Last year, while planning this issue, I found myself in Kobe to see Takuya Niwa, a fifth-generation futon maker, produce a cushion. We’d gathered at the invitation of Yasuharu Kuzaki, the founder of Tokyo-based label Aton, who’d brought us together to see his latest project: a collection of cushions, stools and modular mattresses to be released under his textile brand Échapper.

Niwa-san chatted as he worked, laughter occasionally rippling through the room as he told a joke, only to dissolve back into silence as the needle returned to its steady cadence. We watched with craned necks and open mouths, bobbing our heads in time with his stitching, as though we were all playing the same instrument in our minds. At some point, we forgot we were in public, having slipped into a collective trance. When the cushion was complete, he thumped it flat with the full weight of his body — 20 to 40 layers of raw cotton compressed into something deceptively tidy, simple and almost delicate.

If you’ve spent any time traversing Japan’s craft landscape, you’ll recognise this brand of hyper-specialisation: towns devoted to a single material or process; a fourth, fifth or sixth — and in some cases final — generation refining a detail that’s long since been optimised for speed, scale and cost elsewhere.

I suspect you may recognise the sense of pleasure in watching an expert create. Design Anthology’s readers are often makers themselves — of objects, spaces, brands, systems and places. Perhaps they’re things people cherish or perhaps they’re things no one notices but which would be missed if they were inferiorly made or absent altogether. And yet, our industry has become remarkably good at disguising the labour behind that pleasure.

The people I meet in the workshops where we print this magazine approach their craft with a similar obsession, fussing over bindings and finishes and calibrating machines to tolerances that would be invisible to most. A good object resists abstraction; it is tangible, weighty and alive. Parts of what you hold in your hands are still made by hand. You will, no doubt, spot the odd imperfection in these pages. I hope you do. They’re the fingerprints of the human hands who made it — proof it wasn’t merely generated and dispatched into the ether.

Although the goal remains perfection, the pleasure, more often than not, is found in the process itself. This issue is a celebration of that devotion: of dedicating yourself to the pursuit of betterment, and pushing the limits of craft and construction for no other reason than the joy of the work. It’s about being so absorbed in that work that you forget about time, or who might be watching. Enjoy.

Jeremy Smart
Editor-in-Chief