Discussions about Japanese design in the West often relate it back to tradition – to ideas about philosophy and aesthetics said to be unique to Japanese culture, that have established an instantly recognisable language in products available all around the world today. This, for example, was the classic approach taken in a recent major show organised by the Japan Foundation in Paris that framed examples of celebrated contemporary design from Japan in terms of distinctive cultural virtues of ”finesse“, ”minimalism“ and ”craft“, as well as a genius for the harmony of ”ancient/modern“, ”nature/artifice“, ”emotion/reason“, and so on ¹. Yet Japanese design today is as much a product of a specific social and economic milieu – the dramatic, fast moving context of a highly urbanised, ultra-modern global society facing new problems and challenges at the beginning of the 21st century – as any kind of aesthetic tradition.

If something is unique to Japan it is the historical trajectory and particular features of this society, which best explain the remarkable design creativity that has emerged from Japan in the period since the Second World War. First, at the end of a long, unbroken rise out of wartime destruction, Japan in the 1980s began to produce designers able to compete if not outdo American and European rivals in leading global trends. Then, after the end of the infamous economic “Bubble” – the spectacular collapse of the Japanese economy in 1990/91 that led to fifteen years of depression – the 1990s gave birth to a new generation of sub-cultural and countercyclical creators across all design fields, that have regenerated a global interest in Japanese popular and high culture in the first years of the twentyfirst century.

We forget how recent it is that the world came to appreciate the startling modernity of post-war Japan. It wasn’t until the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and the Osaka World Expo of 1971, that the world fully realised just how fast modern Japan was then moving. Its enormous post-war investment in matching, then improving, Western industry and technology led to a new recognition of its extraordinary creative powers in efficient, high tech design that for the very first time had Westerners wondering if the future might not be something other than all-American. To see Asia leading the way was pure future shock – and more than twenty years prior to the current obsession with China. By the mid 1980s, Japan was producing world class designers in all fields, led by household names such as Issey Miyake in fashion, Arata Isozaki in architecture, or Toshiyuki Kita in furniture design. A fashion designer such as Yohji Yamamoto, whose deconstructive anti-fashion became the toast of Paris, as well as establishing a new, cross-genre high art style of catwalk fashion, exemplified the clever East-West dualities that marked the 80s global generation. He and others pioneered an exotic avant-guard style, that represented both a kind of “Japan-ness” imagined by Westerners as full of classical aesthetic virtues, while importing into Japan and Japanese products the most cutting edge attitudes and stylings from the West ².

With the designers an emblem of the city, Tokyo in the 1980s became an early kind of global Shangri-La, at a time when New York and London were gloomy and run down, and Paris or Milan still reliant on older, classical reputations. It was a spectacular, futuristic boom town, running an economy that was outpricing the world, while fuelling an extraordinary explosion of consumer choice and diversity amidst lightning urban change and new development. It was here that the features of hyper-modern Japan were established in the global imagination: an alternative Asian modernity with the power to overtake even the US; a vision of amazing consumer choice and diversity, with prolific niche markets in every field (seen most dramatically in the amazing commercial magazine sector that reflects these choices); a lavish importer of the best and most expensive style from around the world; and a new global player, with a self-confidence in its own technological and commercial capabilities. On the back of this, Japanese corporations rose to global success, often selling iconic design products – motorcycles, stereos, iconic furniture, the Walk man – that proclaimed Japanese design as the future.

But then something happened. Following a staggering collapse of the economy in 1990 – 91, and driven down by a collapse in land value prices and banking confidence (an exact parallel to what has just happened globally in 2008), Japan sunk slowly into a trough of economic depression that was not to escape until the early 2000s – and then only partially. Economic panic was followed by natural and man made horror in 1995, with the Kobe earthquake and Aum cult poison gas attacks. This apocalyptic moment signalled the end of the post-war dream, but also a dramatic generational shift as the youth of Japan began to question everything that their society had been built up on. Young women and men started to refuse traditional roles and corporate careers; and young people generally started looking for a newer, freer alternative lifestyle.

The designers on show at Rundetaarn in Copenhagen are for the most part children of this post-Bubble generation. Born in the 1960s or after they were either still at school or only very early career when the corporate golden age ended. Anyone creative in their mid-40s or below today is thus likely to have been affected by the new ideologies and forms of self-expression that developed in Japan during its social and economic crisis years. Refusing the company identities that has given Japan such stable growth in the post war years, young people everywhere started embracing a radical individualism, expressed in the notion of being a freeter (“free worker”), devoted, not to country, corporation and career, but rather jibun sagashi (“self discovery”). Freeter-hood for many meant flexible, unprotected employment with no hope of career progress, but for a sizable minority it signalled an expression of creativity, with its attendant ideology of the kurieita: to live your life as a creator, to live by and for creativity.

Japan was in crisis, indeed wracked with political, social and economic despair, yet by all accounts mid 1990s Tokyo – which the rest of the world had lost interest in after the economic downturn – was the most amazing hotbed of creativity in the world at the time, comparable in every way to the London-centred “cool Britannia” of the time, yet much further off the global radar. In design, fashion, music, art, and architecture what happened or got started in the mid 1990s established a font of creativity that, once Westerners started to discover it, has grown into a global tsunami of fascination for new Japanese popular and visual culture ever since.

