Secrets of Japan’s Award-Winning Designs

TOKYO – By the 1980s the Japanese had become world leaders in industrial and commercial design, a phenomenon that has had a fundamental influence on American and European designers, making it imperative that they improve their own designs in order not to be totally replaced, as well as providing them with new insights into the nature of good design.

This phenomenon has a historical precedent. In the early 1600s foreigners in Japan began to ship various Japanese handicrafts to Europe wrapped in the now famous woodblock prints, which at the time were so cheap and so lightly regarded (at least by the foreigners) that they used them as wrapping paper.

In Europe the woodblock prints quickly became collector’s items, changed hands for large sums of money, and dramatically influenced European painters in their use of form and color.

Long before that era, the Japanese sense of design had become an integral part of the culture. Rather than concentrating on philosophical quests for absolute or eternal truths, or occupy themselves with abstract concepts of a transcendental God or of art for art’s sake, Japanese artists and designers endeavored to extract the essence of nature and then to express it in simplified as well as symbolic forms.

Instead of viewing straight and curving lines as opposing expressions, the Japanese regarded them as the same element in different manifestations, like water that is constantly undulating and changing its shape, or the flame of a candle that flickers, but both maintaining their essence.

For these reasons Japanese artists have traditionally avoided perfect symmetry in composition, believing that it lacked vitality.

Western industrial and commercial design concepts, introduced into Japan as early as the 1860s, were at first slavishly copied, and for nearly one hundred years the traditional Japanese sensibilities were suppressed by the Japanese themselves as well as by foreign importers who brought in their own product samples to be copied.

However, between 1945 and 1955 the Japanese sense of design, based on handicrafts and textiles that had achieved the level of fine arts more than a thousand years earlier, began to re-emerge and to reassert itself. Hundreds of design schools were established. Organizations began sponsoring design contests.

These ancient impulses were first applied to industrial machinery and again to textiles, and then gradually to products destined for the export market. The number of original product designs created in Japan between 1955 and 1965 was incredible to those who were not familiar with Japanese history.

In characteristic fashion, the Japanese expended enormous amounts of time, energy and talent on applying their traditional design sense to modern-day products, giving design a far higher priority than Western manufacturers were wont to do.

On the commercial/graphic design front, the Japanese did not have to go through a learning or adaptation process. As the economy grew from the 1950s on, so did the output and quality of graphic designs, particularly in posters, magazine and newspaper advertisements, and in book illustration.

A great deal of the sensual appeal and the overall ambiance of life in Japan today is a reflection or manifestation of the essence of Japanese design concepts in advertisements, architecture, automobiles, art, crafts, kimono, yukata, interior decorations, public posters, magazines, even in traditional food displays.

The power of Japanese design comes from the fact that it is a direct expression of both the dynamic and static aspects of nature, which has a positive impact on the human senses as well as the intellect and the spirit.

Foreigners wanting to do business in Japan can benefit enormously from studying and reflecting on the essence of Japanese design, and building it into their products and marketing programs.

All travelers need to do to reap the same benefit is to stop, look closely at things Japanese, open their minds, and let the natural energy flow into them.

If you are really interested in good design, I recommend that you obtain a copy of my book, ELEMENTS OF JAPANESE DESIGN – Understanding & Using Japan’s Classic Wabi-Sabi-Shibui Concepts.

Copyright © 2007 by Boye Lafayette De Mente
______________________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boye Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan, Korea, China and Mexico since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, journalist, and editor. He is the author of more than 50 books on these countries, including the first books ever on the Japanese way of doing business: Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, first published in 1959 and still in print, and How to Do Business in Japan, published in 1961.

To see a complete list of his titles [each one linked to Amazon.com’s buy page], go to his personal website: http://www.phoenixbookspublishers.com/.