The advisory board supported the idea, proposing a new type of shop and a new retail orientation that was against mass production and oligopoly. For the shop’s location, the head of the shop planning division, Takagi Minoru, considered Seiyu’s original locations such as Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, Ginza, and suburbs like Machida, but the advisory board and Tsutsumi decided to open Mujirushi Ryohin’s first shop in the luxurious and fashionable Aoyama district. Koike Kazuko recalls: ‘It was brave to open that kind of shop in fashionable Aoyama, but we thought that it would

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Figure 4.3  Tanaka Ikkō, shake wa zenshin shake nanda, advertising poster, 1981.

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help consumers understand that Mujirushi Ryohin is not just a product line but is also about lifestyle. So, we needed one store that reflected our concepts in a very hot spot.’27 Tsutsumi also thought that the shop’s trendy location would attract media coverage and publicity that would generate more customers and increase Mujirushi Ryhoin employees’ motivation.28 The decision to open the shop in fashionable Aoyama was a key moment, positioning the company as an antithesis to the luxurious brand name products and the society of the spectacle that dominated the area. In order to establish an independent shop with enough products, six product development stages were set in motion in the span of two and a half years (from 1981 to the shop’s opening in 1983), transforming Mujirushi Ryohin from a supermarket product line to an independent company that had its own concept and aesthetics.29 Nakata, who was in charge of product development, worked with the advisory board and with product designers such as Masaru Kagaya from GK studio. He also sent out questionnaires to the manufactures to learn about their product development ideas. These development stages expanded the range of Mujirushi Ryohin from food to clothes, stationery, and household items. They also changed Mujirushi Ryohin’s fundamental concept, which was ecological and focused on saving through the choice of materials and reducing the costs of production or packaging, to the production of basic and universally needed and useful products. This idea was reflected in the third product development stage in October 1981. Titled ‘Love is Not Decorated’ (ai wa kazaranai), it encompassed twenty-three articles of clothing, sixteen household products, and nine food items (see Figure 4.4). The clothes included basic items such as socks, tights, women’s underwear, and several garments for babies and children – all very simple, without any decorations or colour. In the production of women’s socks, the process of dyeing was omitted, leaving the final product in the colour of the natural thread. This started a new product concept: real value can be seen in products in their original form, without any colouring and decoration. Following the customers’ response to the new products, Mujirushi Ryohin’s designers realised that the closer the item was to its original form, the more consumers could enjoy using products according to their own imagination and creativity. The fourth phase of development, in April 1982, included fifteen household products and four food items. Nakata Tetsuo produced plain white shiki-futon and kake-futon (sleeping mats) without the floral patterns that were customary until then in Japan. It was known as fude-futon and had an enormous influence on the simplification of later products. The fifth stage of development, launched in September 1982, included five clothing items, ­ninety-three household items, and eight food items under the name ‘Mujirushi Ryohin for Everyone’ (hitori hitori no mujirushi ryohin). Nakata developed a very simple bicycle, focusing on essential functions and safety such as brakes,

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Figure 4.4  Tanaka Ikkō, ai wa kazaranai, advertising poster, 1981.

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handles, and frame, and allowing customers to choose whether they wanted to customise the bicycle by adding items like a flashlight. This bicycle became one of Mujirushi Ryohin’s most emblematic designs and opened the way for customised products. The sixth stage of development, in April 1986, included 128 household items, 30 food items, and 48 articles of clothing (women’s clothing, shirts, and sweatshirts that were produced with colourless kinari cotton).30 A wooden furniture unit and paper pipe rack were also developed at this stage. All these products embodied the shift in Mujirushi Ryohin’s concept from ecological products into simple, basic, and undecorated products that showed their very essence. The Aoyama shop was opened in June 1983. In addition to Mujirushi Ryohin’s original products, the shop also sold products by other Seiyu private brands such as local handmade food by Furusato Meihin and Shufu no Me.31 In December 1983, Mujirushi Ryohin opened sales corners of their products in Hanshin Hyakkaten in order to build a strong partnership with Seibu Hyakkaten. The Aoyama shop was highly successful and made a profit of 190,000,000 yen in the first half of 1983.32 The total sales of Mujirushi Ryohin in 1983 reached 15 billion yen, and by 1984 sales ­doubled to 30 billion yen.33 Since the store’s opening in 1983, Mujirushi Ryohin has flourished into a huge 573-store global company.34 The company is headed by president Kanai Masaaki, who works in collaboration with an advisory board, led by art director Hara Kenya. The company is comprised of a marketing and advertising department, overseas department, sales department, and products department. The products department includes three divisions: apparel, food, and household. The apparel division includes a design studio that designs clothes for women, men, children, and undergarments, as well as LABO. The household division includes a design studio that focuses on textile, furniture, kitchenware, outdoors, electronics, stationery, health, and beauty. In 2016, the household design studio employed twenty-one in-house designers, the apparel and textile design studio engaged twelve in-house designers, and the company also works with eight (Japanese and international) designers on external contracts. In keeping with the company’s initial agenda, it continues to be committed to fair trade, sustainability, and recycling as part of its ecological protest against the superfluous and unnecessary products created by the late consumer market. However, this ecological protest has changed over the years, explains Hara, since the use of natural materials is more romantic than it is practical: ‘Production costs became a problem because we are living in an era in which it costs more to use raw and pure materials because processed materials are available more than raw.’35 He goes on to explain that production in developing countries is incongruent with the company’s ideology, since: ‘The whole idea of producing in a country with low labour costs and selling them in countries with high labour costs is

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Critical design in Japan not sustainable.’36 Mujirushi Ryohin still initiates various social projects like the POOL recycling initiative in 2014. POOL was an attempt to use leftover wood and textile from Mujirushi Ryohin’s internal production process as well as products that were damaged or stained in the distribution process, in order to produce new products such as the stool covers that were designed for the inaugural run of the line. Other projects involve factories that employ special manufacturing methods, like a factory in Cambodia that uses a completely natural dyeing process of wood from Mujirushi Ryohin’s factories, or a unique natural dyeing process of wool by Kyrgyz women in a project that was both commercial and aimed at women empowerment in collaboration with JAIC.37 The company also initiates social projects in Japan, such as natural dyeing of Mujirushi Ryohin textiles by families that use traditional Japanese dyeing techniques (like Ise-Momen or Arimatsu-Shibori), or commissioning porcelain from families that specialise in craft (like Hasami-Yaki factories in Kyushu), to help them maintain their livelihood and preserve Japanese craft traditions in danger of disappearing.38 As a socially conscious commercial company, in 2011 Mujirushi Ryohin also initiated an embroidery project with the victims of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. However, beyond these novel concepts, which are not always profitable and are sometime used for marketing purposes, Hara Kenya explains that Mujirushi Ryohin’s designers must also be aware of contemporary market mechanisms, marketing strategies, and production conditions (materials, the production process, packaging, storage, and shipping logistics as well as retail price) since for him, a design that needs to be part of the capitalist system cannot take place in an ivory tower or abandon itself to sentimentalities. In order to make an impact, concludes Hara, design has to take the market into account.

Mujirushi Ryohin as a protest against late consumer culture The social impact of which Hara speaks is expressed in the connection between products and the market in which they operate. I will try to explain this mechanism and how the products’ physical design, style, and aesthetics, as well as the company’s social projects, have made it subversive to late consumer culture ideology. Mujirushi Ryohin emerged in the 1980s – the decade in which late consumer culture consolidated its power as the dominant ideology. This consumer culture had introduced into the market a wide range of products that did not always meet functional physical needs but rather served psychological and social needs. As presented in the ‘design and visual culture’ section in the introduction to this book, Baudrillard describes how in this period products lost their functional meaning and started serving as a social sign that establishes the relative value of a brand, where the

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functional difference between products is minimal and operates according to the logic of differentiation. The ‘sign value’, which imbues the product through its design and style, contains social information surrounding a certain lifestyle. In this social climate, Mujirushi Ryohin challenged the ideology of late consumer culture. First, Mujirushi Ryohin defied these ideas with an ecological protest by producing products that utilise ‘waste’ materials, streamlining the production process, and simplifying the packaging. Moreover, the company created basic and timeless products like a white T-shirt, transparent ruler, or white rice cooker that do not have a built-in obsolescence mechanism and do not create sign value for the user. These are basic items that are always in demand and are not governed by fashion trends. They do not change with the seasons, or from year to year, since they are not desire-oriented products. In other words, Mujirushi Ryohin’s products do not follow the logic of changing fashion, which dictates differentiation and is found at the heart of late consumer culture and postmodern society; in other words, its products do not provide status. Hara explained that Mujirushi Ryohin’s basic products and style do not incite intense appetite and outbursts like ‘I must have this’, as most brands aspire to do. Rather, according to him, Mujirushi Ryohin strives to make its customers say about a product ‘this will do’; Mujirushi Ryohin’s products do not aim to trigger the customers’ appetite but rather their acceptance. For Hara, this is where the social protest of Mujirushi Ryohin lies. He explains that in contemporary society, individuality is expressed by a person’s desire, and so it follows that democracy means the management of desires and the free market economy creates the competition of desires. In that sense, for Hara, in the contemporary era desire and freedom carry the same value: to desire means to be free to choose. To counteract desire, which Hara sees as a source of obsession, egoism, and other negative values, Mujirushi Ryohin attempts to create products that are not objects of desire (objet de désir) and in which the dominant value is that of acceptance. The idea is for consumers to understand, through the products, that acceptance equals freedom, and to replace the current ideology in which desire equals freedom. Thus, Hara believes that Mujirushi Ryohin’s products aim to re-­educate consumers to look for the functional aspects in products – those that ­generate logical satisfaction and not emotional desire through a unique design or social sign. By selling high-quality products with no label and no social information, Mujirushi Ryohin attempts to raise an anti-capitalistic awareness that distinguishes between the essence of a product and its branding. Hara refers to this as ‘global rational value’ – a philosophy that advocates the use of resources and objects in accordance with an exceedingly rational perspective. However, since consumer culture is built on a sign that is built on style and aesthetics, a protest of this kind is performed not only via products that do not have planned obsolescence, but also

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Critical design in Japan through the language and means of consumer culture, meaning, by creating new products that in contrast with existing products are not branded, yet still hold ‘sign value’. Hara claims that the products are not minimalist or no-design – quite the contrary. He explains that at the beginning, in order to lower production costs, the company made an effort to simplify the production process. This strategy led to the emergence of a whole slew of products with unparalleled aesthetics. However, as Mujirushi Ryohin’s concept was never based on being ‘cheap’, the advisory board led by Tanaka Ikko¯ achieved the new style while adhering to product planning: by omitting parts of the production process via a search for optimal shape and optimal material, screening out the ego of the creator and the designer. This process ensures that the product’s style is not the outcome of elimination but rather emerges from the ultimate design. Thus, no-brand does not translate into no-design, but rather into a search for the essence of each product.

Mujirushi Ryohin’s search for the essence of the product and the sign Mujirushi Ryohin’s search for a modest aesthetics that showcases the essence of the product and does not display a social sign, went through several stages and several references from the history of design. In an interview, the director of product planning design Yasui Satoshi talks about Tanaka Ikko¯’s attempt to design according to traditional principles from the Muromachi period: ‘The underlying thought of Muji is what Tanaka Ikko¯ said – “it would be wonderful if we could create simple (kanso) and plain (shisso) goods that would be superior to luxury goods, and if consumers would choose and appreciate the simple one.”’39 Yasui continues to explain how Tanaka Ikko¯’s previous design was highly influenced by the colourful rinpa style of the Edo period, but when he started working with Mujirushi Ryohin, the simplicity overcame the colourful and variegated rinpa style and became the central philosophy and aesthetics of the company. According to Yasui, with this new style Tanaka tried to counter human nature and its predilection for showing off status and power through luxury products, and so he inspired his design team with traditional aesthetic mythologies, such as the famous story of the meeting between Shogun Hideyoshi and the tea master Sen no Rikyu¯. The story tells that when Hideyoshi heard that Sen no Rikyu¯’s garden was full of asagao (morning glories) flowers, he asked Rikyu¯ to invite him to the tea ceremony. When Hideyoshi arrived at the ceremony, he saw that all the flowers had been taken away, and only one asagao flower was arranged in the tiny tea room. The idea was that one flower makes a stronger impact than showing thousands of flowers.40 Yasui concludes by saying that this sense and notion of beauty, and beauty concepts such as wabi-sabi of Zen culture, definitely influenced Mujirushi Ryohin’s sense of beauty.41 Koike

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Kazuko also recalls that ‘as we all had the Japanese way of living and aesthetics, we thought about the traditional Japanese way of living for contemporary life’.42 Tanaka’s design ideas can be exemplified by his process of achieving simplicity through the natural colours of each material, even when it is a synthetic material. According to Yasui, when Tanaka ordered a plastic ruler he asked that all colour pigment be taken out of it, but also that no chemical material would be used to make the plastic clear. The result was a ruler in the natural translucent colour of the plastic. Another example is the colour of metal objects. Tanaka wanted to leave them in their natural colour, but the lacquer that was needed in order to keep the metal from oxidising gave the products a shiny finish. The solution was to create a paint that was the exact shade of the metal’s natural colour and paint the product with it. The result was a metal product in its natural colour. After ten years of working with the various natural colours of different materials, Tanaka told his team: ‘Now we have reached the colour palette of Mujirushi Ryohin.’43 This Japanese sense of aesthetics can be seen also in the work of Hara Kenya who replaced Tanaka Ikko¯ as Mujirushi Ryohin’s art director. The ‘Tea house’ campaign that was created by Hara in 2005 shows one of Mujirushi Ryohin’s products, a small white porcelain rice bowl, in a traditional Japanese-style room: Togudo’s Dojinsai at Kyoto’s Jisho¯-ji (known also as Ginkaku-ji – the Silver Pavilion), which is a national treasure and is considered to be the origin of the zen teahouse of this period.44 These rice bowls are produced for Mujirushi Ryohin in a traditional porcelain production centre in Hasami in Nagasaki prefecture. According to Hara, the photograph that features a national treasure and a contemporary rice bowl conflates two creations from different eras that share the same aesthetics, which looks for beauty within simplicity. When he presented the campaign, Hara gave a long explanation about wabi aesthetics and the development of a unique Japanese perception of simplicity; a simplicity embodied in the tea ceremony developed by Murata Juko¯, Takeno Jo¯o¯, and later by Sen no Rikyu¯ who pushed the design of space, utensils, and manners of the tea ceremony to an extreme asceticism, or in the words of Hara: ‘profound simplicity and silence’.45 However, Hara himself claims that Mujirushi Ryohin has no Japanese origins, saying that: ‘It is time we stop thinking of Mujirushi within the narrow confines of Japan.’46 Mujirushi Ryohin’s vision, according to Hara, is collecting the universality found in locales around the globe and creating products that address people all around the world. He refers to Mujirushi Ryohin’s design as sophisticated forms and details that clearly reveal the prolific legacy of traditions and progenitors in design history. Japanese design history is simply one of them. In order to realise this vision and incorporate talent and ideas from all over the world, Hara hired many international designers (among them Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, and James Irvine) who work in the same simple style.

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Figure 4.5  Mujirushi Ryohin, paper shredder.

Figure 4.6  Mujirushi Ryohin, acrylic storage.

Indeed, a careful examination of the company’s various products, like the shredder, kitchen appliances, notebook, or the acrylic desk system, reveals functional products without any decorations (see Figures 4.5, 4.6, 4.7). These bring to mind the design legacy of the Bauhaus, which was introduced to Japan in the 1930s through designers like Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, and of the International Style during the American occupation in the 1940s and 1950s. The formulation of Japanese Modernism in those years (the works of Yanagi So¯ri being one notable example) was shaped by the curriculum of schools like Kuwasawa Design School, which taught Modernist design methodologies. Another major source of inspira-

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Figure 4.7  Mujirushi Ryohin, bind notebook.

tion was contemporaneous international designers like Dieter Rams of the German company Braun. Dieter Rams influenced Japanese designers such as Kuroki Yasuo who led Sony’s design team, and Fukasawa Naoto who is Mujirushi Ryohin’s product designer.47 Modernism’s legacy also had a

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Critical design in Japan great impact on Yasui Satoshi, who recounts that, according to his design philosophy, if during the design process one thinks only of function, the product will be beautiful. From his point view, his design is not a vehicle for increasing sales, it does not promote sign value, but rather is a vehicle for searching for the essence of the product. He explains that this search stems from a desire to present objects as they are, in their natural shape without any special design, which will lead to a beautiful product, ‘just as a baby is beautiful when it is naked and natural’. He describes the design process as an attempt to strip the product down to the core or produce products without design, coating, or setting. Yasui also says that it is his belief that if the piece of furniture is good quality and beautiful, it can also influence the company to be ethical.48 These ideas of Mujirushi Ryohin’s head designer concerning the connection between form and function, the product’s essence, and the link between simple products and an ethical company, share significant similarities with the ideas developed at the Bauhaus School. Of course, we can think of Mujirushi Ryohin’s design style as feeding off of these two sources – traditional minimalist Japanese aesthetics and European Modernism, both of which attempted in their own way to present the essence of the product, to create a new glocal style that deals with tradition with a critical twist. For instance, Fukasawa Naoto recounts the design process of Mujirushi Ryohin’s kitchen appliances, which were inspired by Braun’s product design on the one hand, while their round edges drew on the aesthetic of Japanese porcelain (although made of plastic), in order that the product would look like a part of Japanese kitchenware49 (see Figures 4.8 and 4.9). The idea of fusing two traditions is not new. This concept evolved in Japan after the Second World War and had already permeated the discourse of architecture and design in Japan in the 1950s.50 However, in contrast with products rooted in the Japanese or European-American Modernist tradition, Mujirushi Ryohin’s style was born in a different ­socioeconomic

Figure 4.8  Mujirushi Ryohin, electric kettle.

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Figure 4.9  Mujirushi Ryohin, pop-up toaster.

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climate as a response to late consumer culture, and, although it stems from minimalistic styles that existed in Japan and in Europe, it does not present traditional Japanese or European expression. Therefore, I would like to adopt Koike Kazuko’s approach, which says that from the start, ‘we never specified any aesthetic source for our design’, and now the style is a fusion of different designers who work for the company. She presents Mujirushi Ryohin’s products with the term ‘Super Normal’, coined by Fukasawa Naoto and Jasper Morrison in an exhibition they co-curated under that name.51 In the exhibition, Fukasawa and Morrison presented some 200 objects that have an ordinary or anonymous design devoid of any design gimmicks, pathos, or branding masks. The exhibition did not set out to present archetypical products from the history of design, but rather simple products like disposable plastic plates, which are often designed by an anonymous designer. Therefore, the objects in the exhibition were objects that do not embody the designer’s ego or a special expression of his personality. The Super Normal object is characterised and defined by absence. It has no identity (of a company, a brand, a nation), no originality, or anything that makes an impression. An object of this kind is based on deliberate ambivalence since its qualities cancel its presence, and despite (and due to) its everyday use, the object is often almost not sensed or seen. This definition can be applied to Mujirushi Ryohin’s products, which also aspire to be anonymous. First of all, the products and clothes do not present the company’s name or logo, nor is there a reference to the name of the designer who created the different products (even though some of these were designed by top designers). As such, the objects do not display sign value that demonstrates social, gender, class, or national information and identity. One interesting example is the Found Muji line, which reproduces objects that were found around the world by Mujirushi Ryohin’s designers. These are objects that were developed by anonymous designers as part of folk crafts (like a wooden bench on a street in China or a paper postal bag in France) and serve people naturally, without drawing attention to themselves. Fukasawa Naoto emphasises that Super Normal is a design that presents the essence of things and its style can be defined as ‘free of the mantle of design’. He suggests that Super Normal is the part that we ignore when we talk or think about the concept of ‘design’. Therefore, it does not represent anti-style but rather serves as a bridge between the concept of ‘design’, usually interpreted as something meant to be ‘innovative’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘exceptional’, and the term ‘normal’. Building on this notion, Fukasawa says that Super Normal is not minimalism but rather design meant to clean up our lives. These definitions are also typical of Mujirushi Ryohin’s products, which present the essence of each product. In an interview, Fukasawa Naoto mentions that some say that Mujirushi Ryohin’s designers never make any new products, but rather find products that already exist, and then go through the product’s

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Critical design in Japan design and m ­ anufacturing process but simply stop the production process one step before it is completed, meaning, before the decoration or styling are added to the product, thus reaching the product basis.52 Koike Kazuko adds: ‘When we first started working, all the products in the market were decorated, which was considered design, but design is not an action that simply adds or decorates something. We thought about design as “minus”, a process of reduction, which subtracts and strips down the products to their fundamental elements.’53 Fukasawa also defines the Super Normal object through the relationship between the object and the user, saying that these are objects that do not make an effort, do not pander to the user, and do not create a fetish. This type of aesthetics goes beyond optical pleasure to experiencing through other senses like touch. Since these are domestic objects that are part of our everyday life and our personality, their shapes stimulate our ordinary senses, evoking a feeling of home and a calm habitat. Morrison claims that this is a new type of beauty ideal, which is not an immediate beauty but layers of beauty formed through an instinctive use. In other words, the use of the object is what creates and grants aesthetic values, at times through touch or comfort, rather than the initial form. Fukasawa mentions the Japanese term aichaku, which means attachment, presenting it as a symbolic love for an object that does not stem from the function it fills but from what it is, namely, products that emphasise the essence and function and do not present a style that holds social or emotional information which serves the consumer in the creation of identity. This description also corresponds with the products of Mujirushi Ryohin, which can be perceived as a white canvas onto which consumers can map their own iden­tities.54 For this reason, Mujirushi Ryohin’s products are suitable for different populations, and do not target a segmented group that forms the brand tribe. As such, these are not minimalist products with a distinguished style that target certain people, but rather basic products with a fundamental design that defies the logic of fashion underlying consumer culture. However, despite the simple nondescript style of Mujirushi Ryohin’s products, this is hardly an underground fringe company. Quite the ­contrary – the company has positioned itself as one of the leading lifestyle companies in Japan, and owns stores in the most prestigious locations around the world, which, despite the agenda of the company’s designers, has created a desire for its products. Furthermore, while when seen individually the company’s products seem anonymous, when they are grouped together as an ensemble they create a differentiated look. In fact, the absence of any identifying or idiosyncratic mark becomes a recognised iden­tity in itself, a sophisticated trademark.55 By creating functional and nondescript products on the one hand, and setting up stores in prestigious locations on the other hand, Mujirushi

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Ryohin creates a new genre of products that undermines late consumer culture ideology and logic, while simultaneously joining forces with them. This is why it seems that the company blurs the distinction between prestigious sign value (manifested in the stores’ location) and the absence of sign value (manifested in the products’ design). This poses two questions: first, whether and how design and style that serve as a critique of late consumer values and introduce the idea of no-brand can also serve as a branding strategy in the late capitalist system? The second question is whether the initial protest has not been restrained under the ideology of late capitalism? To answer these questions, I will present how the style and sign of Mujirushi Ryohin was built by the design of the company’s advertising campaigns responsible for the branding, and what the company represents.