Creativity can thus be counter-cyclical: it can happen precisely while the economy is at its most sluggish. The cultural economy in fact continued to expand dramatically into the 1990s, even as mainstream industry and finance took a dive. Also, for some designers, the immediate post-Bubble effect was to remove the commercial possibilities that had dedicated their work to corporate products and output, forcing them instead back on to paper and into experimental forms. This has been well noted in the field of architecture, where a new generation unable to build or get contracts, were instead going back into laboratories and university class room, and starting to design fantasy architecture on paper without commercial constraints 3. A few years later, when the contracts started to come back in, these ideas taking built form would emerge on the global scene as some of the most innovative architecture of the age. The work of a younger generation of visionaries such as SANAA (Kazuo Sejima & Ryu Nishizawa), Jun Aoki, Shigeru Ban, or Junya Ishigami has gone from houses in the Tokyo suburbs to iconic constructions in major world capitals. Yet what was most noteworthy about their work was the turn away from monumentality – the kind of grandiose architecture associated with names such as Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel or Rem Koolhaas – toward a new philosophy.

Questioning the earlier period’s rampant modernisation, development and unsustainable urban forms, Japan, post-Bubble, post-1990s, sees creators responding to a different economic condition: of stagnation, decline and decadence; of an almost totally urbanised society realising it has to deal with cities that can rise or expand no further, that must begin to internalise the negative consequences of development. Hence, the overriding concern of the new generation of designers is with ”economy“ in the other sense: an economical aesthetic, fitting design to scale and sustainability, recycling, reusing and reinventing products and materials, while retaining an unmistakeable touch of simplicity and vision.

This mirrors the process described by Tokyo’s most articulate architectural/design theorists, Atelier Bow Wow, as ”metabolic“: the urban dynamic by which Tokyo as a city changes and finds new forms. Tokyo is a city carved up into smaller land divisions, and more intense land use than anywhere in the world, and where change and diversification happens as new land uses and constructions constantly replace old ones ⁴. It is this microscopic dynamic that explains so much of the finesse and variety seen in Japanese design today: from domestic houses to mobile phones, interior design to the fantasy-world of infinitely variable household products and packaging seen in conbini (convenience stores) or mass market design stores like Muji. Unlike in the US (and now Chinese) consumption models, where bigger is always better, smaller is best in Japan – a fact which does not reject consumption as such, but rather celebrates it the through an extraordinary dynamic of subdivision and variation to produce choice and individual expression.

The dynamism of popular culture is the other side of this consumerist drive. So much of what was extraordinary in 1990s Japan came straight off the street. What are now internationally recognised as pervasively influential sub-cultural styles all derived from a period of social change and crisis in which an insatiable hunger for western and global culture was metabolised through changing generational attitude. Hence, in design, we can look to the pioneer cultural entrepreneurs of kurieita life, some of whom took their commercial ideas all the way to global fame: street wear designers such as Nigo (A Bathing Ape), and Jun Takahashi; taste leaders such as Hiroshi Fujiwara and design consultant Kashiwa Sato (the man behind the now globally instantly recognisable look of clothes brand Uniqlo); photographers such as Fruits magazine’s Shoichi Aoki, and the girl’s icon Mika Ninagawa, whose supersaturated colour has best captured the everchanging glamour parade of Shibuya streetlife.

The 1990s thus threw up its heroes, and many of these have become generational gurus, writing their ”how to be successful“ self help books while living as hipster Hiru hito (”Roppongi Hills people“) in the iconic towers that are the most recognisable part of the new Tokyo skyline. Thousands more of their generation – the ”lost generation“ criticised and castigated by the mainstream press and politicians alike – have had little more than their creative dreams in their pockets to live on. Post-Bubble Japan has massive creative potential, but still delivers inadequate career channels to the kurieita and freeter generation. The rising tide of what can be called Japan’s ”creative surplus“ is seen most dramatically in the massive, twice annual Design Festa events, whose DIY punk rock ethos encourages thousands of young, wannabe designers and artists to come out of their bedrooms, show off and (maybe) sell some of their unstoppable creative output. This young human tide is ultimately contemporary Japan’s greatest resource, but it is still a resource largely ignored and despised by the older corporate generation. Design Festa has its occasional success stories, where a young design genius is discovered clutching their creations in their own little booth, but the youth of Japan still mostly vote with their feet, taking their dreams and creativity elsewhere, to mythical lands of opportunity where their self-expression is often much more appreciated and celebrated—favourite destinations being London, New York, LA, Berlin, Sydney, Shanghai… This international pilgrimage is almost an inevitable part of any young creator’s career: either to study or just to hang out in some other global city. It has meant though that the 90s generation of creators has internationalised itself in a much more thorough way than older generations, who seemed to be struck by inferiority complexes to high European culture or American pop. Nowadays, young Japanese seem to have an almost effortless experience of Asia, Europe, and North America under their belt; they are more confident about being Japanese, and increasing numbers are returning to Japan, and making their experience count.

