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A thread about the life and wisdom of Kenji Ekuan, designer of the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle.
75 years ago this week, Kenji witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima, his family's hometown, by the atomic bomb.
“Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture. I needed something to touch, to look at. Right then I decided to be a maker of things.”
“Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture. I needed something to touch, to look at. Right then I decided to be a maker of things.”
In his 20s, he won the soy sauce contract from Kikkoman. "It took three years and 100 prototypes to come up with a final design for his dispenser, which combined a curving form with a dripless spout. More than 300 million of the bottles have been sold." https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/world/asia/kenji-ekuan-japanese-designer-who-gave-soy-sauce-its-curves-dies-at-85.html
As a child, he wandered the streets of Hiroshima, and spoke of hearing the voices of ‘mangled streetcars, bicycles and other objects’, lamenting they could no longer be used. “Objects have their own world. Making an object means imbuing it with its own spirit.”
“When we think of the evolution of design, we might imagine a world where robots are everywhere, but that’s not it. The ultimate design is little different from the natural world.”
"For anything humans use in their day to day life, they need design and it is a clear and concrete proof of the fundamental human right to live."
"Just like a man is born, and becomes old, ill and dies… even in a factory things are born, they have very useful years, and then finally die. It’s all the same.”
Bonus Kenji fact: he "wanted to design the soy sauce bottle because he remembered his mother having to pour soy sauce from a big half-gallon bottle when he was a child." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31296029
"How do you improve the lives of people and the places they live in? I think that was Ekuan's concept."