Mujirushi Ryohin advertising and the creation of its social sign Advertising uses style to add a new signifier to the products and thus turns products into signs that deliver social meaning. This is not simply a sales promotion tool. This semiotic sign-building mechanism establishes a new social meaning for commercial products and thus a language system for everyday interpersonal visual communication. Hara Kenya, who is also responsible for the company’s advertising, argues that while most advertising communication clarifies a point about the product, in some cases communication takes place when an empty vessel is offered to the audience and they supply the meaning. Accordingly, Mujirushi Ryohin’s advertising posters do not present a lucid message with clear values but instead use the notion of ‘emptiness’ as an advertising strategy.56 According to Hara, this kind of message was a result of the different reasons why customers like Mujirushi Ryohin’s products: some saw Mujirushi Ryohin as ecological, some liked its urban aesthetics, for some it was perceived as low cost, while for others it was the sophisticated design. There were those who neither liked nor disliked the products but used them out of habit because they ‘do the job’.57 The advertising message could not therefore represent any single message but was used to facilitate the mutual exchange of information between viewer and image by creating a capacious vessel that would accommodate all.58 Of course, the empty sign notion is not exclusive to Japanese culture; it is dominant in postmodern culture which is built on signs. Baudrillard describes anonymous graffiti with no political or social meaning as: burst[ing] into reality like a scream, an interjection, an anti-discourse, as the waste of all syntactic, poetic and political development, as the smallest radical element that cannot be caught by any organized discourse. Invincible due to their own poverty, they [certain terms used in graffiti] resist every interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything. In this

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Critical design in Japan way, with neither connotation nor denotation, they escape the principle of signification and, as empty signifiers, erupt into the sphere of the full signs of the city, dissolving it on contact.59

Baudrillard maintains that the concealment of the author’s identity renders ambiguity itself a reference, pointing to an identity that manages to escape normative naming systems and the organised discourse they represent. In that sense, the anonymous sign is an act that marks the reversal of all agreed-commercialised-sorting-cataloguing signs – a sign that is poor in content (of the critical kind) and has in itself become a revolutionary sign. The empty sign in consumer culture, therefore, has the power to generate social change, since it dissolves with its very presence the importance of signs and brands that demonstrate segmentation, categorisation, and consumed social identity. Mujirushi Ryohin’s style can be understood as offering an antidote to Japan’s visually cluttered and complex urban environment, engaging, according to Solomon and Dimmer, ‘in a parasitic and paradoxical relationship with the vulgar, complex urban environment, upon which it is ultimately dependent. For it is only by distinguishing itself from this context and by devaluing different aesthetic formations that it can itself appear as simple and tasteful.’60 Since Hara Kenya’s appointment as Mujirushi Ryohin’s art director, the company does not advertise much. The company designs posters and issues an annual media campaign with a comprehensive text that presents its vision, a newsletter, and a website. The first advertising campaign that Hara created for the company in 2003, the ‘Horizon’ campaign, exemplifies how Mujirushi Ryohin’s advertising does not construct sign value but rather offers an empty sign that presents nothing while simultaneously presenting everything. The ‘Horizon’ campaign advertising posters were photographed by Fujii Tamotsu at a few unidentified locations around the world.61 The image in the ads is a horizon line which divides the frame into two symmetrical upper and lower halves.62 It features no product, and the elements in the poster (sea, fields of flowers, clouds, houses, a human figure, sky) are neither significant nor symbolic. The ads have no slogan, and the sole text is the company’s name placed on the horizon. In his book Designing Design Hara argues that the photograph of the horizon provides ‘an empty vessel in epic proportions’.63 In Hara’s words: ‘The image of the horizon represents nothing in particular; on the contrary, it can accommodate everything. It gives an unobstructed view of everything in heaven and earth at once. It is an ultimate image capturing man and earth.’64 For Hara, it is not a landscape photo but an image of the horizon that functions as a vessel or an empty sign that people can fill with their own ideas and meanings, such as their different perceptions of Mujirushi Ryohin. Solomon and Dimmer give an example of the way that these ads allow each customer to superim-

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pose their own identity freely, saying that: ‘Paradoxically, these landscapes evoke different notions or responses in different cultural contexts: when consumed in Japan they will contribute to the global esteem of Mujirushi Ryohin, but the same imagery will come to embody all the properties of the typical Japanese Zen aesthetic when seen by knowledgeable Western consumers.’65 Thus Hara claims that the one word that sums up Mujirushi is not ‘simple’ but ‘emptiness’.66 But more importantly, Hara argues that the horizon serves as a symbolic image that allows for and nurtures his idea of ‘global rational value’, the basic value of the company’s vision.67 In 2004, the company launched the ‘House’ campaign, which featured photographs taken by Fujii Tamotsu of houses in unidentified locations around Africa.68 This campaign showed simple, basic houses in which people actively live their lives. The slogan read only ‘House’, as, according to Hara, these simple houses cannot be described in other words.69 The photos did not convey any particular or clear message regarding what a house should look like or what purpose it should serve. The house does not offer a specific style direction but is an empty sign for the concept of a simple house in which each individual can create their own lifestyle. The advertisements were accompanied by images in the company magazine showing individual products (such as a toothbrush), thus creating two equally indispensable visions: one displaying simplicity on a global scale, and the other showing Mujirushi Ryohin’s proposed lifestyle.70 In conclusion, Mujirushi Ryohin presents products that do not change, within the perpetually flux of the fashion world. The company’s aim is to create anonymous, no-brand products that do not manufacture an identity for their users and do not generate differentiation or follow the logic of fashion and planned obsolescence, and as such, Mujirushi Ryohin defies the core values of late capitalism and consumer culture within which it operates, functioning as both a participant and a protestor. The products and ads are designed without signs that contain social information and instead offer empty signs that not only refrain from generating a desire for the product, but also dissolve the meaning of brand name products purchased solely for their style and the social information they grant the consumer. As such, Mujirushi Ryohin’s style raises consumers’ awareness of a simple, basic, everyday, anti-brand life, offering instead an alternative to the lifestyle of the society of the spectacle.

Notes   1   2   3   4   5

S. Kamei, ‘The latest on Muji’, Brutus Casa, Tokyo: Magazine House (July 2012), 82. K. Hara, Designing Design (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015), p. 239. Ibid., p. 240. N. Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), pp. 325–7. Seiyu Stores (which changed its name to Seiyu in 1983) was formed as the supermarket arm of Seibu Ryutsu group and was a 100 per cent subsidiary of Seibu

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  6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Hyakkaten. The Seibu Ryutsu Group changed its name to Seibu Saison Group in 1985 and to Saison Group in 1990. By 1989, Seiyu was operating 258 retail outlets in Japan including department stores, general merchandising stores, supermarket chain stores, and convenience stores. Some examples of private products are: nihon seifun (flour), kaneka shoji (margarine), gunze (women stockings) and toyobo (cutter’s shirt). The Seiyu Line included products such as seiyu ochazuke konbu and seiyu tororo konbu. See S. Tsutsumi, Jōjō to Tōsō (Lyricism and Struggle) (Tokyo: Chuo Koronshinsha, 2012), pp. 591–604. ‘No-brand’ originally started with the French supermarket Carrefour in 1976, which offered products with no brand name and was later developed in the United States when Jewel-Osco launched the no-brand Generics in 1977. H. Nishikawa, ‘Mujirushi Ryohin no keieigaku (The management of Muji) part 1: Mujirushi Ryohin no tanjou (The birth of Mujirushi Ryohin)’, Hitotsubashi Business Review, 63:1 (2015), 151. Ibid., 151–6. Interview with Yasui Satoshi, chief designer at Mujirushi Ryohin design studio (Tel Aviv, 7 May 2015). In his memoir, Tsutsumi says: ‘At the beginning of 1980, I started to have doubts over the business approach which centered upon the department stores. Though I achieved my goal to modernise and sophisticate my Seibu department store … I started to see the shadow behind the glory. I had doubts over selling the famous brand goods at two or three times the price of other no-name goods that had the same qualities’, Tsutsumi, Jōjō to Tōsō, pp. 152–3. In his memoir, Tsutsumi recalled that his doubts started when he visited China under Mao’s regime and saw the people who were living meaningfully and blissfully without any fashion. After his visit to China he wrote the article about ‘the theory of distribution industry’ and started lecturing about industrial conditions at Tokyo University: ‘By reading Max Weber and Adam Smith again as a lecturer, I started to see myself more objectively as someone who was ambitious for the success of the company’, Tsutsumi Jōjō to Tōsō, pp. 591–604. See also Nishikawa, Mujirushi Ryohin no keieigaku, 152–3. Interview with Koike Kazuko, member of Mujirushi Ryohin advisory board (Tokyo, 17 September 2015). Later, fashion designer Masaru Amano was added to the advisory board. See Nishikawa, Mujirushi Ryohin no keieigaku, 153–5. Interview with Yasui Satoshi, chief designer at Mujirushi Ryohin design studio (Tel Aviv, 7 May 2015). Interview with Koike Kazuko. Ibid. Tsutsumi, Jōjō to Tōsō, pp. 591–604. Nishikawa, Mujirushi Ryohin no keieigaku, 154–5. Interview with Koike Kazuko. Ibid. Nishikawa, Mujirushi Ryohin no keieigaku, 154. The reason behind the cheap price was also explained in the maroon colour label on the packaging alongside the product’s name, size, etc. See Table no. 1 in Nishikawa, Mujirushi Ryohin no keieigaku, 156. Tsutsumi, Jōjō to Tōsō, pp. 591–604. Interview with Koike Kazuko. Tsutsumi, Jōjō to Tōsō, pp. 591–604. For more about the product development stages, see Nishikawa, Mujirushi Ryohin no keieigaku, 158–9.

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30 For detailed information about each product development stage, see ibid. 31 Ibid., 156–60. 32 The profit of 190 hundred million in the first half year of 1983 was 7.6 times the estimate. 33 Nishikawa, Mujirushi Ryohin no keieigaku, 161. 34 As of 2018, the company has 975 stores worldwide: 458 stores in Japan and 517 stores in other countries. 35 Hara, Designing Design, p. 236. 36 Ibid., p. 235. 37 Interview with Yasui Satoshi. 38 Interview with Sudo¯ Reiko, CEO and design director of Nuno cooperation and design textile for Mujirushi Ryohin (Jerusalem, 10 May 2015). 39 Interview with Yasui Satoshi. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Interview with Koike Kazuko. 43 Interview with Yasui Satoshi. 44 Images from these advertising campaign can be seen in: www.ndc.co.jp/hara/ works/2018/04/muji-a.html (accessed 25 February 2019). 45 Hara, Designing Design, pp. 272–7. 46 Ibid., p. 240. 47 Interview with Fukasawa Naoto, product designer at Mujirushi Ryohin (Tokyo, 18 September 2015). 48 Interview with Yasui Satoshi. 49 Interview with Fukasawa Naoto. 50 Japanese designers and architects (like Kenzo¯ Tange or Isamu Noguchi) tried to associate Japanese tradition with the Modernist language formulated after the Second World War with books like W. Gropius and T. Kenzo, Katsura: Tradition and Creation of Japanese Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960) (photographed by Ishimoto Yasuhiro and designed by Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer), with the aim of building a new Japanese language that draws on both traditions and presents a new direction for postwar Japanese architecture and design. However, while the objects of both styles – traditional Japanese and Modern European – are minimalist, austere, and based on values of simplicity, both styles stem from different origins and express different world views. In broad strokes, we can place the roots of Modernism in the ideas of the Industrial Revolution and the machine age that introduced efficiency and a new type of industrial aesthetics. This Modernism strove to transform class society and power relations based on Marxist ideas and to build a universal society through an anti-class aesthetics that demonstrates social equality. This aesthetics was based on basic geometric shapes (circle, triangle, and square), the use of basic industrial materials (metal, glass, concrete), and primary colours. These elements are of course vastly different from the ideas behind the minimalist aesthetics based on Zen Buddhist inspiration in the Muromachi period, which expressed Buddhist notions of clarity achieved by removing anything that is not essential, randomness expressed through asymmetry and irregularity (fukinsei), breaking from the formula or routine (datsuzoku), subtlety and suggestion or symbolism expressed by presenting only part of the whole that alludes to it, and of course, the use of natural materials that show the passage of time, in contrast with Modernism’s industrial materials. 51 N. Fukasawa and J. Morrison, Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2007). 52 Interview with Fukasawa Naoto. 53 Interview with Koike Kazuko. 54 E. Golani Solomon and C. Dimmer, ‘Below the minimal surface of Muji’, in M. Ghidoni (ed.), San Rocco 9: Monks and Monkeys (Geneva: San Rocco, 2014), p. 45.

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Critical design in Japan 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70

Ibid. Hara, Designing Design, pp. 241. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid. J. Baudrillard, ‘Kool killer or the insurrection of signs’, in J. Baudrillard (ed.), Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 2017 [1976]), pp. 76–84. Golani Solomon and Dimmer, ‘Below the minimal surface of Muji’, p. 45. The locations photographed in the poster included the salt flat called Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia and the prairies of Mongolia. The figure is a young woman from Uyuni and is a point in the infinite landscape. This information was not mentioned in the poster. For more about this campaign, see Hara, Designing Design, pp. 243–53. Images from this advertising campaign can be seen at: www.ndc.co.jp/hara/ works/2018/04/muji-a.html (accessed 25 February 2019). Hara, Designing Design, p. 243. Ibid. Golani Solomon and Dimmer, ‘Below the minimal surface of Muji’, p. 48. K. Hara, ‘Muji: Traditional Japanese beauty in modern form’, Brutus Casa, Tokyo: Magazine House (July 2012), 78–9. Hara, Designing Design, p. 243. The images were taken in Cameroon (a village called Deli) and Morocco; however, the ad does not reveal the location. Images from this advertising campaign can be seen at: www.ndc.co.jp/hara/works/2018/04/muji-a.html (accessed 25 February 2019). For more about the ‘House’ campaign, see Hara, Designing Design, pp. 254– 71. Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., p. 267.

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5 Hironen and the representation of the other

The objects designed in Japan between 1987 and 1995 by the designer duo Ronen Levin and O¯kawa Hiroyuki under the brand name Hironen sometimes look like a surrealist hallucination. Each of the objects is one of a kind, and they are presented in theatrical phantasmagorical scenes replete with all the objects needed for the total design of a space: armchairs, sofas, tables, chests of drawers, lamps, carpets, paintings, decorative artefacts, tableware, and even jewellery. Each of the objects demonstrates radical individualism, narcissism, and a private identity that points to itself as ‘other’ through decadent, erotic, grotesque, and often ludicrous style and visual expression. In the catalogue of one of their exhibitions, the curator and art critic Naomi Aviv wrote: From your first encounter with Hironen’s furniture, you stop thinking about furniture. You begin to think about strange libidinal creatures that compel you into awe. The shock effect dictates very instinctual viewing, which has little to do with the ‘objectness’ of the objects but rather with their mental-sexual energy. They symbolise people in the world of Hironen: an armchair, sofa or lamp possess a body, desires, sensing organs – nose, eyes, mouth, skin. A body that reverberates with its own desires, erotic fantasies and affections. Affections so perfect that you are tempted to believe that they are the true representatives of your secret desires. They will dwell with you and you will dwell in them, yet they will never have a full authentic existence – merely a representation of a literary existence, symbolic and fantastic, a fairy tale existence.1

To be sure, Hironen’s objects belong to the genre of design-art, and as such are more symbolic than functional. The wood armchair designed by O¯kawa and Levin is a wooden cube from which a small cube had been removed, a baby-cube born from the belly of the large cube to serve as a footstool. Of course, the designers themselves are aware that the armchair

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Critical design in Japan was not created with function or comfort in mind. It was not commissioned or designed for long sittings in one’s living room. The armchair was designed first and foremost to communicate a postmodern fairy tale animated in the objects: a large cube that had spawned a smaller cube, each has its exact function in life. The form of this design does not follow its function but rather the language that will serve the story that they wish to tell. Therefore, Hironen’s one of a kind objects are displayed in installations in which a carefully choreographed movement weaves relationships between the objects that tell a story. And so, the space also plays a vital and concrete role in the construction of the narrative and viewing experience, no less than the object’s line, form, material, and function. Before anything else, the conceptual object creates a theoretical claim formulated visually and materially. Walter Benjamin likened storytellers to designers and artisans, since like artisans, storytellers also process the raw material of their or others’ life experiences: ‘In fact one can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way.’2 For Levin: In contrast to the world of words, in design there is an object that necessarily generates a fetishistic relationship with the user. This fetishism to objet de désir creates a physical, often erotic, relationship compared with the relationship with words. Furthermore, using design I become a choreographer who dictates or at least offers people a role in the scene. The designed object is a Trojan horse of sorts, which the collector willingly brings into his home – the object masquerades as an objet d’art or even a functional object, but it holds meanings and subterfuges and allows me to infiltrate very intimate areas in the user’s psyche, like self-image, body perception, erotic fantasies, and ‘adjust’ them.3

Indeed, Hironen’s one of a kind objects and the scenes in which they are staged unfold different stories of unrealistic fantasies, of oddity, loneliness, otherness, and the place of the strange and different. They bring to the surface a subliminal world through which they touch on the need for love and acceptance and the futility of all things. This discourse of otherness establishes itself insidiously, through a fetishistic relationship formed between the user and the irregular objects, at the heart of hegemony – in the ‘living room’ of the collector, who is traditionally a person of a certain status and power. In order to present this ‘otherness’ in objects, Hironen adopted a transgressive visual strategy derived from two different sources that offered deviant erotica, the grotesque and ridiculous figures: the first was camp visual expression, rooted in the queer theory of the postmodern ‘other’. The second was the Japanese genre of ero-guro-nansensu (­erotic-grotesque-nonsense), iterated in bourgeois popular culture in different periods in Japan’s history, which also depicted unusual conducts.

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Queer theory was one of the avenues of postmodern critical theory that addressed gender. These theories pointed to the way is which ‘the other’ is presented as pure negation, as everything and anything that is different from the ‘self’ and incongruent with the established philosophical, psychological, or aesthetic convention of the ‘self’. These theories have shed light on the silenced areas in which the ‘other’ has no representation in language, culture, and politics in order to allow symbolic minorities and sub-cultures to have their voice and world view heard.4 By looking at binary models of masculinity and femininity, queer theory pointed to the fact that binary thinking is an arbitrary and aggressive fiction: not a biological reality but rather a cultural construct meant to invent the ‘normal’ or ‘right’ as the opposite of the ‘deviant’ or ‘pathological’. Aiming to generate social restitution and political change, queer activists tried to bring to the fore a new identity that is dynamic and fluid and does not stand as the opposite of binary categories of ‘normal’ or ‘heterosexual’.5 This type of thinking about ‘the other’ fascinated Hironen, because it stressed visual performativity (such as drag and masquerade) but also because it did not concern only gender but created a coalition of ‘others’, ‘foreigners’, and ‘marginal people’ in terms of sex, race, ethnicity, and class, in the presumption that these are not radically different from one another. Unusual, deviant, bizarre, and ridiculous behaviour was also presented by the different products of the Japanese ero-guro-nansensu genre. The genre, which was expressed in the Edo period through painting, theatre, and literature, portrayed bizarre erotic scenes alongside beheadings and murders. In the Taisho period, with the emergence of mass media, cafes, bars, and the era’s new energies, ero-guro-nansensu made its way to advertising, cabaret shows, and pornography that depicted the physical expressiveness and sexual promiscuity of the modern girl, alongside literature that offered mystery, horror, and grotesque stories. In the postwar era, the genre moved to the screen with films like In the Realm of the Senses or hentai anime.6 The combination of the foreign designer and the Japanese designer, who were also life partners, helped create the synergy between postmodern queer theory and local traditional thinking about the other. Ronen explains: We were foreigners [O¯kawa returned to Japan after spending several years in New York] and we had a different perspective on life in Japan that we wished to express: what it was like to feel foreign, to live in a culture that is not yours, to be an outsider in terms of language and in terms of gender. The feeling was that we were living in a very proper and bourgeois place, but beneath the surface, both in Japanese art and in our private lives, there was an erotic storm and a decadent lifestyle and we wanted to present what takes place beneath the surface.7

This fusion engendered a postmodern visual language that references fairy tales, prominent figures in the history of design, and hybrid design

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Critical design in Japan styles that formed a sensual performance where colonial Art Deco meets crystal chandeliers, Rococo meets fairy tales. These encounters offered a decadent visual expression that was full of pathos, in which the different and unusual were portrayed through elegant gestures, beauty, and decorativeness.