Parallel things might be said about the way in which career frustrations fuelled a necessary blurring of genres and contexts for many designers of this later generation. It is precisely this genre-less creativity between art and design that that is often now the hallmark of Japanese design. Many successful Japanese designers were first and foremost artist-creators in their own minds; they were doing work as students and in early career that sought to push back aesthetic and conceptual barriers. Yet ”art“ as a career was blocked by the limitations of the Japanese art world and its financial poverty. Design thus became an alternative art career, sustained often by commercial shows organised by major department stores such as Parco, and the avid fans-as-consumers who follow the design media in Japan with such intense appreciation. Examples are the now guru-like influence of older artists who mostly made careers as commercial graphic designers such as Keiichi Tanaami, Shinro Ohtake, or Tadanori Yokoo, forced to work with art on T-shirts or in advertising, rather than gallery walls. One sees it too in the pervasive visual influence across genres of figures such as fashion designer Issey Miyake, the man behind the new 21:21 museum for design at Tokyo Midtown – a place where design is art, and vice versa.

Moreover, what we now think of as the most representative Japanese contemporary art today owes more than a little to graphic design. It was in the mid to late 1990s that the visionary art entrepreneur Takashi Murakami first harnessed the creative surplus of the new generation, selling it to the world as brand new Japanese pop-art. His famous Superflat (2001), Tokyo Girls Bravo (2002 – 2003) and Little Boy (2005) touring art shows, were in large part curated collections of graphic designers working at the borders of art, with a new pop idiom that used the everyday visual language of Japanese urban consumer culture.

Enlightenment, Groovivisions, Murakami’s young girl Kaikai Kiki atists, and Murakami himself, as well as the two other most expensive international Japanese contemporary artists today, Yayoi Kusama and Yoshitomo Nara, are all graphic/object artist-designers who have made branding franchises out of their distinctive pop art aesthetics. In Murakami’s shows, too, art, design, photography, architecture, toys, and pop culture (such as manga and anime), come together in a package that attempts to capture the visual overload of “Tokyo Life”, to borrow the title of another recent Western anthology that celebrates all this ⁵.

All these factors together – the urban environment, the generational changes, the genre blurring, the interweaving of consumption and form – perhaps help explain why the design scene in Japan is so strong – over and above the charm of any traditional aesthetics or philosophy. The Japanese government was slow to celebrate the creativity of the new generation, but now it trumpets their visions as the proof of ”cool Japan“ as a global ”soft power“ leading the world in visual and consumer culture ⁶. Even nearly twenty years on from the Bubble, visitors to Tokyo are still mostly enraptured by its urgent, bright, celebratory, futuristic feel – although this is always shot through now with a bitter undercurrent of decadence and collapse. No wonder that the city remains such a great destination for global hipsters catching up on newest, off-the-wall trends – as can be read in the art and fashion gossip columns following Marc Newson and Marc Jacobs as they take make their regular pilgrimages. Beyond this, for the more average visitor interested in art, design and creativity, the annual Tokyo Design Week/Design Tide, as well as the much more populist Design Festa, are windows to its continuing pulse; museums such as the new 21:21 Museum, or the Mori Museum in Roppongi Hills nearby, deliver stunning art and design experiences; local institutions such as Super Deluxe (run by Klein Dytham, the Anglo-German architect partners who invented the Pecha Kucha design talk shows) can give you quick access to the lively local social scene; and for extensive guides to design now in Tokyo, there is nowhere better than the up-to-the-minute coverage of the scene’s best (foreign) experts, gaijin bloggers such as Jean Snow, W. David Marx (Neojaponisme) and the Tokyo Art Beat team 7. The global business talk today may all be of China, but Tokyo is still a far more hip destination. For Europeans and others getting a first taste of new Japanese design at a show like this, the next thing to do is to plan your first trip.

Adrian Favell is Professor of European and International Studies at Aarhus University, and currently writing a book about Japanese contemporary art and society since the 1990s.

See his website: www.adrianfavell.com

¹ Wa: ”The Spirit of Harmony and Japanese Design Today”
(Japan Foundation and Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris,
22. Oct. 2008 – 31. Jan. 2009)
² Yuniya Kawamura: ”The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion“
(Oxford: Berg, 1994)
³ Thomas Darnell: ”After the Crash: Architecture in Post-Bubble Japan“
(Princeton Architectural Press 2008)
⁴ Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto: ”Made in Tokyo”
(Tokyo: Kajima, 2001)
⁵ Ian Luna et al: ”Tokyo Life: Art and Design“ (New York: Rizzoli, 2007)
⁶ See for example the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affair’s glossy booklet from 2007, ”Creative Japan“, that celebrates famous architects, artists, designers, cooks and writers, alongside the designers of manga/anime, games and toys: www.creativejapan.net
⁷ Check the following websites:
www.super-deluxe.com
www.jeansnow.net
www.neojaponisme.com
www.tokyoartbeat.com