The inception of Hironen The brand Hironen started with the meeting between the Israeli designer Ronen Levin and the Japanese designer O¯kawa Hiroyuki in Tokyo in 1985. Ronen Levin, who never studied design, grew up in Tel Aviv. His fascination with Japan started in the early 1980s, after watching the Japanese Butoh dance show by the Sankai Juko group and films like The Woman in the Dunes, Muddy River, and In the Realm of the Senses. Around that time, he also came across erotic photographs of the author Yukio Mishima, and read his biography that used homoerotic aesthetics in a macho world of military rituals. All these ignited his imagination and galvanised an image of a culture imbued with erotic and fascinating visual expression. His interest in the culture took him to Japan, and in 1984 Ronen Levin landed in Tokyo, where he worked at odd jobs and came to know the culture by living and experiencing it. One of these jobs was as a host who dances and sings for women in a Japanese bar that was run by a transvestite. One day, when he arrived to work, recounts Ronen, he saw all the employees standing outside and realised that the club owner had been murdered by the Yakuza, who embalmed him alive with metres of duct tape. The grotesque murder against a gender-erotic background was evocative of Japanese ero-guro-nansensu stories and imagery (for example, the case of Abe Sada or the series of paintings 28 Famous Murders with Verse by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi) and rekindled Ronen’s fascination with Japanese grotesque erotic culture that flourished in the dark, outside of official Japanese styles of the time that ranged from traditional style, contemporary minimalism, and conceptual avant-garde. The encounter with the rich visual world of Japan led Levin to pursue architectural studies in London. Two weeks before leaving, Ronen met O¯kawa at a gay bar in Shinjuku. The two became a couple and moved to London together for Ronen’s degree. ‘In London,’ recounts Ronen, ‘we were very poor and lived in a squat in a poor and crime-infested neighbourhood near Clapham Common station, with immigrants from all over the world. When we had some money, we rented a small room on Soho’s Rupert Street, which at the time was a street of prostitution and strip clubs.’8 Since as immigrants they could not work in regular jobs, they started making jewellery from broken objects they found on the street: shards of glass, buttons, etc. Later, they used to go to Camden Market on weekends and buy cheap old cutlery, which they then turned into jewellery that they sold the following week-

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end. The unusual nature of the jewellery was matched by their sales technique. As foreigners, they had no work permit, and since they could not afford to rent a stall and street trading was illegal, Levin and O¯kawa used to walk around with big coats in which they stashed the pieces of jewellery and ‘flashed’ people to display the objects. Surprisingly, i-D magazine did an item on the two, and the independent fashion boutique Brown bought some pieces and put them on show. This led to an invitation to take part in the permanent display on the ‘designer world’ floor of the prestigious London department store Harvey Nichols. In the display, Levin and O¯kawa gave the jewellery the brand name Hironen (combining the first letters of their given names, Hiroyuki and Ronen). In 1987, Japanese agents arrived in London in search of trendy London designers for London Designer Month, which was taking place at the Japanese department store Komatsu in Ginza that year. The department store invited the couple to display their pieces alongside other Londonbased designers like Rifat Ozbec, Betty Jackson, and Jasper Conran. The couple returned to Tokyo to present the exhibition and one thing led to another. At first, the curator of Chimera Gallery offered them a solo exhibition of the jewellery. Later, Parco Department Store invited them to design an exhibition on Marlene Dietrich. One of the visitors who saw the exhibition was the owner of an Osaka bar named Coelacanth, who invited them to redesign the bar. When they started working on the design of the bar, they looked for interesting chairs but everything they found was too expensive for the project’s budget, and so they ended up designing all the furniture themselves. Since the walls were bare, Ronen created paintings that would later evolve into the series that would accompany the couple’s design installations. The bar’s exceptional design was featured in magazines, and the bar attracted the attention of Nakamuta Yo¯ichi, president of E&Y company and design editor, who offered the two a solo exhibition of jewellery and furniture. And so, in 1989, the duo opened their exhibition at Face Gallery, titled ‘To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor’. In 1991, E&Y Gallery had opened in Aoyama, where they had another exhibition titled ‘Faux-Fauve’. As early as 1991, Hironen represented Japan in the exhibition ‘Progetti e Territori’, held in Verona, Italy, on the occasion of Abitare il Tempo, after which they were invited to various group exhibitions that showcased Japanese design in the United States, Europe and Asia (New York, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Köln, Frankfurt, Seoul) alongside many group shows in Japan.9 The exhibition catapulted the duo to stardom in the Japanese design world of the early 1990s. They became regular guests in design magazines in Japan, and their works were the subject of articles in international newspapers and magazines such as Domus, Casa Bogue, Axis, and The New York Times, and were featured on CNN, in the 1993 International Design Yearbook, and in books such as Japan Design (1992) and 1000

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Critical design in Japan Chairs (1997).10 Their private home, which was designed in a surrealist style, became a hot spot of decadent parties, and the couple partied in Tokyo’s trendiest clubs with fashion designers, artists, and designers who came to Tokyo in the early 1990s, which had become a design centre and a mecca for architects and designers. This period was characterised by the economic bubble and a host of people who flaunted their wealth with expensive cars and flashy fashion alongside alcohol and drug-fuelled parties. Ronen recalls: There was a feeling of surplus. A feeling of drowning in plenty, submerged in a daze of overabundances. The period’s decadence was overwhelming – a rich and luxurious visual wealth. It had nothing to do with the visual cleanliness that I had learned about Japan before arriving there. Among others things, it seemed that there was an almost erotic desire and fetishism of objects. Hironen’s mission in those years was to externalise this eroticism and decadence and place it in the bourgeois living room. You have to remember that by the 1980s, even Rei Kawakubo’s avant-garde was already a bourgeois boutique in Aoyama, and we also wanted to rebel against this avant-garde.11

Hiroyoki O¯kawa adds about his goals in design: ‘I wanted to create amusing, good hearted objects. On the backdrop of the post-apocalyptic and deconstructivist visions that have filled the art world, and cold, soulless high-tech objects that filled the design world in the 1980s, I feel an almost moral obligation to come out with something that will act as a remedy for depression.’12 O¯kawa proclaims his desire to create things which are more ‘wagamama’ (egocentric, individualistic) and fewer things that declare themselves as being ‘social-cosmic’. O¯kawa speaks of the object’s essential quality as a conversation piece. The fusion between the very different biographies of the two – one raised in a Modernist culture rooted in Tel Aviv Bauhaus, and the other a descendant of Japanese Buddhist priests from the Shokenji sect – and the fact that neither had ever studied design, gave them artistic freedom as designers for whom no culture or aesthetic traditions are out of bounds. Rooted in the imagination, intuition, private fantasies, life experiences, and historic and literary references, their work generated a new language of postmodern aesthetic values, expressed in a hybrid style that created an aesthetic amalgamation of dialectical shapes, perceptions, approaches, and contents. This synthesis reflected their experiences and attitude towards life, while at the same time, it also responded to the decadent lifestyle during Japan’s economic bubble and to popular culture products celebrated as cultural icons during this era. As Levin explains: I was always attracted to decadent periods like Berlin, Shanghai, and Tokyo of the 1920s, as well as Versailles’ Rococo, since in these periods there was more acceptance of the other and the eccentric. In fact, in these periods, the deviant and the different enjoyed a special status. The Modernist movement and other subsequent ideologies clearly stated what was right and what was not right,

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what was beautiful and what was not, what is allowed and what is forbidden. Decadence, on the other hand, is a more inclusive style, for instance the genre of cabaret, which is based on eccentric figures like Josephine Baker, and other dandy figures of the era. Periods of ideology are rigid periods in which culture is uptight. Ironically, decadence is almost more human.13

Aviv described the works as: pieces that do not shrink from appearing glamorous and ridiculous, beautiful and ugly, solid and unstable, whole and defective, flowing and harmonious yet stiff and fixated. Sofas that are not ashamed, on the one hand, to wiggle with shameless abandon and, on the other hand, to act as self-righteously as a church confessional. Impertinent armchairs that decorate themselves with roses and stars and bright cloths and colours, and sombre chairs that yield to the material, and even worship it.14

I will present this symbolic style, which addresses otherness and challenges the repression of the deviant by social regulations and ideology that impose an identity that follows rigid social codes and cultural construction, through three scenes that incorporate different references: literary, historic, and stylistic. As a symbolic style, the function of this design by its very nature is to challenge thoughts and generate questions rather than offer solutions. As such, the scenes’ semiotic reading, while anchored in interviews with the designers, is open to interpretation and does not present a ‘single’ closed interpretation.

Rumpelstiltskin Utz-Li Gutz-Li is the title of two pudgy armchairs created in a practice that is closer to sculpture than design. The humpy armchairs have two horns that look like a wilted jester’s hat, and two arms curved in a different shape each, one of which drags on the floor like the train of a cape or a queen’s gown. The pudgy body has a human backside and stands on legs made of tree stumps, like prosthetics that end in metal legs, which look as though they were distorted by the armchair’s weight (see Figure 5.1). The armchairs were upholstered in velvet: one in star embodied purple and the other in yellow embroidered with roses. Both are made of foam polyurethane that had to be carved and then dressed in the upholstery, sewn as a dress in an organic silhouette on which the roses and stars were embroidered. Between the two armchairs stood a metal, leather, and glass star-shaped coffee table, supporting a lamp that emanated blue light with crystal drops. The table and lamp as a set are named Don’t Forget the Lapdog, a reference to ladies of leisure who sit with a groomed dog on their laps. The painting in the background, of two long-nosed women celebrating the birthday of a little boy wearing a clown’s hat, completed the installation. Aviv described the two armchairs, table, and lamp with the following words:

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Figure 5.1 Hironen, Utz-Li Gutz-Li, 1991. There’s something about that body – of the armchair, sofa, or lamp – that really touches your heart. What is that something? It’s the heart of the thing itself. The heart of the thing touches your heart. Not every object has a ‘body’, but very rarely does an object have a heart and libido as well as a body. Hironen’s objects have the developed body, heart, and libido of a swaggering peacock with tail feathers that does not succeed in weaving perfect eyes, or other grotesque figure of a courtier with a rich past in surrealist realms … Something in this ‘body’ – an artificial leg, a hump adorned with a rose, some dimple up on the buttock, a nose that grows and elongates and threatens to fondle your back with desire, a train that offers itself as a carpet for your revered feet – something grabs at your feelings. Perhaps like the way a beautiful body with a slight deformation or ‘aesthetic defect’ can wrap your desires around it.15

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The title given to the installation, Utz-Li Gutz-Li, is the Hebrew name of the German fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, titled after a fictional imp. The name represents the furniture’s first reference to a backdrop of a children’s play, where everything looks like the real thing, but is in fact a replica made from simple materials. In addition, through the reference to the name Rumpelstiltskin and to its literal meaning (‘little rattle stilt’), the set of armchairs introduces a discussion on the ‘functionality’ of style (in contrast to a chair’s traditional functionality) as transgressive, when it presents otherness, deviance, incongruence, and decadence that offer nothing other than style. Rumpelstiltskin is a story of deceit: the miller tells the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The nameless imp drives the plot when he helps the miller’s daughter to spin straw into gold in exchange for her jewellery. When she has no more jewellery to give, he asks for her firstborn child. The fairy tale describes an alchemical process of transforming straw into gold and greedy, insatiable characters. This relates to the emotional state of consumers in late consumer culture, who crave more and more brand names. The nameless imp in the folktale represents the Trickster, one of the archetypes in folktales, mythology, carnival, and religious literature, and according to Jung, the product of the collective unconsciousness. The Trickster is the archetype of reversal and manifests himself as an unusual many-faced character full of contradictions, such as a creating and shifting god, a trick-playing animal, a court jester, or a fool. These figures, which have no moral obligations, transgress the law, turn the tables on social rules while mocking the sacred and conventions, break social taboos, and revel in the fulfilment of forbidden desires. The Trickster often serves as comic relief in religious myths, uncovering the foolishness of people.16 His vulgar and sensational manners represent the unconscious qualities and the behaviours that society usually hides or forbids, namely sexuality, aggressiveness, and profanity.17 Jung claimed that the reiteration of the Trickster in folktales and fairy tales across different cultures demonstrates the vitality and power of this antisocial behaviour, and his figure allows the incorporation of demonic and primitive subject matters in culture. These are instinctual and primal subject matters, which were originally autonomous, and whose repression by culture could have potentially devastating consequences. Therefore, the appearance of the Trickster in culture is important as an outlet that allows a regulated expression of dark, denied, repressed and ‘other’ contents in the human psyche. The manifestation of the Trickster in the role of the jester and fool, in myths, fairy tales, theatre plays, carnivals, and drag shows, much like the products of Japanese ero-guro-nansensu, expresses our repressed shadow.18 The Utz-Li Gutz-Li set of armchairs also represents a spectacular clownish demonstration in an exceptional and unconventional style that is unlike anything we know. The armchairs, table, and lamps have no commitment to function, but only

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Critical design in Japan serve as an erotic or grotesque object that undermines the traditional perception of design’s social role. Like the Trickster and various court jesters, the exceptional style of Utz-Li Gutz-Li is an expression of unconventional thinking that expands our treatment of our experiences in the world and allows repressed contents to rise to the surface. Throughout the fairy tale, the imp Rumpelstiltskin is nameless; his name is only revealed at the end of the story, when he comes back for the firstborn son of the miller’s daughter, who is now queen. The queen offers to give him her entire fortune, but the imp is willing to let her keep her son only if she guesses his name. The revelation of the name by the miller’s daughter is comparable to the uncovering of the repressed shadow or her internal and unconscious motivation. The imp’s demand overwhelms her emotional world, but through the discovery and naming of the repressed, she manages to overpower him. Hironen presents the armchairs as the Trickster of the visual world, one that defies the formal Japanese styles and the social order from the very heart of the bourgeois living room. The two ask us to examine and accept the confusing identity it offers as a necessary step on the path to awareness, growth, and development represented through the behaviour of the court jester – the only one who is allowed to say anything he wishes. This installation showcased the power of the deviant and the abnormal, and not its weakness. ¯ kawa also present the difference in the armchairs through Levin and O the incongruence of the chairs with the context in which they are presented, like the homoerotic images that Mishima introduced into the macho world. As Levin recounts: I think that my objects look best when they feel like outsiders ... it might be connected to a memory that I have. After my grandmother died, I burrowed through her estate and found a photograph of her, taken shortly after they arrived in Palestine from Poland, via Belgium. In the photograph she is standing in a tailored suit, with gloves and a hat and a net veil ... in sand dunes. Tasselled in the sand dunes. Absolutely chic, absolutely wonderful and absolutely heart-breaking. I think that in everything I will ever do, I will always be aiming for the same impact that photograph had on me. That’s how my Utz-Li Gutz-Li armchair also feels: tasselled and dressed up in red velvet, with a long train, embroidered with gold stars, sitting in some emaciated space. Like a story of an eccentric countess who was exiled from Russia after the revolution, and now lives in a foreign country without title or status, but still carries her internal narrative, despite the circumstances.19

O¯kawa also talked about the connection between the design and his childhood memories. He recalls that when he was four years old, his grandfather carried him on his shoulders in the temple’s garden and showed him the last persimmon on the tree. ‘It is about to drop,’ his grandfather had told him, ‘this is the melancholy of fall. Can you feel it?’ O¯kawa tries to infuse the objects that he designs with this melancholy, which for him

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Figure 5.2  Ronen Levin, Five O’clock Orange, 1989.

represents a nostalgic experience. The installation Utz-Li Gutz-Li offers this juxtaposition of a heart-breaking scene and a sublime scene, a grotesque style and the beautiful, the absurd and the feasible. It seems these objects are touching because while on the one hand they are ‘deviant’ and do not find their place, they nevertheless put their best face forward, as though they are ‘the knights of style’. Levin explains this interweaving of the grotesque with the stylish: ‘The willingness to be ludicrous in order to win love is a point that radiates permanent pain. The actual attempt to be an artist seems heart-breaking and pathetic no matter which art we are talking about. After all, even Joseph Beuys was a court jester.’20 The Utz-Li Gutz-Li installation is an incarnation of Levin’s painted images (see Figure 5.2). As explained by Aviv: It is the paintings – which impart complete congruence and are an inseparable part of every setting that Hironen produces – that remind the viewer the most that the world in question is designed. In other words, the paintings are more ‘designed’ than the designed objects, while the objects are more picturesque than the paintings. The paintings complete the mise-en-scène. If it is not clear how one should behave in the company of the objects, the paintings come along and function as stage directions. How to dress near them, how to put on makeup and arrange one’s hair, what to eat, how to hold the porcelain cup,

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Critical design in Japan in what position to hold one’s head, how high to lift one’s nose; how to relate to one another, what is the range of permitted gestures and mannerisms. The etiquette of being in their presence. It is in the paintings that one finds the most acute expression of existential pain, which is linked to the longing for the beautiful and with a feeling of abnormality. Always the same women, forever sitting round a table. Always huge noses, like Cyrano de Bergerac. What looks like a relaxed, stylized tea-party induces nervousness and unease.21

Levin describes himself as a choreographer who stages a scene and asks himself: ‘Who sits there?’ ‘How do you sit there?’ ‘What type of sitting do the chairs generate?’ The figures he casts have to be simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, like the women in his paintings. To a certain degree, the theatrical scene of Utz-Li Gutz-Li is Hironen’s confession on the world of folly, a hedonistic world that feels empty but is maintained religiously, all sexy and ‘stylish’. A world where people have nothing but style, in which the style is not the means but a goal. Levin describes Tokyo in the 1990s as ‘a time in which even decadence was an amusement and a toy and people were decadent wannabes’.22 As celebrities in Tokyo’s bubble years, Levin and O¯kawa lived with the feeling that they sat and babbled in these tea parties, trying to extract some sort of existential meaning from them, being seduced by them as though their vanities were a raison d’être, but at the same time they also undermined them through self-irony and ridicule. In Levin’s words: It seems to me so painful to be a part of such a world, a fraternity of people united on the basis of one strange, dominant detail: their large nose, it’s an oddity that tyrannises – the nose decides for you. It’s a fatalistic feeling, like my elegant grandmother in the dunes. Then I try to examine what group I ‘belong to’: Jew, Israeli, stranger in Tokyo, artist. Each of these affiliation groups seems to me like a club of people who are ruled by their oddities, who sit together and hold melancholy tea parties.23

O¯kawa adds: Ronen speaks of melancholy, but melancholy is not necessarily an expression of existential despair. It can still be a lyrical experience, which can also cause pleasant nostalgic remembering. These are sensations that I feel obligated to summon out of the oblivion after years of denying and rejecting them. Yet it’s still important to maintain the thin line between kitschy sentimentality and the refined touching of spiritual–mental–emotional focal points.24

Like the installation’s title, which references the archetype of the Trickster that challenges social rules and conventions, the installation itself blurs the boundaries between art and design, raising awareness to the deviant and presenting a style that lies between the glamorous and the grotesque, like a crippled glamorous drag queen or a heartbreakingly ridiculous hunchbacked count. Through style, the installation attempts to push the boundaries of design and the imagination without committing to social norms.

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Figure 5.3 Hironen, To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor, 1991.

To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor is the name of a set of armchairs, table, carpet, chandelier, mirror, and painting. This set constitutes a discussion on the doctrine of Adolf Loos (1870–1933), as well as on the psycho-erotic role of the self-aware ornament and the meaning of decadent styles versus ideological styles(see Figure 5.3).25 The installation’s title alludes to a short story by J. D. Salinger, ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’, about a young girl from an aristocratic family, who has lost both her parents and is trying to preserve the legacy of her erudite father. This is manifested in her demeanour, which is unusual for a girl her age, her earnestness, and

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Critical design in Japan her vocabulary. The story’s title is derived from her seemingly extensive and rich vocabulary, which she often uses incorrectly and in the wrong context. Like the girl who uses big words and tries to be what she is not, the design of the set of chairs references colonialist Oriental Art Deco and emulates a European aristocratic style. In other words, like the girl’s manner of speaking, the design strives to use performance (of a figure of speech or a visual style) to gain identity through the emulation of social codes, which are severed from their essence. Both succumb to structured social categories that determine how things are supposed to sound and look but are essentially jarring. The allusion to Adolf Loos presents the postmodern designer duo’s ambivalent relationship with the perception of Adolf Loos. Considered one of the forerunners of European Modernism, Loos is remembered mostly for his essay ‘Ornament and Crime’, published in French in Les Cahiers d’aujourd’hui in 1913 and in German in Frankfurter Zeitung in 1929.26 In his essay, Adolf Loos presented ornamentation in design as a childish need that is only legitimate at an early stage of cultural development, writing: ‘I can accept the African’s ornament, the Persian’s, the Slovak peasant woman’s, my shoemaker’s, for it provides the high point of their existence, which they have no other means of achieving … What is natural to the Papuan or the child is a sign of degeneracy in a modern adult.’27 He continues: ‘Do you not see the greatness of our age resides in our very inability to create new ornament? We have gone beyond ornament, we have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity … The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use.’28 Loos’s criticism was directed mostly at artists like Klimt and architects like Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich, his contemporaries from the Vienna Secession group: ‘The Modern ornament artist lags behind or is a pathological case … Cultural people find them intolerable straight away … Where are Otto Eckmann’s works today? Where will Olbrich’s be in ten years’ time? Modern ornament has no parents and no offspring, no past and no future.’29 Alongside the war against ornament, which Hironen celebrated as a postmodern element, Loos also disparaged the practice of naming furniture: ‘Soon in the Vienna Museum of Applied Art there was a sideboard called “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,” soon there were cupboards with names like “The Bewitched Princess,” referring to the decoration with which these unfortunate pieces were covered.’30 Defiantly, Hironen named their set of chairs after Loos. Alongside his war against the use of ornament by his contemporaneous Vienna Secession group, Loos also criticised the Neoclassic doctrine and the use of redundant and empty ornaments it had left in its wake. In 1908, Loos published an attack on the buildings complex in Vienna’s Ringstrasse. This row of buildings replaced the ancient military

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wall of Vienna with Neoclassic structures that created a social and cultural border. Loos saw these buildings as flamboyant: ‘Whatever the Italy of the Renaissance produced in the way of lordly palaces was plundered in order to conjure up as if by magic a new Vienna for Her Majesty the Mob. A new Vienna where only those people lived who could afford to occupy an entire palace from socle to cornice line.’31 Loos considered ornament to be a symptom of moral weakness, writing: ‘These people who lag behind are slowing down the cultural development of the nations and of humanity.’32 However, in contrast to Loos’s image as the father of Modernism, rooted in his attack on decorative style, it should be noted that Loos also objected to the industrial aesthetics that would later form the heart of the Modernist movement. He objected to the artists in the Wiener Werkstätte and the Deutscher Werkbund, who laid the foundations for industrial design and criticised them for trying to merge art with craft and industry, and to blur the line between the art world and everyday objects. For him, these pairings were culturally inconceivable and therefore must remain separate. In contrast with the Modernist movement that was built on the principles of new industry and the aesthetics of the machines, Loos admired craftspeople and considered rich materials and fine artisanship to be superior to any ornament. He reproached the artisans of the Wiener Werkstätte and the Deutscher Werkbund, stating that their support of the development of mechanical duplication went against the expression of human values and individuality in objects. The installation To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor responds to Loos’ two sides: on the one hand, the critic of the use of ornament, since the set of chairs has a decorative ornamental aspect, simulating a fortress on the top of a fairy tale style castle; on the other hand, the set was made from a rich material (a birdseye maple veneer) and required a high level of skill to hand make a curve that is simultaneously horizontal and vertical in the back of the sofa and armchairs – something that Loos would have respected and appreciated. The cushions and upholstery also speak in both languages: they are covered with an extravagant bridal silk satin, which Loos would have disliked, however the fabric is solid white, in the style that Loos advocated.33 The reference to skilled artisanship and gaudy ornament in the same breath, reminds us that Loos himself, while considered a forefather of Modernism, never belonged to any distinct architectural school, and was not thrilled with the simplistic manner in which his writing was embraced. More than a need in new shapes, Loos advocated a change in cultural spirit, writing: ‘New forms? How dull! It is the new spirit that matters. Even out of old forms it will fashion what we new men need.’34 Indeed, the new spirit stood at the centre of Loos’ interest, and therefore, in addition to his architectural practice, he also engaged in critical writing in several of Vienna’s newspapers and magazines, including Die Zeit, Die Wage, and Wiener Rundschau. In fact, Loos first made a name for himself as a

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Critical design in Japan cultural critic, rather than as an architect. His breakthrough as a journalist came in a series of articles published in the Neue Freie Presse, the city’s most respected daily newspaper, in 1898–99. Like much later postmodern critics such as Roland Barthes, Loos measured cultural life by examining its vital signs via popular aspect of everyday life – furniture, fashion, clothing, household utensils, plumbing, travelling, ceramics, interior design, tailoring, table manners, current affairs, hairstyles, and architecture. His observations on these subjects were not limited to aesthetics but reviewed the culture that shaped them and reflected Loos’s aspiration for a total cultural transformation and a change in everyday life. Thus, for instance, in a manner that was ahead of his time, Loos understood that fashion was a channel for cultural research, and wrote about men’s fashion, women’s fashion, and even underwear. He also rejected the hierarchisation of architecture and fashion (a mix of disciplines that is also present in Hironen’s work in the use of a bridal fabric for upholstery), and thought that the shade that is appropriate for the material that covers a building can help with the selection of the hue for a dancer’s undergarments.35 The installation To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor explores Loos’ complex personality and the ambivalent relationship of the postmodern artists with this cultural critic and what he represents – the objection to the association that Loos made between ornament and crime, or as he phrased it: ‘ornament was once synonymous with beautiful, but thanks to my life’s work it now means inferior’.36 The decorative set of chairs defies Loos’ claim that a civilised man who ‘goes to the Ninth Symphony and then sits down to design a wallpaper pattern is either a fraud or a degenerate’.37 As postmodern artists, Hironen have a different understanding of the ­psycho-erotic function of the self-aware ornament in art and design. For them, the question of what is an ornament and when is it over the top are a matter of taste, common sense, and stylistic inclination. Levin explains: If there are details that are required in order to tell your ‘tale’, they should not be treated as ornament but as essential, vital forms. We have no fear of empty surface, sometimes they are absolutely necessary to us; it’s just that sometimes there is a need for embroidered roses to complete the particular story. Ironically the artistic language that speaks to us the most is Minimalism, and when we say Minimalism we think of values like ‘form is content’, but more like the way it exists in Japanese aesthetics. Only our ‘stories’ are a little less laconic than the story of a drop on a persimmon leaf in a Haiku. There are forms whose emanation from function does not serve our ambition. No one can convince us that the embroidered stars or the hump on one of our armchairs are ‘extravagant ornaments’. It is true that our insistence on them may make production more expensive as Loos argued, but psychoanalysis with a specialist is more expensive than going to a novice psychologist. Our need to express ourselves is sensual. Literary or erotic language cannot testify to intellectual infirmity, just as a lack of ornament poetics does not necessarily attest to intellectual vigour.38

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The presentation of the fraught relationship between aesthetic, taste, and class also points to decorative style as a marker of the identity of the other. In other works, Hironen agree with Loos that non-European people or lower social classes have a different and decorative style, but they do not see this preference for ornament as a part of an early stage of cultural evolution. For them, ornaments point to an alternative identity to that of the white European male, whose ‘proper’ culture is represented by a clean style. The clean style, as it was presented by Loos, strove to form cultural uniformity and was meant to present the ‘right’ as the opposite of the pathological or the uncivilised. However, from a postmodern perspective, the clean style is just another style in the supermarket of styles that indicates a certain identity, but is by no means the opposite of ornament, and is certainly not a style that is superior to others. The set of chairs To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor presents a decorative style not as a moral weakness but as a force that presents the other whose identity has been denied. With that, the installation sets in motion a discussion on the relationship between Modernism – which viewed itself as humanist but in fact created an ideology that was not tolerant towards the other, rejecting vibrant or sexual identity via a stylistic performance that represses non-standard identity – and the postmodern and decadent style, which is inclusive of the different and the other. However, despite the ‘squalor’ of Loos’ doctrine, Hironen also have an admiration for the man who was ahead of his time and linked fashion and architecture, someone who as early as the turn of the century realised that culture is in fact constructed of ‘low’ everyday objects, and for his struggle to display the identity of his otherness, even if it is different from that of Hironen. Like Hironen’s defiant incorporation of a ‘different’ style in a disharmonious context, Loos also set the exceptional in an incongruent surrounding. For instance, Looshaus (1909–11), located in Michaelerplatz – one of the bustling squares in the heart of Vienna, across from the eclectic and ornate Imperial Palace of Franz Joseph I – was designed in a spartan style that stands out against its surroundings. The building infuriated not only the Emperor, who ordered the curtains of the wing opposite Looshaus to always be drawn so he wouldn’t have to look at it, but also the young painter Adolf Hitler, who in one of his watercolours of the square replaced it with a fictional baroque structure.39 Loos also published a journal titled Das Andere (The Other) which was aimed at introducing Anglo-Saxon culture to Austria.40 While Loos’ ‘other’ is different from that of Hironen’s, his interest in the figure of the other in the premodern period allows Hironen to reflect on the transformation of the perception of the other throughout the twentieth century. It is worth noting that at the same time, Hironen describe with admiration a villa that Loos had planned for Josephine Baker (which was never built) and the Elephant Trunk Table he designed in 1900 from Vienna Oak, brass, and marble, both of which

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Critical design in Japan were ornate. This ­discussion extricates Loos of his one-dimensional image as the forerunner of Modernism and showcases his multifaceted figure and identity, since from a postmodern perspective, every subject is constructed from a collection of not necessarily coherent identities, some of which present ‘other’ parts of one’s personality. In addition, Hironen had a particular interest in Loos’ incorporation of writing and design, since Levin started his career as a dance critic, food critic, and culture columnist in Israeli daily newspapers (Haaretz and Koteret Rashit), writing in a style that was close to that of Loos.41 For Hironen, writing and design are simply different ways of communicating a narrative. Beyond this set of chairs, Hironen presented a series of decorative objects, each pointing to a different identity. For instance, the Pi-Isu chair (whose name is a pun related to (artistic) piece, peace, and the Japanese word for chair, isu) is made of brushed Nirosta inlaid with glass domes in a technique borrowed from the world of luxury jewellery (see Figure 5.4). The PU leather upholstered chair was supported by thin hook-like legs. A lamp, screen, and white dove that symbolises peace completed the installation. The chair, which looks like a giant piece of jewellery that conflates high and low (industrial boiler inlaid like jewels) is nonsensical, ridiculous, meaningless, and seems like obsession for obsession’s sake. It harks back to a decadent time, when jewellery that symbolised an individual’s identity became more prominent and seemed jocular, florid, graceful and playful.42 In contrast, the Uni-Chair was made of carved polyurethane foam covered with a nude colour synthetic upholstery fabric (see Figure 5.5). Its legs, which were four cones upholstered in the same material, seemed as though they multiplied uncontrollably to create an ornamental element that ended up covering the entire chair, creating a hedgehog of sorts. The chair was completed by a round footstool, which looked like a baby hedgehog that has yet to grow legs and spines. Combined with the Uni-Lamp, they also alluded to torture contraptions or S&M aesthetics. Alongside these creations, Hironen displayed the table Kinoko that referenced Art Deco aesthetics and the Poko lamp, both made of the same fiberglass frame. Kinoko was painted yellow while Poko was gilded (see Figures 5.6 and 5.7). Both are blistered simple Duralex soy bowls that allowed light to shine through them. The clash between Art Deco and the dark style of Poko demonstrated how the same shape can gain different meanings in different contexts.

Biedermeier The installation Biedermeier presents a bourgeois living room comprising a carpet, two chairs, two chests of drawers, two vases, and a painting (see Figure 5.8). The scene alludes to a design style created for the middle class that emerged in Europe in 1815–48 – years of political stability, indus-

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Figure 5.4 Hironen, Pi-Isu, 1994.

trialisation, and urbanisation. Biedermeier style encompasses ceramics, glassware, jewellery, textile, furniture, and art created in this period of calm, which communicated the values of this new class: the emergence of the domestic sphere as a place of familial intimacy.43 The style presented

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Figure 5.5 Hironen, Uni-Chair, 1992. 25/02/2020 08:24



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Figure 5.6 Hironen, Kinoko, 1992.

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Figure 5.7 Hironen, Poko, 1992.

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Figure 5.8 Hironen, Biedermeier, 1991.

the new standard of living and stability of the new class as a marker of the respectability and facade of a calm and peaceful life. The paintings that completed the interior design often depicted memories, heritage, and family heirlooms. The new style also presented the peaceful and conservative world view of the bourgeoisie and was considered an expression of liberalism, and its social proclamation of new self-fulfilment, civil emancipation, and patriotic romanticism.44 These values were demonstrated via different artefacts created by Central European craftspeople, who translated, simplified, and stripped French aristocratic furniture of its decoration and offered cheaper, lighter, and brighter versions. The objects’ style exhibited the shift and conceptual conflict between Neoclassicism,

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Critical design in Japan ­ anifested in the Directoire style, and Romanticism, manifested in the m Empire style.45 The new style expressed the social zeitgeist of cosiness, comfort, and harmony between function and natural beauty that represented the bourgeoisie.46 Biedermeier became very fashionable in the postmodern era, when architects such as Robert Venturi, Charles Jenks, and Michael Graves used its design as the inspiration for their own lines of contemporary furniture. However, Hironen used the style for critical argument against the false facade that the bourgeois lifestyle presented. As such, the installation undermined the values and narrative of the bourgeoisie as they were constructed via nineteenth-century objects. The installation stood on a carpet whose fringes (which normally surround the edges) were moved to its centre. The way that the fringe at the centre of the carpet was parted transformed it into an erotic element, bringing into the respectable bourgeois living room the theme of sex, which had been banished to other rooms and considered taboo. The chairs themselves are covered by bourgeois and refined pearl-coloured silk and present a seemingly elegant Biedermeier expression. However, while original Biedermeier chairs were designed to ‘sit well’ with the bourgeoisie, in Hironen’s Biedermeier the front legs (the facade) of the seats have the same shape and are made from the same material (wood) as the original Biedermeier chairs, but look like crudely attached prosthetics. The more hidden back leg is a dagger that pierces through the seat all the way to the floor, wounding the carpet. These are not ‘real’ legs and certainly not stable ones. Six wood rolls emerge from the dagger, serving as an uncomfortable back support. And so, while the chair maintains a Biedermeier appearance rooted in values of comfort, cosiness, and status, it is in fact unstable (supported by three legs), uncomfortable (wood rolls as back support), and not cosy (constructed of violent imagery), thus destabilising bourgeois serenity. The installation subverts the meaning of the term Biedermeier, transforming it into a critique on the bourgeois facade, which despite its silk upholstery, stands on a precarious and fragile structure. Each chair is accompanied by a chest of drawers built as an inverted pyramid that was cut into three sections, connected by metal rods. The chest contains two drawers topped by a round glass tray that supports a blue vase with a pattern of white clouds. The vase is cut as a spiral and cannot contain water and therefore can only be used for dry or artificial flowers. The two chairs flank a portrait painting; in contrast to Biedermeier portraits that featured the family’s ancestors and status symbols, this is a painting of a ridiculous long-nosed woman sitting alone at a table with a pitcher, one loquat, and a dead fish. The installation’s title also refers to the actual name Biedermeier, which in itself was born as a satire, written by two liberal intellectuals, on a bourgeoisie that is concerned with its comfort but is in fact uncultured. The two German writers, Ludwig Eichrodt and Adolf Kussmaul, used the

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pen name Gottlieb Biedermeier to publish humorous poems in the Munich journal, Fliegende Blatter. Their humorous poems mocked the style of Samuel Friedrich Sauter, a small-town schoolteacher who wrote his views about duty, authority, and order and his satisfaction with his destiny as an insignificant man. They characterised Gottlieb Biedermeier as a well-to-do upstanding middle-class man without culture or intellectual ambitions.47 His only desire was to work out his own personal problems without any particular political or cultural interests except the preservation of his own economic stability and domestic tranquillity.48 Like Ludwig Eichrodt and Adolf Kussmaul, who used the name Biedermeier to offer a critical satire on bourgeois life, Hironen’s erotic carpet, ridiculous portrait, and precarious chairs present their critique on a bourgeoisie that used stylistic performance to construct a new social category, whose values were domestic bliss and respectability. These values became dominant and repressive, and intolerant of other values, certainly not those of social misfits. By undermining the symbols of the bourgeoisie, Hironen points to the dissonance between the calm exterior of the domestic sphere that the bourgeoisie puts up while sweeping the dramas and tragedies that are a part of any family life under the carpet. The installation brings to the fore the gap between the conservative bourgeois image and the unstable, volatile reality. Beyond the Biedermeier scene, Hironen referenced other historical styles in an attempt to expose the false identity that they give to their users. Thus, for example, the Love Seat, made of birdseye maple, alludes to the historical love seat that illustrates the blissful relationship of the bourgeois couple (see Figure 5.9). Hironen’s Love Seat undermines this performance: the two chairs are constructed as two boxes, which at first look identical but are in fact dissimilar. Each of the boxes has only two legs, and so, like a couple, they depend on one another for stability. When they are connected, a small window is formed between the two boxes, allowing the couple to communicate with one another. The structure recounts the ethos of modern romantic relationships, in which each partner has a small closed world of their own, and a small window of communication. At the same time, they need one another in order to stand and function. Hironen’s Tiffany lamp alludes to traditional Japanese lanterns in its shape, while its name references the Tiffany lamps that came to embody the American bourgeoisie, even though they were created as part of the French Art Nouveau style that emerged from the encounter with Japonism and Japanese aesthetics (see Figure 5.10). The lamp, composed of a metal frame covered with translucent fiberglass, also points to the Japanese origins of the symbols of the American bourgeoisie.49 The Speedo chair, made of white geometric shapes, hints at Modernism with its typical formal cleanliness and logical structure, while shifting the hand rests to different directions, thus creating asymmetry in the chair’s

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Figure 5.9 Hironen, Love Seat, 1995.

legs. The Modernist shapes in this chair are pulled apart and recompiled in a disjointed manner (see Figure 5.11). In conclusion, Hironen’s installations staged scenes that depicted the designers’ obsession with pushing the envelope of performance and style, using them to portray complex, dark, and at times even violent relationships between the erotic and the grotesque, the stylish and the ridiculous, the bourgeois and the other, decadent world views and ideological ones. These critical ‘stories’ present the place and importance of ‘the other’ in society and allow repressed contents to come to the fore. At the same time, they also address the age of reason from the nineteenth century to Modernism, which was characterised by a fear of the dark side in the

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Figure 5.10 Hironen, Tiffany, 1992.

human psyche and wished to repress this side in the individual and in culture. The stories that the installations present are derived from a private place and sensibility, yet tell universal stories and radiate ­communicability,

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kindness, compassion, and good nature. The ideas of presenting the other, the foreigner, and the socially ridiculed are manifested via a transgressive visual expression that was born underground in queer subcultures, conflated with the surreal, bizarre, and macabre atmosphere characteristic of Japanese ero-guro-nansensu. However, the scenes and objects do not present the queer per se or ero-guro-nansensu horror stories but only build on what these ideas allow to take place in culture, and with that strive to present the identity of the deviant, whoever and wherever they are, and the underlying dark side of the human psyche. Through this unique visual expression and through the deconstruction, selection, and reconstruction of composition, symbolism, and ornamentation of historical visual narratives that express, each in its own way, a different social category, the designers created stylistic categories that have new meanings. The structural changes formulate stories with new contents. The aim of the new stylistic categories was to bring to the fore and criticise the cultural construction aimed at binary categories of design versus art, ornamental versus minimalist, functionality versus decoration, as fictions concocted to create the ‘right’ style and represent the ‘right’ civilised person as opposed to the other and the different. In his essay, ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’, written in 1939 at the height of Modernism, Clement Greenberg differentiated between kitsch and avantgarde as two parallel cultural categories.50 While avant-garde undermines the values of bourgeois society and attacks consumer culture, kitsch is the by-product of industrialisation and serves as an inferior substitute for art, striving to amplify the consumer’s emotional experience as a means of entertaining the masses. Kitsch borrows markers, strategies, actions, and images from high art and reconstructs them within an industrial productive system. According to Greenberg, who held a Marxist world view, these categories correspond with and define the social gap between the poor, exploited, minority and the ruling minority, since the consumption of high culture belongs to an educated affluent class, while kitsch can be enjoyed without any intellectual effort, and is therefore preferred by the masses. Consequently, kitsch is often used by the government and those in power in capitalist society as a tool for preserving society’s values. Hironen use a postmodern strategy to undermine the construction of these Modernist categories and blur the lines between them, while creating a new category of self-aware kitsch, whose awareness renders it subversive – an intellectual avant-garde kitsch. Through this hybrid style, Hironen’s installations engage with the intrinsic danger of the use of basic aesthetic concepts and their attribution to social categories (for instance the association of a clean Minimalist style with higher class and cultural evolution). Their aim was not to present a ‘new’ ideological model, which includes a set of generalisations and conceptualisations of signs and signified that would supposedly facilitate the understanding of things as they ‘really’ are, but

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Critical design in Japan rather to deconstruct the authoritative positions of power of the so-called ‘right’ styles, to raise questions concerning the mode of operation of different social categories and oppressive systems, and to look for new modes of operation through which to create new connections and associations. In other words, they do not serve merely as models of thought and style that help examine the hegemonic structures but also introduce other options for understanding and constructing the world. The act of presenting this unusual visual expression was carried out in Aoyama – the epicentre of the Japanese bourgeoisie in the 1990s. Placing these objects centre stage constituted a strategy for creating a reversal of values, in which the demeaning meaning of the other as strange, eccentric, and shady, acquired a new and positive meaning that exuded power and luxury and presented the new status of the other in society via various styles, as a strategy for a new political and social tolerance.

Notes   1 N. Aviv, Hironen: For Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor (exhibition catalogue) (Tel Aviv: Tzifha International, 1996), p. 64.   2 W. Benjamin, ‘The story teller’, in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections/Walter Benjamin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 108.   3 Interview with Ronen Levin (Tel Aviv, 26 March 2016).   4 Many postmodern theories addressed the notion of ‘the other’. Feminist theory, for instance, saw ‘the other’ as a liberating element that underlines the difference between women and men but also the diversity within the feminine subject herself. Post-colonial theories demonstrated how the geographic ‘other’ (like ‘the Orient’) is invented and imagined as different and dangerous in order to formulate European thinking as ‘right’. The aim of these theories was to engender a political discourse that tackled the other’s exclusion mechanisms.   5 J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1999); J. Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).   6 In the 1920s–40s, the expression ero-guro-nansensu became a catchphrase in the press, reflecting the tempo and vitality of the culture, which included cafes, cabaret, the new sexual energies of the modern girl. The emergence of mass culture – including the mass media with new ads, pornography, cinema, magazines that sell illusions, the emergence of new grotesque social practices – gave a stage for humour and a carefree outlook on life. The new tempo of the period was described by Kawabata Yasunari in the 1930s: ‘eroticism and nonsense and speed and humor like social commentary cartoons and Jazz songs and women’s legs’. Authors like Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ and Edogawa Ranpo were pioneers of this style, combining elements like mystery, horror, grotesque, pornography, cafes, and revues. See M. Silverberg, Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 28–33; Jim Reichert, ‘Deviance and social Darwinism in Edogawa Ranpo’s erotic-grotesque thriller Koto no O¯ni’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 27:1 (2001), 113–14.   7 Interview with Ronen Levin (Tel Aviv, 26 March 2016).   8 Ibid.   9 During the late 1980s and 1990s, Hironen was featured in many exhibitions in Japan and abroad as a Japanese design brand. Partial list of exhibitions includes:

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‘Seibu – Designers World’ (group exhibition) 1989, ‘Ginza Wacol Art Space’ (group exhibition) 1989, ‘Ozone Art Space (Tokyo) 1989, ‘Chimera Gallery’ (solo exhibition, Tokyo) 1989, ‘Face Gallery’ (solo exhibition, Tokyo) 1990, ‘Progetti e Territori’, 1991 (representing Japan, Abitare il Tempo, Verona), ‘Seibu Shibuya Walking Gallery’ (solo exhibition, Tokyo) 1991, ‘ICFF’ (New York) 1991, ‘Via’ (Paris) 1991, ‘The Earth Gallery’ (group exhibition) 1992, ‘Interior Theater’ (solo exhibition, Fukuoka) 1992, ‘Komatsu Ginza’ (group exhibition) 1992, ‘Vitra Plus’ (group exhibition, Tokyo Design Center) 1992, ‘Komatsu Ginza’ (solo exhibition) 1993, ‘E&Y Gallery’ (Aoyama, Tokyo) 1993, ‘Copy Edition’ (Dusseldorf) 1993, ‘Japanese Light’ (group exhibition, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt) 1993, ‘Japanese Paper Light’ (touring Europe group exhibition), 1993, ‘Komatsu Ginza’ (solo exhibition) 1994, Seoul National Museum of Contemporary Art (group exhibition) 1994. A partial list of publications in design-related magazines and culture-related television programmes about Hironen includes: Axis, 1989, 1994, Bazaar, 1992, Blueprint FP, 1992, Brutus, 1988, 1994, Casa Vogue, 1992, CNN, 1995, Cultura Veronese, 1991, Domus Magazine, 1992, Dream, 1991, 1993, 1994, Icon 1991, Interni, 1992, 1993, Metropolis, 1991, Modern Living, 1993, The New York Times, 1993, Raum und Whonen, 1993, Ryuko Tsushin, 1994, Shoten Kenchiku, 1991, 1993, Tokyo Today, 1992. And in the Israeli media: Globus, 1996, Ha’ir, 1996, 1998, Maariv Signon, 1996, Yoman Tarbut (Channel 2), 1995. Interview with Ronen Levin (Tel Aviv, 26 March 2016). Aviv, Hironen, p. 62. Interview with Ronen Levin (Tel Aviv, 26 March 2016). Aviv, Hironen, p. 62. Ibid., p. 64. L. Makarius, ‘The myth of the trickster: The necessary breaker of taboos’, in W. J. Hynes and W. G. Doty (eds), Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts and Criticisms (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), p. 67. Jung writes about the archetype of the Trickster as one of the four main archetypes. According to him, the Trickster reflects an early stage in the development of the consciousness, like a repressed second personality of qualities that clash with the consciousness, mainly animalistic ones. He represents human consciousness that does not have distinction yet. It is the psyche that has barely separated from the animal level and the manifestation of a pornographic and grotesque sexuality. His main dangerous attribute is the fact that he is unaware, lacking an organising and directing consciousness. See C. Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Routledge, 1972). On the role of carnival in social life, see M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Aviv, Hironen, p. 60. Interview with Ronen Levin (Tel Aviv, 26 March 2016). Aviv, Hironen, pp. 59–60. Interview with Ronen Levin (Tel Aviv, 26 March 2016). Aviv, Hironen, p. 59. Ibid., pp. 58–9. To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor is also the title of Hironen’s first show in Tokyo’s Face Gallery, which featured the installation Utz-Li Gutz-Li, To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor set of chairs, and the Biedermeier installation, alongside jewellery pieces and paintings. Modernism saw Adolf Loos as one of its trailblazers. In 1914, Le Corbusier presented the essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ to the French public, saying: ‘Loos swept under our feet, it was an Homeric cleansing – exact, philosophical and logical. With it, Loos influenced our architectural destiny’, K. Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd edition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), p. 95. See also J.

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Stewart, Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos’s Cultural Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 173. A. Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. M. Mitchell (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1998), pp. 167, 174. Ibid., pp. 167–8. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., pp. 168–9. A. Loos, Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), p. 95. Loos, Ornament and Crime, p. 170. The material execution of the set of chairs To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor proved problematic since Hironen could not find a craftsperson who would be able to create what they wanted. Eventually, they found a Japanese master craftsperson from Fukuoka, who specialised in making butsudan and had the skill to make the furniture. The set was displayed in a gallery and sold for 75,000 USD. P. Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), p. 128. Loos, Spoken into the Void, p. 68. The sentence is a translation from German (‘“Ornament” war einmal das epitheton für “schön” Heute ist es dank meiner lebensarbeit ein epitheton für “minderwertig”’) from a book by Adolf Loos. See A. Loos, Trotzdem 1900–1930 (Vienna: Georg Prachner Verlag, 1988 [1931]), p. 19. Loos, Ornament and Crime, p. 175. Interview with Ronen Levin (Tel Aviv, 29 March 2016). B. Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man (New York: Tauris Parke, 2010 [1999]), p. 72. The magazine was launched in 1903, and had the subtitle: ‘A Journal for the Introduction of Western (abendländische) Culture to Austria’. The idea in this magazine was that Austria lagged behind the West, especially England and the United States, and that only through emulating the Anglo-Saxon world could the country hope to reach its standard. The reviews written by Levin, like those of Loos, were not academic but more intuitive and offered musings on seemingly trivial matters that comprise culture. For instance, his restaurant reviews often focused on the scene created in the restaurant, like the pictures that hang on the wall, who dined at the next table, and eating habits. This description of scenes reflected Levin’s interest in the general atmosphere that shapes behaviour and culture and shares similarities with Loos’ writing. The sofa Pi-Isu was exhibited in ‘Faux Fauve’ exhibition in E&Y Gallery, Tokyo 1991. R. Vondrácˇek, ‘Biedermeier and its semantics’, in R. Vondrácˇek, C. Terenzi, and J. Rak (eds), Biedermeier: Art and Culture in Central Europe 1815–1848 (Milno: Skira Editore, 2001), pp. 29–33. C. Terenzi, ‘Biedermeier: A bourgeois style in the Restoration period’, in Vondrácˇek, Terenzi, and Rak (eds), Biedermeier, p. 39; ibid., p. 24. In its early stage (1815–30) the style was the most severe and Neoclassical in inspiration, but towards 1840, the style moved from the early rebellion against Romanticera fussiness to increasingly ornate commissions by a rising middle class, eager to show their newfound wealth. Thus, the style became more whimsical and made out of exclusive materials and the straight lines become curved and serpentine; simple surfaces became more and more embellished beyond the natural materials; humanistic form became more fantastic; and textures became experimental. The style also varied from country to country, its specific characteristics being dictated by what materials were available locally and by the demands and traditions of a particular culture. See Terenzi, ‘Biedermeier: A bourgeois style in the Restoration period’, p. 40.

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46 Later, Biedermeier, which was often dismissed as an impoverished or unsophisticated style, gained new interpretations that pointed to it as heralding clean Modernism, due to its simple lines and the objects’ functionality. See Vondrácˇek, ‘Biedermeier and its semantics’, p. 26. 47 The term Biedermeier is constructed from the word ‘bieder’, meaning ‘commonplace’ and ‘meier’, meaning ‘steward’. 48 Terenzi, ‘Biedermeier: A bourgeois style in the Restoration period’, p. 37. 49 Interview with Ronen Levin (29 March). 50 C. Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’, Partisan Review, 6:5. (1939), 34–49.

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6 Digital design as social and critical design in the twenty-first century

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, it seems that the social struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were subsequently formulated as critical theories, continue to play a central role in our lives. Some of the designers that adopted the practice of critical design, such as Rei Kawakubo, who focuses on body politics and identity politics, or Mujirushi Ryohin, which challenges the dominance of brand names over the product in late consumer culture, are still active but not as critical as they were in the beginning or along the way. Nevertheless, it appears that under the wheels of late capitalism and other cultural shifts, the ‘revolutionary moment’ that was set in motion in the late 1960s has become a romantic myth that lost its hold in twenty-first-century reality. With the socioeconomic changes of the late twentieth century such as globalisation, the Digital Turn, the growing gaps between developed and developing countries, and the rise in life expectancy, the goals of social activism have also changed. This was further fuelled by the 2008 economic crisis, which shook the world: stock markets collapsed, workers were fired, offices shut down, cargo ships anchored in the docks without sailing. Global exports ground to a halt, throwing countries like Japan, whose economies depend on exports, into an immediate crisis and recession. All these factors undermined confidence in capitalism as a central ideology, generating waves of protest (Occupy Wall Street, social justice protests, student protests) against the existing system, the elites, and the political-economic establishment. These protests signalled that people sought change, equality, and a fair playground. At the same time, the activist discourse has also shifted from the path of critical theory and the elaborate system of discursive practices that branch out from it, which for several decades served as the intellectual

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backbone of the social struggle against the capitalist market economy, globalisation, ethno-national divisions, increasing militarisation, and liberal rights discourse. The new trajectory of social struggle and new activist discourse diverges from the outlook of critical theory in various ways. First, in the nature it confers on its agents, the carriers and messengers of criticism, and particularly in shifting the revolutionary centre of gravity from the group to the individual, or a collection of multiple and dispersed individuals. Second, in the scope of action it demarcates for the critical ‘toolbox’, particularly in the shift from wide, all-encompassing macro-­ resistance to targeted, partial and contextual micro-resistance. And third, in the status it offers to the political ideological targets that serve as its platform, including shifting away from one ‘truth’ towards a realm of temporary truths. These shifts wish to take on the shortcomings and blind spots of the critical position that was formulated in the 1960s and 1970s, for instance the call for macro-social struggle, the aspiration to present a particular truth rather than multiple truths, and the strive for a utopian social order that this perception advocates.1 Thus the designer and activist Jan Van Toorn argued in the 1990s: The point is not to create a specific alternative in the form of a new dogma as opposed to the spiritual space of the institutions. On the contrary, the point is to arrive at a ‘mental ecology’ that makes it possible for mediating intellectuals, like designers, to leave the beaten path, to organize their opposition, and to articulate that in the mediate display. This is only possible by adopting a radically different position with respect to the production relationships … This will only come about within the context of a political approach that, unlike the dominant neoliberal form of capitalism, is directed at real social problems … The designer must take on an oppositional stance, implying a departure from the circle of common-sense cultural representation.2

The visual and material dimension has a unique role in this context. In this age, when the visual space and the world of products have been taken captive by different ‘cartels’ (globalisation, the market economy, and the invisible hand of capital), the new – duplicated, cloned, rewritten, forced – images reach unprecedented circulation and visibility. In the all-encompassing, omnipresent visual network, the constant spectacle, with the myriad of visual means borne out of digital culture, including human–machine interface (HMI) and virtual reality that have replaced material reality, becomes a new type of critical possibility. According to Lev Manovich, the new media represent a new phase in the avant-garde movement, as the radical aesthetic vision of the avant-garde artists of the 1920s became the standard computer technology in the 1990s. When computer users navigate in virtual space, interacting with a website or investigating a digital image, they fulfil the wildest fantasies of the avant-garde artists of the 1920s. For example, any interactive 3D computer graphics demonstrate the defamiliarisation technique that was avant-garde in

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Critical design in Japan early Modernism. However, the new media represent much more than the formative innovation of the 1920s, as it provides new ways to access reality, to approach and collect data, and to analyse it. In fact, the new media offer new perspectives for looking at the old media. In that sense, claims Manovich, software-based techniques are the new avant-garde.3 Thus, digital designers do not criticise hegemonic knowledge or dominant social values by presenting an opposing agenda but rather hack into traditional thought categories, deconstructing them and actively creating new categories of thought in their place. These options challenge the modes in which visual perception, information, and the traditional meaning of objects in culture were arranged, and the sociopolitical roles assigned to them, as well as the spectrum of possibilities that unfolded between representation and the represented. In this chapter, I will review the methodology of design for social innovation that emerged in the twenty-first century, which introduced the new design activism, as well as the changes in visual perception and the shift from a material culture to a digital culture, which was a game-changing moment and facilitated a new type of critical design.

Social design The term social design is typically used in reference to contemporary designers whose work takes on humanitarian and sociopolitical issues, i.e., living conditions, class and income inequality, environmental responsibilities, disabilities, and economic developments in the developing world. The genre of social activist design is not new, and like critical design also emerged as part of the revolutionary movement of the 1960s and early 1970s with Victor Papanek’s 1971 book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. This genre included politically charged design that is ideologically averse to the commercial aspects of product design, as well as humanitarian design that responds to natural or human-made crises and catastrophes and compassionate design. One Japanese design studio that engages in this field of disaster management is Nosigner directed by Tachikawa Eisuke. The studio launched the project ‘Olive’ forty hours after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. ‘Olive’ was an open source, Wikipedia-style venture, which gathered and shared useful crowd-sourced DIY tips, design solutions, and tutorials to assist disaster survivors. These included instructions for making a temporary toilet, creating a water purifier, or making rubber bands from old bicycle tubes. A month after the disaster, the information gathered by ‘Olive’ reached a million people, and with the help of the traditional media (television and press), it reached ten million people.4 The design solutions that were gathered by ‘Olive’ were subsequently compiled into a chapter in Tokyo’s new guide to disaster survival called Tokyo Bousai (Tokyo Disaster

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Figure 6.1  Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Tokyo Bousai, 2014.

Preparedness), issued on 1 September 2014 by Nosigner in collaboration with Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Disaster Prevention Department and the advertising agency Dentsu¯ Inc. (see Figure 6.1).5 Tokyo Bousai – a 340-page manual – was sent to 7.5 million households in Tokyo free of charge and, according to a Yomiuri Shimbun report, has assumed cult status.6 Designed in yellow and black, the book presents emergency procedures and opens with the alarming statement: ‘It is predicted that there is a 70 per cent possibility of an earthquake directly hitting Tokyo within the next thirty years.’ And then it directly addresses readers: ‘Are you prepared?’ While most government issued documents are boring (or possibly intentionally incomprehensible in order to deter overly inquisitive citizens from interfering with policymaking), Tokyo Bousai is beautifully designed and showcases how design thinking can be used to address the public. The guide’s bright colours make it stand out and a simple layout with easy to recognise illustrations not only makes it comprehensible but actually enjoyable to read. In addition, the designers of Tokyo Bousai created a yuru-kyara (mascot character) to instil their disaster preparedness message into the minds of a public saturated with anime and manga (see Figure 6.2). The cute rhino, Bousai-kun, wears a helmet and carries a backpack with a disaster preparedness kit as he guides readers through the book.7 The book closes with manga artist Kawaguchi Kaiji’s comic ‘TOKYO “X” DAY’, which drastically visualises the devastated metropolis immediately after the next major earthquake,

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Figure 6.2  Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Tokyo Bousai, 2014. 25/02/2020 08:24



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reminding us that this scenario may be only minutes away. Finally, the guide was not presented to the public in a conventional press conference, but at a public event at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku, in which former Governor Masuzoe Yo¯ichi opted for an informal and young look and wore a yellow Tokyo Bousai T-shirt while he interviewed the teen idols of the pop group Momoiro Clover Z.8 Another example of activating design thinking methodology to bring social and political issues to the mind of the public was the use that the student activist group SEALDs (Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy) made of design to draw the public’s attention to large public protests they organised outside the Diet building in 2015.9 SEALDs was an activist students’ group, which included around 175 college students led by Takahashi Wakagi.10 The core members of SEALDs were originally part of the Students Against Secret Protection Law (SASPL) group, which protested Prime Minister Abe’s state secrets bill from February 2014. That legislation passed, but following the Abe Cabinet’s decision to unilaterally reinterpret Article 9 of the Constitution to allow Japan to exercise the right of collective self-defence, the group turned its focus to this new goal. And so, on 3 May 2015, Constitution Day, SEALDs was established in Tokyo and subsequently expanded into a nationwide network with branches in Ryukyu (Okinawa), Kansai, Tohoku, and the Tokai regions.11 Wishing to appeal to a mainstream public that shunned radicalism and extremist actions, SEALDs eschewed leftist jargon, Molotov cocktails, or hunger strikes, and instead adopted design thinking to influence public perception. First, they collaborated with the media by holding press conferences, offering interviews, and orchestrating events that attracted large audiences. They also wooed the international press, knowing that fame abroad translates into legitimacy and coverage at home. Second, they employed design activist Ise To¯ri, a SEALDs member and a student at Musashino Art University, who led a twenty-six-person design team that created eye-catching placards with messages such as, ‘Give peace a chance’ and ‘Our future, our choice’ (see Figure 6.3). This activity was reminiscent of the graphic protest created by L’Atelier Populaire (the popular workshop) run by the dissidents who occupied the printing studio of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in May 1968 and used the equipment to design and print posters in support of the protests staged by students, workers, and other radical groups.12 Living in a more advanced technological period, SEALDs also used Twitter to inform people that placards can be printed out at 7-Eleven stores. Ise To¯ri explained: ‘If we want to make political involvement a standard, we need to bring design in politics to a higher level, to a standard level.’13 The design team was divided into branches, each in charge of a different media format such as fliers, pamphlets, placards, photographs, and videos. Ise communicated to each branch her overall expectations,

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Figure 6.3  SEALDs activists’ placards, 2015.

­including the colours, compositions, and layout. Members of each team critiqued each other’s work to narrow down their selection. SEALDs designers incorporated into their design techniques and stylistic elements from street culture such as hip-hop and skateboarding style (for example, they used images inspired by the skateboarding brand Supreme’s box logos, which were based on the works of the conceptual artist Barbara Kruger). The slogans they printed were taken from catchy phrases that SEALDs members had used in their speeches and protests, including ‘Fight for liberty!’ and ‘No one wants war’. In an interview with the Japan Times, Ushida Yoshimasa, a student of sociology and philosophy at Meiji Gakuin University, pointed to French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte as an example of why visual art is important. He explained that when Napoleon contributed his portrait to the Louvre Museum collection in Paris in the early nineteenth century, he succeeded in connecting unrelated individuals through the shared experience of seeing the same painting of the emperor. ‘Right now, in the city, individual people seem separate and disconnected from each other, but when they see things like advertisements on the train, they are brought together through this shared experience,’ he said. ‘In this way, cool designs become social power.’14 Social design concepts are also incorporated into the academic design programmes in Japan as in the case of the Fixperts project in Kyoto Design

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Lab. In February 2015, Fixperts co-founder Professor Daniel Charny of Kingston University led a workshop at Kyoto Design Lab centred on the subject of ‘Making and Materials’. In the wake of workshop, Kyoto Design Lab’s third year product design students explored the theme of ‘Invisible People’ – the custodian, security, and cleaning staff on Kyoto Design Lab’s campus, who are essential to its operation but whose work conditions could be improved with some design rethinking. The students focused on ‘Silver Workers’, who continue to work long beyond the official retirement age. The project set out to train students to look for design opportunities in seemingly uninspiring contexts and experience how even minor design interventions can positively impact the lives of elderly people. The students conceived and produced design solutions aimed at making the working procedures of these invisible people easier in some way, for instance a door stopper (titled ‘Hingehog’) that can be used by the person who moves heavy objects around campus. These projects were featured in the exhibition ‘The Future of Fixing’ at the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in Asheville, North Carolina.15 Beyond social design that offers solutions to concrete social problems, in the contemporary period another type of design has emerged: critical design, which undermines the unshakable dominance of capitalism and corporations that dictate social values and lifestyle. This critical design builds on financial values and technological tools that appeared in the postmodern era, which shaped, as Fredric Jameson claimed, the new ‘habitus’ and social awareness.16 This postmodern habitus, with its socioeconomic values and technological tools, has also summoned new social challenges and provided contemporary designers with tools for tackling these in a new way. Another tactic of social criticism employed by contemporary design is blurring the boundaries between binary categories of thought such as human/machine or nature/culture, which are a throwback to the pre-digital era. This blurring engenders new areas of insight, in which traditional categories dissipate while a new reality takes shape. In this respect, the genre of critical design picks up the postmodern cultural struggle of the 1980s and 1990s to blur the boundaries between Modernist thought categories like high and low or art and craft.

Sharing economy and open design The first critical action of the new designers challenged the central ideology of the postmodern era – late consumer culture – of which product design and brand design are two mainstays. The new subversive process dubbed open-design is based on the availability of digital platforms, which have become a part of the product designer’s toolbox, and the new perception that these brought with them to product design. Open-design was inspired by the concept of open-source – software whose source code is

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Critical design in Japan open and accessible to anyone who wishes to use, view, edit, or circulate it. This method is contrary to the idea of a closed code that users have to purchase in order to get their own license, the basic business model of big software companies. Open Code is a community venture that allows anyone with an interest to take part in the software development and contribute to the community that will use it. Based on a similar principle, Open Design distinguishes design as an idea and as information from the material product. In other words, Open Design offers free access to information files that contain sketches of different products (e.g., desk, chair, bookcase) created in AutoCAD on file-sharing websites. Users can view, download, alter, edit, print with a 3D printer, or create the file in material form with a 3D printer, as well as redistribute these based on an intellectual property contract formulated by NGOs such as Creative Commons, commonly used in online information sharing communities. The idea of Open Design is to turn a design object into 100 per cent digital information and create a virtual sharing community whose members support one another. This idea can be traced back to 1999, when Sepehr Kiani, Ryan Vallance, and Samir Nayfeh established ODF, Open Design Foundation. The Open Design method conceives the new function of design not as a platform that serves and feeds consumer culture, but as one that undermines it. Open Design wishes to change consumer culture and call users to become involved in society, take part in initiatives, and act for social change, so they are no longer passive consumers who comply with capitalist values that celebrate individualism. It is an attempt to create a sharing community economy that undermines brand names and the values of late consumer culture that created products as part of the capitalist market system in the service of commercial companies. The development of this idea was made possible thanks to the new role design had achieved in consumer culture alongside the advent of digital culture, which heralded a new perception of products. In order to understand this new perception, we need to go back to Baudrillard, who already in the 1970s claimed that the postmodern economy should be viewed as a social system in which products are no more than a sign (see the introduction to this book for more on this). And indeed, late consumer culture spawned a myriad of similar products that not only had functional use, but were signs that responded to the consumer’s pursuit of experiences, desires, indulgence, and self-expression. In their 1996 book The World of Goods, sociologists Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood maintained that ‘goods work as communication units’, since in information society, products are communicating elements, and every act of consumption or selection of a product is a sociocultural action.17 Postmodern consumer culture certainly offered a very broad range of products that do not answer any material need, but rather meet communication and social requisites. The revolution of consumer culture, which established

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its dominance as a central ideology in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrates therefore the supremacy of ‘sign value’, as opposed to the Modernist ‘use value’, based on style and aesthetics that represent social information. This perspective presents products as social information embodied in the sign or, in other words, in the product’s design. Design’s shift to social information has also changed the role of the designer from working with materials to navigating information and signs. We could see the digital revolution as the extension of the product’s evolution into a designed sign or social information. In the wake of the digital revolution, products have turned into a virtual object/entity composed of information (computer algorithm or code). Furthermore, digital design has also challenged the materiality of the object, since the object is information and its material realisation is secondary and can be performed with multiple various materials, depending on the preference of the end user. Again, like Baudrillard’s sign value, the object has been transformed into something that is predominately information. But in contrast with sign value, here the product is not depleted of its original function in the Modernist or postmodern sense, but rather relinquishes its material aspect. Thus, sometimes the products are no longer objects but merely a brand sign, software, or design concept. In order to examine the correlation between the product’s transformation into a sign in the social realm and the depletion of its material aspect following the digital revolution, it is worth revisiting the ideas of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin identified technology as the mediating category between material culture in each period and the structure of our consciousness. Benjamin ascribed technology a central role in the interaction between humans and the modern world of objects, in which the individual’s life is navigated through the mediation of an industrial reality. Technology is a means that shapes consciousness and affects the mediation between humans and reality or between material history and the system of human consciousness. Benjamin claimed that technological progress is not only a reflection of the time’s scientific breakthroughs but also of the structure of human understanding, mediated through material means. The notion of the link between technology and human consciousness was discussed at length, in a different way, by Jonathan Crary, who analysed the history of observation in the disciplinary framework of the history of ideas.18 Crary maintained that while important advances in optical technologies were the outcome of a linear scientific and technological progress, they expressed even more the prevalent views and the new ways in which people perceived their world at different periods. One example is the invention of the stereoscope in the nineteenth century, which was based on new representation techniques that replaced the seventeenth-­ century camera obscura. Camera obscura established an objective relationship between the device and the subject of observation, and alluded to

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Critical design in Japan ­ quivalence between the object and its representation. According to Crary, e the stereoscope was not invented as a result of a technological development but was rather the outcome of an awareness and manifestation of a new concept that appeared in European society at the time: the subject. Crary also draws parallels between the development of photography in the mid-nineteenth century (which depicted objects that the organic eye and former media were unable to reproduce and retain, thus providing for the first time academic materials about the ‘optical subconscious’ of the world) and the contemporaneous emergence of psychoanalytical theory, which turned the spotlight on the subconscious areas in the human psyche. In the same way, I believe that it is impossible to separate the digital and scientific developments of the 1990s, which changed the designer’s toolbox and mediated between people and products, from the rise of postmodern values and the positions that preceded them. These postmodern values were manifested as early as the 1970s and 1980s, and fostered the idea that the names of products or of brands were more important than the actual/material or function of the product. In other words, the new social awareness in the postmodern consumer culture that an object is no more than a social sign or, rather, information, created a new non-material habitus that characterised postmodern values and later facilitated the advent of digital product design.19 The transformation of the physical product into a social sign or information and the evolution of material into a digital code transformed traditional Modernist ethics and sites of human consciousness shaped around the concept of material. This revolution reshaped human consciousness and the way we understand our reality. In the contemporary era, technology’s mediation between people and the world of objects was blurred and redefined, since some of the products are themselves software based, and new design became the interface between people and futuristic technologies. In this hyper technological reality, concepts like ‘information’ or ‘virtual product’ serve similar functions to those that were once the domain of the material. Given that material and information follow fundamentally different rules, this shift inevitably introduces a new set of ethical questions.20 The fundamental law conceived in human thought about material is the principle of mass conservation, which states that a certain quantity of material will forever remain the same quantity.21 For instance, one kilogram of wheat, one ounce of gold, and one pen will never become two. The notion of material preservation shaped our perceptions and the basic definitions we used to define ‘ownership’ and ‘property’. If one pen will always remain one pen, then it can either belong to me or to you: we cannot be the exclusive owners of the same object at the same time. This fact engendered a social and moral ideology, formulated by the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, who claimed that individual property is a natural right since it stems from one’s natural abilities. The notion

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that an object or property cannot belong to two people at the same time, expressed in Locke’s economic theory, extends from the principle of mass conservation and is the product of the economic conditions in Locke’s time. This perception was also true for most of the twentieth century. The current shift – from material that upholds the principle of mass conservation to information that replicates itself – presents a shift in the fundamental perception of ownership and property. We can identify the impact of this phenomenon in the field of digital products. When a digital product is replicated, this does not prevent ownership from the original owner, as it is transmitted to more people. A piece of information can copy and replicate itself and exist simultaneously on several computers. While theft of material products is a moral infraction that yields profit to the thief and loss to the product’s original owner, the duplication of digital products, while purportedly theft, is in fact distribution that creates a new market, which yields profits to many people from new sources; in other words, one benefits and the other does not lose out. For example, a famous musician whose songs are shared/circulated online illegally will often gain more revenues as a brand presenter than from album sales. The difference between material and information thus prevents us from automatically applying the same logic/ideology and moral perceptions to both cases – the conceptual shift from material culture to digital culture entails new financial and social values.

Open-sharing design The idea of information that replicates itself and the ability to distinguish between the digital sketch of a product and its realisation in material stands at the foundation of virtual industrial design, allowing designers to undermine the rules of consumer culture and create a sharing community economy. The design studio Nosigner, which works with Open Design in Japan, was responsible for Mozilla Factory Space, which was a redesign of Mozilla Japan offices in 2013. Mozilla Japan is a branch of American Mozilla Foundation, which promoted the idea of open source software and became the world’s largest open source community. Nosigner were commissioned to design Mozilla’s Tokyo office and decided to build on the company’s concept and use open source design. Thus, instead of solving the specific company’s office design, they set up, as part of the office design, an ‘open source furniture’ website for companies that wish to create inexpensive functional office furniture. The website offered drawing data for DIY office furniture, like plastic plates and wood panels, which can be downloaded and made from available materials.22 Based on the Mozilla project, in 2015 Nosigner created Open Sohko Design. The project helped people to renovate old warehouses into new offices, shops, and creative spaces by downloading free open source design drawings of offices,

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Critical design in Japan furniture, and renovation ideas.23 The web platform offers design drawings created by professional Japan-based and international designers and architects, such as the cardboard desktop lamp, which was contributed by design group Fattelo! or a chair and table by the designer Enzo Mari. As a symbol of this project, Nosigner designed a modular cube, which transforms into a moveable office that includes all items for creative works called Re-SOHKO Transform Box.24 A different experimental design project that adopts the principle of the sharing economy was created by Takram Design Engineering as a concept for an exhibition titled ‘The Fab Mind’, presented in 2014 at 21_21 Design Sight. The project displayed the lifestyle of a Professional Sharer who lives as part of a virtual community (see Figure 6.4). The person shares traditional assets such as a room or a car and more abstract elements like time, skills, and knowledge as well as ‘sleeping’ computer processors in wearable devices.25 The person shown in the video installation shared his images and even took photos of his location for other people who needed them. He then shared his computer energy with people who needed to recharge their smartphones or allowed people to connect and use his computer processor to perform searches. He also shared his screen with companies that presented ads on it when he was not using it while strolling the streets. The sharing went further, to include time or skill sharing, for instance queuing for someone else because you are in the area. The person also shared his personal information like health data with family, friends, and insurance companies. This experiment showcases the idea of a ‘sharing economy’ that goes against the individual values of the late consumer market and presents a new lifestyle based on new interactions between individuals in society. The examples of digital design that undermine the financial logic of consumer culture differ greatly from postmodern subversive design like that of Mujirushi Ryohin, which challenged late consumer brand name culture. The Open Sohko Design project or Takram Design Engineering build a community-based economy, give the consumer an active role, and facilitate the phenomenon of crowdsourcing and, with that, cancel out the power of commercial corporations. This democratisation of design also undermines the idea of the specialist designer, as it decentralises the designer’s power and hands individuals the power to create a design and share it online.

Post-human design Another change brought about by the digital revolution is the emergence of smart, connected products, as opposed to static objects. The evolution of the internet to Web 2.0 and social media that engendered widespread interconnectivity have led to ubiquitous computing. These new products

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Figure 6.4  Takram Design Engineering, Professional Sharing, 2014.

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Critical design in Japan have radically altered our perception of a product’s function and shape and of user–product and human–machine relations, creating the concept body 2.0. The world view of Newtonian mechanics, which was the mainstream scientific paradigm until the late 1800s, described the material as a collection of parts that can be completely separated from one another; in other words, each material object can exist as and of itself, with its objective array of properties, irrespective of other objects. 26 Like a machine that any of its parts can exist independently, the connections between materials were perceived as secondary to the individual properties of each element. In contrast to material products, in the interactive world there is no meaning to one single part of the software on its own. An isolated communication software is worthless in an environment that does not have other communication software for it to communicate with. Put differently, through its products, digital culture produces a new systemic thinking, in which the connection between various artefacts and their changeability in different contexts stands in contrast to the separation between Modernist objects. A mechanical clock, for example, can be taken apart into its different elements and then reassembled, since each part maintains its properties when it is isolated from the complete system. This is not possible in the digital world. Communication products based on information and a conceptual and technological structure that links different systems, like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, are the forces that drive today’s global economy, interpersonal interactions, and at times even global political processes. These digital products have set in motion a process in which even material products, like a watch or a car, are transformed from independent objects into a technological platform. The network of material products that communicate with digital products, known as the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), is rapidly changing people’s relationship with their environment, interpersonal relationships, management patterns, and the culture in which we live. The most popular IoT services in Japan involve vending machines, transportation management, surveillance, and e-wallet services. For example, there are approximately five million vending machines in Japan. Some of them have automatic inventory management based on real-time wireless transmission of inventory status to ensure timely supply. Purchases can also be made via e-wallet transactions through wireless communications such as smartphones or contactless IC cards like Suica cards. Another example of an object that is fully connected to the internet is Toyota’s concept car Fun-Vii, presented at the 2011 Tokyo car show.27 The car, nicknamed a ‘smartphone on wheels’, comes equipped with touchscreens inside and out, allowing digital customisation of the car’s interior and exterior based on images, information, and personal design. Another feature of this car is the real-time augmentation layer, which appears on

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Figure 6.5  Wakita Akira, FINA (fluid-HMI inspired by nature), 2015.

its front shield and allows its navigation based on this information, without the driver’s interference. This type of car creates a new user experience that is no longer linked to the car’s primal function as solely a means of transportation. Another project based on human-machine interface (HMI) is FINA (fluid-HMI inspired by nature), a project carried out by Toyota in collaboration with designer Wakita Akira (see Figure 6.5). This experimental project is aimed at intuitively transferring the environmental information that ‘the car is sensing’ to the driver. Created in 2015, FINA is a prototype of a new HMI, which maps the environmental information on the driver’s body, especially on the upper limbs that interact with the steering gear directly. While most HMI requires the machine to send out a message in a human language (written or in audio form), this project sought to create an organic synchronicity between the driver’s and the car’s body by transmitting organic images. It aims to recognise the car as a part of the body image as well as to embody the scale, the dimension of a car on a much deeper level.28 This new HMI carries ‘bio-inspired screen language’ and the notion of ‘the human body as material’ into car design, and strives to create a seamless connection between driver and car, and with that, revolutionise the perception of driving.29 Another project along these lines is the experimental Transparent Intent developed at the Y. Sato Lab in RCAIIS Tokyo Design Lab.30 The project explores the future of HMI, predicting a future where objects can be controlled subconsciously. By using computer vision technology the lab team designed a set of objects that could

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Critical design in Japan learn human behaviour patterns and understand the user’s true intention. The interface is invisible and intuitive, controlled by the user’s instincts. The device is controlled through moving an arbitrary secondary object (such as hands) right or left, up or down or by detecting the user eye gaze (turning right or left etc.). Other objects controlled by human behaviour include an air conditioner that starts working when a person presents body language that they are cold.31 These HMIs are experimental and are not yet manufactured for the general public, but there are already a number of wearable computers available today in Japan that can be worn, zipped, fastened, or attached to the body. The IoT objects that interact with other objects thus become a part of the human body, rendering it a part of the computerised system around it. One of these wearable devices is the smart eyewear by Sony, which connects with compatible smartphones to project text and images onto the user’s field of view. Sony’s SmartEyeglass, reminiscent of Google Glass, allows users to view navigation information while walking or to check an online recipe while cooking, among other things. Another wearable computer developed by engineer Taniguchi Kazuhiro of Hiroshima City University is the Earclip-type Wearable PC, which is worn on the ear and can be controlled with the blink of an eye or the click of a tongue. The 17g wireless device has Bluetooth capability and is equipped with a GPS, compass, gyro sensor, battery, barometer, speaker, and microphone. It also has a microchip and data storage, enabling users to load software. The system can be connected to an iPod or other gadgets and allows the user to navigate through software programs using facial expressions, such as a raised eyebrow, a stuck-out tongue, a wiggle of the nose or by clenching teeth. Because the user does not have to move either hand, its developers say it can serve as ‘a third hand’ for anyone from caregivers to rock climbers, motorbike riders, and astronauts as well as for people with disabilities. The device might be pressed into use also to help relatives keep an eye on elderly family members. The earpiece, which could also function as a hearing aid, could monitor the wearer’s health, including their pulse and body temperature, while logging how often they eat or sneeze, offering early warning of the onset of illness. An on-board accelerometer could tell when the user falls and instruct the smartphone to pass information on to relatives or to call an ambulance based on GPS data. These projects are a further development of mobile and smart devices, made possible thanks to the availability of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) – sensors that allow smartphones to respond to different motions, and tablets to serve as video game controllers or a connection between hardware and cloud computing, enabling operation without an integral energy source in the actual product. These technological developments, whether visual (virtual reality) or material (hardware that facilitates human–computer interface) have changed the relationship between

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viewer and viewed, creating a new HMI that introduces new uses for the object. According to Katherine Hayles, in contrast with traditional stand-alone objects (chair, table, pot) in which there is separation and hierarchy between subject and object, in the virtual age wearable objects represent the expansion of the body.32 Hayles refers to the physiological term ‘proprioception’, which is the sense that tells us where the boundaries of our bodies are, and to ‘proprioceptive coherence’, which describes how these boundaries are formed through a combination of physiological feedback loops and habitual usage. A traditional example would be the tennis racquet that has been used for a long time and becomes another sensory organ or an extension of the player’s arm.33 Contemporary design transforms the traditional human–machine dichotomy, while creating a new reality of HMI and a new relationship between people and the objects that become a part of them. This technology, which is shaped by people, has a physical dimension to it, but in turn also shapes people’s perception of reality through feedback that result, according to Hayles, in people expressing cyborg subjectivity. The historian of science Eran Kimchi suggests that in cyber culture, the infiltration of technology into the body is not limited to physiological mechanisms or senses but also extends to the emotional world, saying: ‘the categories of time and space are reformulated … the option of radical accessibility expands the boundaries of the organic body, affecting the emotional economy and structure of consciousness’.34 He explains how with the expansion of the human body in space there is also an expansion of the human surface, which comes into contact with the external world and is susceptible to stimuli, engendering total availability, regardless of time and space constraints. The external world becomes a constant channel of penetration to one’s mind, and the individual experiences reality as one of a constant potential to access and contact. This state of absolute availability to external stimuli leads to a mental state of high alertness to the world and takes an active part in the formulation of a new type of subjectivity. According to Kimchi, the drastic shift in sense of availably assuages traditional feelings of longing or nostalgia. Another mental aspect influenced by the new technology is human memory. In the wake of the introduction of technology into our lives, people have stopped memorising telephone numbers, using recall of city maps to navigate, or keeping a personal schedule without electronic calendars. Technological parts replace parts of the human memory, and with that bring about a change in memory – from memory of details to systemic memory that connects details and offers new ways of thinking. This technology, which transforms personal memory into a virtual memory card, also changes the way we behave, the way we think, and interpersonal relationships. This new technology also poses the question of how the structure of virtual memory influences the structure of human memory, which

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Critical design in Japan is changeable, retrospective, and nonlinear in nature. The question gains added poignancy in light of the fact that human memory is essentially systemic and based on associative networks, much like the structure of the internet. Compared with objects (everyday items like clothing, furniture, and fashion) which served and shaped modern people’s world and identity, the new objects expanded the boundaries of the body and became, even more than modern design, an integral part of the intimate emotional word and psyche of the new subject. In other words, these software and wearable technological objects are an expansion of the human mind as the tennis racquet is an extension of the player’s arm. The new HMIs have spawned future experimental ideas of embedding technology in the human body and creating cyborgs. One such project was Shenu: Hydrolemic System – a concept of a futuristic water bottle presented by Takram Design Engineering in 2012 at dOCUMENTA 13, which sought to examine a hypothetical, dilapidated earth environment 100 years into the future (see Figure 6.6). Based on solutions for food, clothing and shelter, the exhibition included a group of creators who explored the ultimate aesthetic sensibilities and the basic sense of values under dire fin de siècle circumstances. Takram Design Engineering was given the challenge of designing a concept for a ‘water bottle’. The idea was that in one hundred years’ time, water supply will be extremely limited due to pollution etc., thus the water bottle, which presumes the current situation with abundant water supply, seemed inadequate. Takram Design Engineering group’s starting point was the decision to minimise human water consumption by reducing the amount of water that comes out of a human body. This idea led to the fruition of a series of products, including artificial implant organs that limit water consumption and reconsider the human body itself as a form of water container. The organs included a nasal apparatus for keeping water from escaping the body by condensing exhaled breath into dew or an artificial blood vessel for maintaining the body temperature to prevent perspiration. These devices work together with a Heat Irradiant Neck Collar and an apparatus implanted inside the bladder to concentrate urine and send extracted water to the kidneys.35 Another biological wearable is the Chemical Synchronization design by the RCA-IIS Tokyo Design Lab in cooperation with S. Takeuchi Lab, which developed a robot that can smell human sweat by placing a chemosensor from a mosquito on a sensor chip of the robot.36 Inspired by this robot and by the idea that in nature animals, plants, and insects coexist as part of a synchronised ecosystem which allows them to communicate with each other invisibly and inaudibly using a combination of smell and chemosignals, the lab team developed the Chemical Synchronization. This apparatus is a biological wearable device which, when worn on the neck, enables the user to sense other people’s emotions and synchronise their own emotions accordingly. It uses a sensor made with chemoreceptors extracted from

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Figure 6.6  Takram Design Engineering, Shenu: Hydrolemic System, 2012.

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Critical design in Japan insects that can detect emotions like exhilaration and happiness through chemicals found in human sweat. Once sensed, these emotions can be filtered and amplified, and eventually transferred to other humans through a microneedle patch, which delivers hormones like oxytocin endorphins. This series of experimental artificial organs in effect creates a new cyborg and a new way of thinking about human–machine interaction. A different way to challenge our conception of the body is by rethinking the limits of gender as demonstrated in the Menstruation Machine, created in 2010 by artist and fiction designer Sputniko! (Ozaki Hiromi) (see Figure 6.7). The Menstruation Machine is a metal device reminiscent of a chastity belt, fitted with a blood-dispensing system and electrodes that stimulate the lower abdomen, replicating the pain and bleeding during an average five-day menstruation period. It is designed to be worn by men, children, postmenopausal women, or anyone else who wants to experience menstruation. The machine raised the question of how technological advancements are heavily influenced by the political, social, and cultural climate. It provocatively asks how come modern technology has accomplished feats such as space travel, mobile phones, the internet, cloning, and genetically modified foods, but women are still having their monthly periods, even though since the 1960s advances in hormone-based contraception that suppress ovulation have challenged the biological necessity of menstruation (approved for use in Japan only in 1999). With the Menstruation Machine, Sputniko! looks at the biological, cultural, and historical meanings of menstruation while exploring the relationship between identity, biology, and choice.37 The use of technology in this case is unusual in that it does not set out to enhance human abilities but rather to take on a topic considered taboo in most societies (including Japan). As a result of the deep-seated silence imposed on women from a young age, the monthly period is shrouded by stigma, misconceptions, and ignorance. By externalising an internal, discrete process using a mechanism that has a very prominent visibility and presence, Sputniko! forces people to acknowledge and talk about the process and its significance. The piece introduces and explores several questions: why did scientists think there was need for a technological possibility to limit or eliminate menstruation? (Extended cycle pills such as Lybrel and Seasonique reduce the frequency of menstruation to none or four times a year, but these have very low demand.) What is the meaning of menstruation beyond its biological function? What is the impact of drugs/technological advancements aimed at controlling and regulating the natural body and with that interfere with a deep and significant element of the female identity? The project employs technology as a means of undermining and blurring a fundamental biological boundary between the sexes. The Menstruation Machine gives universal access to an experience considered exclusive to women and with that, while challenging

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Figure 6.7 Sputniko!, Menstruation Machine – Takashi’s Take, 2010.

our ­gender-based identity of the human body, it raised the issue of post-­ gender and post-human being.38 Beyond objects that expand the limits of the human body, change our perception of the body and create connectivity between the human body

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Critical design in Japan and digital or biological platforms, the redesign of information in a digital way also impacts the perception of reality and human thinking, which becomes more visual, fragmentary, discontinuous, and sometimes three-­ dimensional, like visual/material culture.39 Thus, for example, the project CT (City Tomography) is a web-based 3D visualisation by Wakita Akira that reconstructs visible or invisible aspects of urban spaces as a three-­dimensional ‘information city’ and explores it just like a computerised tomography (CT) of the human body. The project provides information about the city that visitors cannot perceive from the physical urban space. It enhances an overall image of the city through a reciprocal relation between a place and information. Another visualisation project by Wakita Akira is Infotube – a web-based project that visualises the existing shopping street Motomachi in Yokohama as a cyberspace filled with consumer information. Instead of direct ‘representation’ of the real shopping street in a three-­dimensional space, Wakita chose to allow the ‘visualisation’ of the space to be generated by the information itself. These new representations of data can change people’s way of thinking about the city structure or shopping experience and moreover, they can change the way we process information.40 These case studies, in which objects expand the human body and communicate with other objects, artificial organs are embedded in the human body and alter biological processes, or humans are engulfed in augmented reality until it becomes indistinguishable from concrete reality usher in a new state of consciousness that poses an alternative to the binary human– machine relationship and to Walter Benjamin’s assertion that technology mediates between humans and reality. The contemporary design discussed above does not mediate between humans and reality but rather creates a new reality. A virtual reality based on digital technology forms a new relationship and commitment between subject and object. This new paradigm that functions as a new habitat in which new design can evolve, takes us beyond design discourse that focuses on a product’s ergonomic, material, or aesthetic dimension, to a new cultural condition in which technology is embodied in the body, as described by Donna Haraway in the early 1990s in the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’.41 But while this manifesto was futuristic for its time, nowadays these cyborgs fill the streets, cafes, buses, and trains. As they are connected to one network or another most of the time, part of the bodies are not organic. These cyborgs undermine the binary categories of human/machine, human/non-human, subject/object and tear down traditional thought categories. These present the new post-human perception that was shaped through post-material design.42

Blurring the boundaries between nature and culture Blurring the lines between people and machines and between material culture and visual non-material culture has also expanded thanks to the

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availability of new materials (like artificial fibres or nanotechnology) in the contemporary design scene, which also unravel the traditional nature/ culture dichotomy. The objects that make up our material culture were traditionally made from raw materials found in nature, and then shaped and treated in a technological process, which Claude Lévi-Strauss defined as ‘cooking’.43 These processed design products demonstrate the nature/ culture dichotomy. Of course, in the world of products there are also products perceived as ‘natural’ or ‘green’, but these are merely a symbolic system within culture that manifests how culture looks at nature. These ‘natural’ products adopt the notion that social values were created in culture as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’, attributing the term ‘natural’ to acceptable social activity as opposed to ‘preternatural’ activity that is not socially acceptable. This perception, which aligns the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘natural’ versus the ‘bad’ and ‘unnatural’ has charged nature with moral values, and as a result culture has also labelled the ‘natural’ as ‘good’. With these ‘natural’ products, the real difference or contrast between nature and culture is blurred by consumer culture, erasing with it the complexity, difference, and dialectics embodied in their interaction. These ‘natural’ products create a fabricated amalgamation of two concepts that can only exist as a sign due to their difference, but in fact the sign ‘natural’ will never find itself within nature, since one is real and the other is symbolic. In contrast with this imaginary amalgamation, the exhibition ‘Senseware’ suggested that contemporary artificial fibre technology is not unnatural. On the contrary, its role is to create a link between humans and nature and form a new ecosystem in which fibre and technology provide infrastructure for the formulation of a new relationship between nature and artificial products. The exhibition, curated by Hara Kenya in 2009, featured objects made of various artificial fibres: nanofibres the thickness of 1/7,500 of a single human hair; carbon fibres that are flexible as well as strong and light; fibres that behave like human skin cells but exceed natural cells in their delicacy, sensitivity, stability, strength, and flexibility and allow materials and technologies that surpass human sensory prospection. Hara found seventeen artificial fibres developed by the Japanese industry for different uses – from artificial blood vessels, to aircrafts, and advanced clothing – and gave them to seventeen designers. Among others, the exhibition focused on the relationship and conflict between nature and culture. Hara explained that in the absence of supervision, the artificial world tends to take over nature, while nature tends to slowly encroach on the human-made environment. Neglected buildings turn into ruins and entire cities are covered with weed. The mediating element between these two worlds, according to Hara, is human activity, which creates harmony between the natural and the artificial and nature.

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Critical design in Japan The reason that a Zen Buddhist temple looks so beautiful actually has more to do with its upkeep than with the form it was sculpted in. A dry landscape garden needs to be looked after on a daily basis or nature will erode it, soiling the whiteness of the pebbles, breaking down the waves of sand, and piling up dead leaves. Care of such a garden includes for instance leaving the moss to grow on the stones, and perhaps leaving just a few fallen leaves instead of cleaning them all away. The interface between the acts of man and the forces of nature is like the water’s edge, and creation occurs through thinking about how to arrange the area where they overlap.44

Therefore, rather than considering artificial fibres as synthetic products that clash with the natural world, Hara wishes to think of them as products aimed at reconciling industrial products with the natural environment, and with that, to change our perception of nature and the way we perceive ‘natural’ products that only bring together two signs (‘nature’ and ‘culture’) and blur the inherent difference between them within the context of consumer culture, but does not actually creating a new ecosystem. This approach was perhaps best articulated in the project Time of Moss, created by Azuma Makoto. Azuma used Terramac® – a biodegradable fibre made of corn, which over time turns into water and CO2. The experimental installation revolved around the subject of the passage of time and the circle of life in nature, manifested in the time it takes for moss and grass to grow and the time it takes for the fibres to return to the soil. In Azuma’s product, the fibres appear as 3cm-thick sheets created with a Raschel knitting machine. Azuma grew moss on the sheets and then used them to create moss gardens in built spaces. The sheets also contained grass seed, and after a week buds began to emerge from the bed of moss. Azuma grew several types of moss on these woven fibres, which encourage the growth of rhizoids, root-like organelles of non-vascular plants (that do not have the organs of vascular plants, including actual roots). According to Hara, this is the formation of ‘third nature’, conflating culture and nature. Azuma explains: ‘The moss represents what we normally mean by nature, whereas the fibers represent the sort of manufactured nature that is essential to our lifestyles. Mixing these two types of nature together has produced a third type. To achieve a comfortable harmony in the mix, it is necessary for people to move closer to and make concessions to the plants.’45 Azuma concludes: ‘My work for this exhibition shows the encounter and coexistence of two lifeforms with different origins. Living things connect strongly and straightforwardly, and conceal unlimited possibilities.’46 The exhibition demonstrated how artificial fibres, considered quintessential industrial products and produced for financial efficiency and convenience, do not clash with nature; their function is to create a bond for a new infrastructure between humans and nature. This idea of reorganising the categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in such a way that neither

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one appropriates the other was already mentioned in Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, which predicted the new associations between science and design that we now see in synthetic biology projects presented as the future of product design. The use of synthetic biology in product design is demonstrated in Tokujin Yoshioka’s series of chairs, which are naturally grown from crystals. The Spider’s Thread Chair, for instance, is created by suspending seven filaments within a frame that sits in a pool in which crystals can grow. The chair grows naturally in the tank as crystals form on the threads. Yoshioka guides the design but leaves the rest of the work for nature to create hybrid products which are in between artificial and natural.47 In conclusion, contemporary critical design, which blurs the lines between human/machine, nature/culture, and object/subject, wishes to germinate new areas of insights, in which the human and non-human, animal, mineral, and vegetable come together to create an active ecosystem in which there is no division into nature and culture and notions like ‘nature’ and ‘natural’. While these new perceptions differ from critical design, which is supported by critical ideologies like feminism or the perception of ‘the other’, discussed in the previous chapters, they also create a new critical design. Unlike the designers of the previous generation who used design to criticise and defy hegemonic knowledge and the dominant social values of their time, contemporary critical design deconstructs traditional thought categories and creates new categories of thought in their place. These changes also transform the role of designers. This is no longer material product design but rather digital technology design (data, interface, code) or commercial sign design (brand names), which shape a new perception of reality. These two elements – technology (as Walter Benjamin explained) and the creation of signs (as Baudrillard explained) – no longer mediate material culture and people’s new mental structure but are themselves the new non-material reality, shaping how we think and the mediation between humans and reality. In the exhibition ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’, Paula Antonelli presented the role of design in the age of virtual technology as the mediator that forms the interface between future technologies and users.48 In the exhibition ‘Senseware’, Hara explained that the role of design is to translate the virtual a-sensory world and nanotechnology into an aesthetic and beautiful, and above all non-intimidating form, through shapes and things that our senses can see, touch, sense, understand, and even like. In other words, the designer is entrusted with the task of visually and materially presenting new technologies and teaching the senses to respond to nanotechnology or virtual reality that is beyond people’s basic senses and with that mediating the new structure of reality. Hara also explained that the idea at the heart of the exhibition ‘Senseware’ is to shift the focus of industrial design from object design to user experience design. That is to say, the role of contemporary designers is no longer to give shape and

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Critical design in Japan meaning to the material and turn it into an object (e.g., the production of a wooden or plastic chair) or to follow the ideas of critical theory like postmodern critical designers (e.g., the creation of conceptual fashion that explores body politics), but to give shape to the new level of freedom that digital technology and new materials have given us and give users the freedom to look at reality through a different prism, to take it apart and rebuild it anew. Hara claimed that the new materials and technologies can dramatically expand and change our understanding of the world through design. In other words, new technologies and their realisation in material are the designer’s way of presenting the user with limitless possibilities and shaping new ways of thinking. The new mental freedom introduces a habitus based on open patterns that expand, alter, and blur the categories that were the bedrock of the Modernist and even postmodern world view, such as human vs machine or nature vs culture. As such, contemporary design sets in motion a process of undermining cultural categories and fundamental traditional perceptions, facilitating a change in the commitment and connection between subject and object. These changes, mediated by contemporary digital design objects, are the foundation from which new awareness, recognition, and world views emerge.

Notes   1 D. Y. Markovich, ‘Introduction’, Bezalel Journal of Visual and Material Culture, 3 (Visual Activism) (2016), http://journal.bezalel.ac.il/he/issue/3610 (accessed 1 February 2019) (in Hebrew).   2 J. Van Troon, ‘Design and reflexivity’, in H. Armstrong (ed.), Graphic Design Theory (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), p. 104.   3 L. Manovich, ‘Avant-garde as software’, in S. Kovats (ed.), Media Revolution: Electronic Media in the Transformation Process of Eastern and Central Europe (Frankfurt: Bauhaus 6, Campus Verlag, 1999), pp. 48–61.   4 E. Tachikawa, Dezain to Kakushin: Mirai o Tsukuru Gojū no Shikō (Design and Innovation: 50 Ways to Create the Future) (Tokyo: PIE International, 2016), p. 49.   5 Tokyo Bousai consists of three components: the actual book, a foldable disaster prevention map that depicts important emergency facilities nearby, and a digital resource with quizzes that raise disaster preparedness and provide additional up-todate information. Every Tokyo ward has its own corresponding map, and on the back of the guide there is a checklist of important items needed in the aftermath of a disaster, an evacuation flow chart, as well as contact information and Twitter handles for major relief organisations.   6 Tachikawa, Dezain to Kakushin, p. 47. See also C. Dimmer, ‘A Guide to Disaster Survival and Good Design’, Japan Times (7 November 2015), www.japantimes.co.jp/cul­ ture/2015/11/07/books/book-reviews/guide-disaster-survival-good-design/#.Wv0NZ­ S6uzcs (accessed 1 February 2019).   7 The use of the rhino as the manual’s mascot is a pun: the second syllable of Bousai, Japanese for disaster preparedness, sounds like the Japanese word for rhinoceros.   8 Tokyo Bousai (Disaster Preparedness Tokyo), Tokyo Metropolitan Government, www.bousai.metro.tokyo.jp/book/index.html or English version www.metro.tokyo. jp/ENGLISH/GUIDE/BOSAI/index.htm (accessed 18 May 2018).

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  9 See the website, SEALDs – Student Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy S, http:// sealdseng.strikingly.com/ (accessed 18 May 2018). 10 E. Oguma, ‘Instability, the crisis of politics and social movements: The contemporary world and Japan’, The Asia Pacific Journal, 14:22 (2016), 10. 11 J. Kingston, ‘Student Protesters Want a Revitalized Democracy’, Japan Times (12­ September 2015), www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/09/12/commentary/student-­ protesters-want-revitalized-democracy/#.Wvw8jC6uzcs (accessed 23 August 2019). 12 L’Atelier Populaire produced more than two hundred different posters, printed in runs of a few hundred. They bore slogans such as ‘La lutte continue’ (The fight  ­continues), ‘Nous sommes le pouvoir’ (We are the power) and ‘La beauté est  dans la rue’ (Beauty is in the street). As the French media was controlled by the government, the posters served as a sorely needed opportunity for the May ‘68 protesters to express their concerns. See M. Seidman, ‘Revolutionary collectivism: Parisian poster art in 1968’, Contemporary French Civilization, 20:1 (1996), 145–67.‫‏‬ 13 Y. Hayashi, ‘Campaign Group SEALDs Hooking Japan’s Youth with Jazzy Placards, Fliers’, Japan Times (21 July 2015), www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/07/21/ national/social-issues/campaign-group-sealds-hooking-japans-youth-jazzy-plac­ ards-fliers/#.WwEe5i6uzcs (accessed 23 August 2019). 14 Kingston, ‘Student Protesters’; Hayashi, ‘Campaign Group SEALDs’. 15 Fixperts projects at the Kyoto Institute of Technology 2015 & 2016 selected for exhibition in the United States. Website of Kyoto Design Lab, www.d-lab.kit.ac.jp/ events/2016/fixperts2016cccd/ (accessed 9 June 2018). 16 F. Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 33–7, 136–61. 17 M. Douglas and B. Isherwood, The World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 57–76. 18 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 48. 19 Digital product design centres around computerised information and code, while the actual material is secondary. However, it also includes nanomaterials like optical fibres, materials that are not the traditional materials of industrial design like water and light (e.g., Atelier Omoya and Team Lab that create digital products alongside water products, including the fountain in Osaka train station). 20 Y. Ben-Dov, ‘From matter to information: Changing the rules’, Galileo – Journal of Science, 67 (2004), pp. 56–63 (in Hebrew). 21 Ibid. 22 Nosigner used plastic pallets covered with thin wood panelling for the flooring. Underneath the panelling lie cables that run into small doors offering power, phone, and network connections, while lightweight polycarbonate panels make it easy to edit the workspace at any given time. Each part has its own blueprint. See Tachikawa, Dezain to Kakushin, p. 26. See also the website ‘Mozilla Japan’s open source factory space’, Office Snapshots, https://officesnapshots.com/2013/12/04/ mozilla-japans-open-source-factory-space/ (accessed 4 February 2019). 23 Tachikawa, Dezain to Kakushin, p. 43. See also website Open Sohko Design, http:// opensohko.com/en/ (4 February 2019). 24 The website is run by Re-Sohko company. Sohko means ‘storehouse’ in Japanese, and the ‘re’ connects between recourse and sohko. 25 The Professional Sharing project was displayed in the exhibition ‘THE FAB MIND’, 2014–15 at 21_21 Design Sight, Tokyo. See also ‘Professional sharing – Speculation on the future of sharing exhibited at 21_21 Design Sight, 2014’, Takram Design Engineer­ ing, www.takram.com/projects/professional-sharing/ (accessed 18 May 2018). 26 Ben-Dov, ‘From matter to information’, 56–63. 27 ‘Fun Vii Concept Car,’ Toyota, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOAC_sPCWME (accessed 4 February 2019).

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Critical design in Japan 28 In order to recognise the car as a part of the body image, the design team has set tasks on four specific developmental levels: first, to convert the car body’s environmental information into organic, biological images and directly project them over the human body; second, the projected images are not explicit information such as written words or numbers, but rather dynamically reflect changes in the outer perimeter; third, the images are organic; and fourth, the projection of the images senses the driver’s position. 29 The design and development were done in the Toyota Info Technology Center, in collaboration with the Keio University SFC Akira Wakita Lab. See ‘FINA, 2015 Automotive UI, Original In-car System’, Akira Wakita, www.akirawakita.com/#works/ fina (accessed 4 February 2019). 30 The RCA-IIS Tokyo Design Lab is an initiative jointly established in December 2016 by the Institution of Industrial Science (IIS) at the University of Tokyo and the Royal College of Art (RCA). The aim of the Lab is to create deployable innovations by leveraging the advanced technology of the IIS with design abilities of the RCA. Y. Sato Lab. is a visual media engineering lab dealing with computer vision for human behaviour sensing and material perception analysis. Y. Sato Lab, www.hci.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp (accessed 18 May 2018). 31 Interview with Yuri Kalbanov, designer of RCA-IIS Tokyo Design Lab (Jerusalem, May 1, 2018). 32 Cited in E. Kimchi, The Internet – What Is New in the Emergency of Novelty (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2010), p. 65 (in Hebrew). 33 K. Hayles, ‘The condition of virtuality’, in P. Lunenfeld (ed.), The Digital Dialectics: New Essays on New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 68–94. 34 Kimchi, The Internet, pp. 65–6. 35 The project was led by Tagawa Kinya, concept development was by Watanabe Ko¯taro¯ and design by Yoneda Kaz of Takram Design Engineering in 2012. 36 S. Takeuchi Lab. is a centre of research and development of integrative biomedical and bio-hybrid systems. S. Takeuchi Lab, www.hybrid.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp (accessed 18 May 2018). 37 B. Fahs, M. Dudy and S. Stage (eds), The Moral Panics of Sexuality (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), pp. 217–18. 38 Sputniko! is a Japanese-British artist based in Boston and Tokyo. After majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science at Imperial College, London, she went on to pursue a Masters in Design at the Royal College of Art. Sputniko! is known for her film and multi-media installation works inspired by how technology changes society and people’s values – in particular focusing on gender issues. She was selected as Women of the Year by Vogue Japan in 2013 and one of 100 Most Influential People of Japan by Nikkei Business. See http://sputniko.com/works/ (accessed 4 February 2019); see also: www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/talktome/ objects/142590 (accessed 4 February 2019). 39 G. Julier, ‘From visual culture to culture of design’, Design Issues, 22:1 (2006), 64–76. 40 See ‘INFOTUBE, 1999, Web-based 3D Visualization VRML/Urban Space Design/ Data Driven Sculpture’, Akira Wakita, http://akirawakita.com/#works/infotube (accessed 4 February 2019). 41 D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 42 T. El Or, Sandals: The Anthropology of Local Style (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2014) 227–8. 43 C. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 1–34. 44 K. Fujisaki, ‘“Did artificial fibers succeed in awakening unknown senses?” Report on TOKYO FIBER ‘09 in Milan in 2009’, Design Museum Holon, www.dmh.org.

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il/pages/default.aspx?PageId=94&catid=-1 (accessed 18 May 2018); K. Hara, Designing Design (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2011), pp. 152–5. Fujisaki, ‘Did artificial fibers succeed in awakening unknown senses?’ M. Azuma, ‘Time of MOSS for Tokyo Fiber Senseware at Milan Design Week 09’, Design Boom, www.designboom.com/design/makoto-azuma-time-of-moss-for-tokyo-fiber-senseware-at-milan-design-week-09/ (accessed 18 May 2018). Interview with Tokujin Yoshioka (Tokyo, 12 August 2013). P. Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), pp. 16–17.

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Personal interviews Fukasawa Naoto (Naoto Fukasawa Design) (Tokyo, 18 September 2015). Hara Kenya (president, Nippon Design Center) (Tokyo, 13 August 2013). Hirano Itaru (chief curator, Museum of Modern Art Saitama) (Tokyo, 11 August 2013). Ishibashi Katsutoshi (editor-in-chief, AXIS magazine) (Tokyo, 9 August 2013). Kalbanov Yuri (design team leader, RCA-IIS Tokyo Lab) (Jerusalem, 1 May­ 2018). Kashiwagi Hiroshi (design critic and professor at Musashino Art University) (Tokyo, 8 August 2013). Kitazawa Eishi (director, GGG Gallery) (Tokyo, 8 August 2013). Koike Kazuko (member of advisory board, Mujirushi Ryohin) (Tokyo, 17 September 2015). Levin Ronen (co-founder Hironen Design Studio) (Tel Aviv, 26 March and 29 March 2016). Sakai Tadayasu (director, Setagaya Art Museum) (Tokyo, 9 August 2013). Satoh Taku (Taku Satoh Design Office) (Tokyo, 14 August 2013). Sudo¯ Reiko (CEO and design director of Nuno cooperation and design textile for Mujirushi Ryohin) (Jerusalem, 10 May 2015). Suzuki Hachiro¯ (Suzuki Hachiro¯ Studio) (Tokyo, 26 June 2005). Suzuki Taro¯ (assistant professor, Tokyo University of the Arts Design Department and Atelier OMOYA) (Tokyo, 11 August 2013). Takahashi Kudo (chief brand officer, Team Lab) (Tokyo, 10 August 2013). Uchida Shigeru (Uchida Design Studio) (Tokyo, 25 September 2015).

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Bibliography

225

Watanabe Ko¯taro¯ (founder and context designer, Takram Design Engineering) (Tokyo, 24 September 2015). Yasui Satoshi (chief designer, Mujirushi Ryohin) (Tel Aviv, 7 May 2015). Yoshioka Tokujin (Yoshioka Tokujin Studio) (Tokyo, 12 August 2013).

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Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures. 1968 movement 19, 31, 32, 47n1, 86, 189 Abe Ko¯bo 33 abjection 117–18 accelerated symbolic consumerism ­ 39 accessories of civilisation 5–6 activist discourse 184–5 actnet 8 Actor-Network Theory 23 Adamson, Glen 16, 21 advertising 8–9, 13, 31, 41–3, 51n48, 54–80, 85n56 Comme des Garçons 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115 Fuji-Xerox campaign 58–9, 60, 61–6, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 72, 76, 79–80, 81n12, 82n25, 83n41 Mujirushi Ryohin 128–9, 130, 131, 132, 134, 145–7, 150n61, 150n68 Parco campaign 67–9, 70, 71, 72–3, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 82n27, 82n28, 83n37 and social protest 76, 79–80 aesthetics Japanese 45-6 Mujirushi Ryohin 138–45, 140, 141, 142 postmodern 31 Akabane Makoto 38–9, 89

Akioka Yoshio 36 Alchemia 18 alienation 19 alpha brands 21 American dream 54, 127 Japanese version of 35–6 An An (magazine) 86–7, 87 Ando¯ Tadao¯ 31, 38, 40 Ando¯ Takemasa, 72 Angelic Pretty 92, 93 Angura 33 anorexia 11 anti-American protest 58–9 Anti-Branding movement 125 anti-consumerism movement 2, 125, 127–8 anti-design movements 34, 39, 80, 101, 105 anti-design practices 2 anti-government protest 59 anti-institutionalism 2 Antonelli, Paula 209 Aoki Jun 40 Apple 21 Ara Tomo 38 Archigram 18 architecture 29n84, 40 art 2, 32–3 art collectives 32, 84n47 art directors 36, 41, 57–8, 68 Art Directors Association 36 Art Nouveau 175

Index Asaba Katsumi 41 Asahi Kasei Textile company 107 Association of Industrial Designers ­ 36 Atkins, Taylor 69, 83n40 autonomous principles 22, 29n78 Aviv, Naomi 151, 157–8, 161–2 Axis design centre, Roppongi 38 Azuma House, Osaka 40 Azuma Makoto 208 Barbie 11 Barlow, Tani E. 21 Barthes, Roland 12, 121n39, 166 Baudrillard, Jean 12, 13, 16–17, 26n35, 136–7, 145–6, 192, 193, 209 behaviour 9–11 regulating 7–8, 17–18 Benjamin, Walter 152, 193, 206, 209 Beuys, Joseph 161 Biedermeier style 168–9, 173–80, 173, 182n45, 183n46, 183n47 Bjork 67 Boas, Franz 14, 26n45 body 2.0 197 body image 11 body politics 2, 19, 24, 34, 47, 89, 96, 97, 101–2, 105, 107, 184 body structure 8 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 7, 26n41 bourgeois lifestyle 174 branding 8, 24, 41–2, 54, 58–9, 79 Braun 21 Braun, Erwin 21 ‘bubble party’ 37 Bullock, Julia 72 Butler, Judith 105 California 34 Callon, Michel 23 capitalism 1–2, 34–5, 37, 86, 105, 108, 125, 145, 147, 184–5, 191 car industry 36 Carrefour 148n9 cars 6, 37–8 chairs 11 Chanel, Coco 101 change 3, 19, 21 Charny, Daniel 191 China, Imperial 14 Chong Doryun 33 city planning 9 Clammer, John 16, 38

co-design 20 Coelacanth, Osaka 156 Comme des Garçons 89, 99–103, 104, 105, 106, 107–8, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116–19, 117, 123n53 commodification 42, 108 commodity self 16 community-based economy 196 competitive edge 1 computerised tomography 206 Conkey, Margaret 14 consciousness, and technology ­ 193–4 consumer culture 8, 12, 16–17, 20, 22, 24, 31, 35–40, 42–3, 46, 57–8, 76, 91, 102, 108, 111, 118–19, 124–5, 136–8, 143–7, 159, 179, 184, 192–3, 194, 196, 207–8 consumer revolution 34–5, 59 consumerism 108 consumers 16, 17 consumption 7, 12, 14, 16, 23, 35, 37–9, 41, 54, 90–1, 116, 118, 192 conventions, challenging 72 Cosgrove, Stuart 87 cosplay 92 counterculture 57, 76, 105 Crary, Jonathan 6–7, 193–4 Creative Commons 192 creative outburst, 1960s 1 critical design 209–10 aims 20 challenges of 18–19 emergence of 39–47 origin of term 18 post-structuralism 19–20 critical protest movements 31 critical theory 19, 20, 153, 184, ­ 210 critical thinking 21, 43, 86, 116 critique 17–21, 23 cross-cultural influences 15 crowdsourcing 196 cultural capitalism 43, 107–8 cultural jams 19 cultural production 39 culture, and nature 206–10 culture industry 46 Cup Noodle 36 CUTiE (magazine) 92 cyber culture 201 cyborgs 202, 203, 204, 206

227

228 Index Daliot-Bul, Michal 86 deadvertising 80 deconstruction 22, 24, 31, 40, 101, 103, 105, 107, 116, 121n32, 179, 209 defamiliarisation 185–6 deontological ethics 10 Derrida, Jacques 121n32 design 2–4, 12–17 design activism 20, 186 design associations 36 design galleries 43 Design Thinking 2, 187, 189 desire 8, 16–17, 20, 40, 79, 147 digital design 184–210, 211n19 human–machine interface 185 and nature and culture 206–10 open design 191–5 open-sharing design 195–6, ­ 197 sharing economy 191–5 digital products 195, 198 Digital Turn 184 Dimmer, C. 146–7 distinction, modes of 13–15 Douglas, Mary 192 Dower, John 32 Duchamp, Marcel 118 Dunne, Anthony 18 Eco, Umberto 3–4, 12, 15–16 ecology 2 economic bubble 37, 39–40, 49–50n29, 156 economic crisis, 2008 184 economic miracle 54 economic policy 34–5, 48n16, 59 economic values 8–9 effective history 18 Eichrodt, Ludwig 174–5 Elias, Norbert 5–6 El Or, Tamar 14, 29n80 environmental standards 61 ephemeral beauty work 102 equality 72, 101, 105 ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesquenonsense) 152–3, 154, 159, 179, 180n6 ethics 9–10 ethnic hierarchy 4 European Modernism 142, 164 Ewen, Stuart 16 exhibitions, international 44–5, 46, 53n62

fashion 73, 74 affiliations 87, 88, 89 Comme des Garçons 89, 99–103, 99, 104, 105, 106, 107–8, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116–19, 117, 123n53 deconstructed 99–101, 99, 103, 105, 107, 116 kawaii style 89, 90–2, 93, 94, 94, 95, 119, 120n16, 120n20 power relations 105 and protest 86–119 and self-expression 87 spending 89 values 102–3 Western 103 female power 69 femininity 84n46, 119, 153 feminism 2, 72, 73, 83n42 feminist design 20 feminist theory 121n40 FINA 198, 199 Fixperts project 190–1 Flusser, Vilém 3 food industry 36 fork (utensil) 5–6 form, and function 3, 16, 79, 103, 142 Foucault, Michel 17–18, 27n53, 27n63, 27n64, 28n54 France, student movement, 1968 19 Fujioka Wako 80, 85n56 Fuji-Xerox, Xerox Beautiful advertising campaign 58–9, 60, 61–6, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 72, 76, 79–80, 81n12, 82n25, 83n41 Fukasawa Naoto 11, 142, 143–4 Fukuda Shigeo 128–9 function, and form 3, 16, 79, 103, 142 Geertz, Clifford 22 gender 39, 103, 105, 153–4, 191, 204 gender equality 105 gender roles 5 gender shifting 92 genealogy 28n54 Gibson, James 11 globalisation 184 Golani Solomon, E. 146, 146–7 Gombrich, Ernst 14 Gossot, Anne 21 graphic design 34, 48n14 subversive 54–5, 56, 57–8 Graphic Design Association 37 Grapus 19, 28n70

Index Great Britain 34 Great East Japan Earthquake, 2011 186–7 Greenberg, Clement 179 Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp 87 Gutai Bijutsu Kyo¯kai 32 Gutai group 120n22 habitus 5, 6, 7, 191 Hamada Koichi 61 Hamano Yasuhiro 50n36 Hanu Michio 36 Hara Kenya 125, 135–6, 137–8, 138, 145, 146–7, 207–8, 209–10 Harari, Yuval Noah 6 Haraway, Donna 206, 209 Hayles, Katherine 201 Hebdige, Dick 16 hegemonic structures 180 Heidegger, Martin 28n54 Hello Kitty 11, 36, 91 Henry VIII, King 14 Heskett, John 19 heteronomous principles 22, 29n78 hierarchies, deconstruction of 22 Hijikata Tatsumi 33 Hirano Ko¯ga, 34 Hi-Red Center 32, 33, 57 Hiroko Naoto 94, 95, 120n19 Hironen 23, 151–80 To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor 163–8, 163, 182n33 Biedermeier installation 168–9, 173–80, 173 exhibitions 180n9 inception of 155–7 Kinoko table 167, 171 Love Seat 175, 176 objects 151–2 Pi-Isu chair 168, 169 Poko lamp 167, 172 Speedo chair 175–6, 178 Tiffany lamp 175, 177 Uni-Chair 167, 170 Utz-Li Gutz-Li armchairs 157–62, ­ 158 visual strategy 152 Hitler, Adolf 167 Horace 15 Hosoe Eiko¯ 33 housing projects 38 human–machine interface 185, 198–202, 199

identity 16, 90, 116, 144, 147, 151 construction of 15 deviant 179 national 3 personal 39 social 12–14 women 73 identity politics 2, 19, 23, 47, 72, 89, 105, 118, 184 ideological structures 4–5 ideological targets 185 Iguchi Yukiaki 126–7 Illouz, Eva 4 individualism 6, 35–6, 39, 73, 151, 192 Inoue Tsuguya 42, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115 International Style 40 internationalisation 45 Internet of Things 198 Isamu Noguchi 149n50 Ise To¯ri, 189 Isherwood, Baron 192 Ishigami Junya 42 Ishimoto Yasuhiro 149n50 Ishimure Michiko 61, 81n19 Ishioka Eiko 23, 31, 41, 57–8, 76, 79, 83n33 Parco advertising campaign 67–9, 70, 71, 72–3, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 82n27, 82n28, 83n37 Isozaki Arata 31, 40 Isozaki Shin 44 Issey Miyake 31, 40, 41–2, 43, 52n59 Italy 34 Ito¯ Ruri 21 Ito¯ Toyo¯ 38, 40 Itoi Shigesato 69 Ivy, Marilyn 39, 80, 85n56 Izanagi boom 35 Izuhara Eiichi 21 Jameson, Fredric 191 Japan as financial superpower 43 social revolution, 1968 31 student movement, 1968 19 Japan Foundation 43–4, 52n56 Japanese aesthetics 45–6 Japanese Association for Industrial Design 44 Japanese design aura surrounding 2 exhibitions of 44–5 immanent development 22

229

230 Index Japanese design (cont.) studies 21–2 styling 28n77 Japanese Modernism 140 Japaneseness 44, 124 Japonism 175 jazz community 69, 83n40 Jazz Film Laboratory 33 Jikken Ko¯bo¯ 32, 33 Jobs, Steve 21 Julier, Guy 4 Jung, Carl 181n17 Kagu Tokyo Designer’s Week 88 38, 50n37 Kamekura Yu¯ saku, 55 Kanai Masaaki 135 Kashiwagi Hiroshi 21 Katayama Masamichi 42 Katsumie Masaru 54, 55 Katsushika Hokusai 55 kawaii style 23, 89, 90–2, 93, 94, 94, 95, 119, 120n16, 120n20 Kawasaki Takao 42 Kenji Oki 41 Kenzo¯ Tange, 149n50 Kimchi, Eran 201 Kinsella, Sharon 90 Kitahara Susumu 38 kitsch 179 Kobayashi Yo¯taro¯ 58 Koike Kazuko 127–8, 131, 138–9, 143, 144 Korean War 32 Kristeva, Julia 116, 118, 121n40 Kuramata Shiro¯ 11, 31, 34, 38, 40–2, 44, 46, 100 Kurihara Tao 40 Kusama Yayoi 96, 98 Kussmaul, Adolf 174–5 Kuwasawa Design School 140 Kyoto Design Lab 190–1 language 20 Latour, Bruno 7–8, 11, 23 Levin, Ronen 151, 152, 154, 155–7, 156–7, 160, 161–2, 161, 166, 182n41 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 13, 207 lifestyle 13, 17, 23, 38, 39, 50n31, 54, 79, 191 Lindbergh, Peter 99, 111 living standards 36 Locke, John 194–5

London 10–11, 155–6 Longinus 15 Loos, Adolf 163, 164–8, 181n26 luxury and luxury goods 38, 45, 50n31, 107–8, 111, 113, 116, 118, 138 McLuhan, Marshall 9 McNeil, Peter 15 Maki Fumihiko 40 Malpass, Matt 20 manga 92 Manovich, Lev 185–6 Marie Antoinette 91, 119, 120n17 masculinity 118, 153 Masuda Ko¯ji 66 Material Cans 126–7 material culture 4–11, 22 material ethics 9–10 material interferences 15 material signalling 15 materiality 22 Matsuda Tsuji 67 Mears, Patricia 21, 89, 100–1 memory 201–2 Memphis Group 18, 40 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15 Metabolism 18, 33 methodology 22–4 microelectromechanical systems 200–1 micro-resistance 185 Middle Ages 14 militarism 4 Milk (fashion house) 91–2 Miller, Daniel 7, 25n17 Minamata diseases 59, 61, 81n19 Mishima Akimichi 127 Mizuno Manabu 42 Modernism 16, 149n50, 165, 167, 175–6, 176–7, 186 Moi-même-Moitié 94 Mono Mono movement 36 Mono Pro Koge company 36 Mono-ha 32 moral dimensions 9–10 Morita Masaki 41 Moriya Nobuo 21 Moriyama Daido¯ 33 Morrison, Jasper 143, 144 Moses, Robert 9 Mujirushi Ryohin 23, 124–47, 140, 184, 196 advertising 128–9, 130, 131, 132, 134, 145–7, 150n61, 150n68 aesthetics 138–45, 140, 141, 142

Index aims 147 birth of 126–9, 131, 133, 135–7 designer collaborations 124–5 first incarnation 124 Japaneseness 124 name 128 packaging 128 production costs 135–6 products 124, 125, 126–7, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137–8, 140, 141, 142, 144–5, 147 as protest 125, 136–8 social projects 136 social sign 145–7 style 125 vision 138 Muller, Wim 6 Munro, Alexandra 1 Murakami Takashi 42 my-car-ism 36 my-home-ism 36 Nakanishi Natsuyuki 33 Nakata Tetsuo 128, 133 natural products 207 nature, and culture 206–10 Nawa Ko¯hei 42 needs 16–17, 79 Neo-Dada 32, 33 Network theory 23 networking 41–2, 52n50 New Left 32, 59, 72, 86 New York 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 27n54 Nishikawa Hidehiko 128 Nishimura Hijiri 36 No-Logo movement 125 Non-No (magazine) 87 norms 4–7, 17–18 Nosigner 24, 186–7, 195–6, 211n22 objects, production of 23, 29n81 Ogino Katsuhiko 36 O¯kawa Hiroyuki 151, 155–7, 160–1, 162 Okinawa design convention, 1975 37 Open Code 192 open design 191–5 Open Design Foundation 192 open-sharing design 195–6, 197 Orientalism 44–5 Osaka, Azuma House 40 Osaka Expo ’70 1, 34, 76 ostentatious poverty 116, 122n52

O¯taka Takeshi 36 otherness 2, 69, 103, 105, 180n4 To Adolf Loos with Love and Squalor and 163–8, 163 Biedermeier installation and 168–9, 173–80, 173 discourse 152 Hironen and 151–80 Utz-Li Gutz-Li armchairs and 157–62, 158 O¯tsuka Eiji 90 ownership 194–5 Panyaarvudh, Jintana 11 Papanek, Victor 186 Parco advertising campaign 41, 67–9, 70, 71, 72–3, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 82n27, 82n28, 83n37 Paris 9, 189 participatory design 20 patriarchy 4, 10 Pavitt, Jane 16, 21 perfume 116, 116–17, 117 Pink House 92 Plaza Agreement, 1985 49n29 pollution 59, 61, 81n18, 81n19, 81n20 Pop Art 118 popular culture 2, 22, 39, 90, 156 post-human design 196, 197–202, 199, 203, 204–6, 205 postmodernism 16, 21, 27–8n54, 29n84, 31–2, 32–9, 100, 179, 180n4, 194 post-structuralism 19–20 power relations 2, 18, 27n53, 105 printing techniques 41 property 194–5 propriety, undermining 33 protest Comme des Garçons 89, 99–103, 99, 104, 105, 106, 107–8, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116–19, 117 and fashion 86–119 kawaii style 89, 90–2, 93, 94, 94, 95 Mujirushi Ryohin as 125, 136–8 and self-expression 87 Punk movement 55 queer theory 152, 153 race and racial discrimination 69, 83n41 Rams, Dieter 141

231

232 Index Rawsthorn, Alice 3, 21 Red Tent Theater 33 Rei Kawakubo 19, 23, 31, 34, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46–7, 52n61, 89, 94–6, 99–103, 99, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111, 113, 116–18, 119, 123n56, 184 Reinking, Ann 76, 78 Renown Nishiki Co. Ltd 36 rhizomatic structures 31 Riello, Giorgio 15 Rome, ancient 14 Roppongi, Axis design centre 38 Rose, Marie Jeanne 91 Rumpelstiltskin 159–60 Saint Laurent, Yves 101 Saito¯ Maki 39, 89 Saito¯ Makoto¯ 41 Sakamoto Hiroko 21 Salinger, J. D. 163–4 Sanrio 36, 91 satire 174–5 Sato Toyoko 73 Sawada Kenji 76, 77 Schneider, J. 87 Scott Brown, Denise 12 SEALDs 189–90, 190 Seibu Museum of Art 67, 127 Seibu group 67–8, 82n32, 124, 147n5 Seiyu Stores Ltd 126 Sejima Kazuyo 40 self-expression 87 semiotic guerrilla warfare 16 Senseware exhibition 207–9, 209–10 sexual freedom 72 sharing economy 191–5 Shehnaz Suterwalla 87 Sherman, Cindy 113, 114 Shimizu Keiichiro¯ 80 sign exchange value 16–17 sign value 12–14, 16–17, 79–80, 136–8, 194 simulacrum 31 Six (magazine) 111, 113, 115, 122n50 social awareness 19, 191 social communication goods 91 social design 186–7, 187, 188, 189–91, 190 social differentiation 12–14 social entrepreneurs 2 social functions 3–4 social innovation 4, 186 and nature and culture 206–10

open design 191–5 open-sharing design 195–6, 197 sharing economy 191–5 social design 186–7, 187, 188, 189–91, 190 social power 10 social protest 1, 2 and advertising 76, 79–80 and consumer culture 79–80 social role, design 2–4 social systems 23 socialisation 5 socially responsive design 20 Sputniko! 212n38 Menstruation Machine 204–5, 205 stadium design 11 Steele, Valerie 21 street performance 33 style 13–16 styling 2, 4 stylistic variety 16 subcultures 16, 39, 46 Sudjic, Deyan 41 Sumptuary Laws 14 super designers 23 Super Normal design 143–4 Superstudio 18 Suzuki Hachiro 23, 57–8, 76, 79 Fuji-Xerox campaign 58–9, 60, 61–6, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 72, 76, 79–80, 81n12, 82n25, 83n41 Swidler, Ann 4, 5, 7 Tachikawa Eisuke 186–7 Takagi Minoru 131 Takahashi Jun 40 Takano Aya 42 Takemitsu To¯ru, 33 Takizawa Naoki 42 Takram Design Engineering 196, 197, 202, 203 Takram Design Studio 23 Tanaka Atsuko 96 Tanaka Ikko¯ 31, 41, 69, 127–8, 130, 131, 132, 134, 138, 138–9 Tarayama Shu¯ ji, 33 taste 13, 26n41 Teasley, Sarah 21 technology, and consciousness 193–4 Tel Aviv Bauhaus 156 television 49n19 Tenjo¯ Sajiki 33 Teshigahara Hiroshi 33–4 Teshigahara So¯fu 33–4

Index therapeutic power 3 To¯matsu Sho¯mei 33 Toda Masatoshi/Toda Seiju 41 Tokujin Yoshioka 209 Tokyo 33, 38, 40, 47, 67, 162 Tokyo Bousai 186–7, 187, 188, 189, 210n5, 210n7 Tokyo Design Museum 42 Tokyo Olympics, 1964 1, 34, 55 totemism 13 Toyota Fun-Vii concept car 197–8, 212n28 transition design 20 transitional objects 3 Transparent Intent 198–9 Trickster (archetype) 159–60, 162, 181n17 Tsutsumi Seiji 67, 126, 127, 131, 133, 148n13, 148n14 Tsuzuki Kyo¯ichi 89 Uchida Shigeru 31, 38, 41–2, 45 Ueki Kanji 38 Ueno Chizuko 86 Umeda Masanori 40, 44 Uniqlo 42 United States of America 31–2, 39, 43, 58–9, 108, 125–6, 155 United States–Japan Security Treaty 32, 59 urban design 9 Ushida Yoshimasa 190 values 4, 5, 6–8, 22, 82n24, 102–3, 175, 191 Van Toorn, Jan 185 Venturi, Robert 12 Verbeek, Peter-Paul 9–10 Vienna 164–5 Vienna Secession 164 Vietnam War 32 virtual reality 185, 206, 209

visual art, importance of 190 visual culture 31, 46, 76, 79 design and 12–17 rise of postmodern 32–9 subversive 40, 55, 57, 94, 96 Wakita Akira 24, 199, 199, 206 war, traumas of 1 Warhol, Andy 118 waste 126–7 Watanabe Akira 38 Watanabe Junya 40 wearable devices 200 Web 2.0 196 Weiner, A. B. 87 Winner, Langdon 9 Wobst, Martin 14–15 Wolf, Naomi 102 women 69, 72–3, 83n43 protest 90–2, 93, 94, 94 women artists 84n47, 96, 121n24 women’s rights 69, 72–3, 84n51 work ethic 61–6 World Industrial Design Conference, 1973 37 Yamaguchi Harumi 69 Yamashita Yu¯ zo¯ 131 Yasui Satoshi 138, 139, 142 Yohji Yamamoto 40, 42–3, 45 Yoko Ono 96, 97, 99 Yokoo Tadanori 34, 52n59, 55, 56, 57, 89, 100 Yoshida Doctrine 32, 59 Yoshioka Tokujin 42 youth culture 89 Yukio Mishima 33, 55, 57, 154 Zen gardens 10–11 Zero Jigen 33 Žižek, Slavoj 43, 107–8 zoot suit 87, 119n5

233