An Ode to the Design Legend Behind the Soy Sauce Bottle and Bullet Train

betting odds are good that you ’re intimate with the piece of work of Kenji Ekuan , even if you do n’t know his name . Ekuan , whodied in Japan yesterday at the years of 85 , was the force behind some of the most iconic industrial design of the 20th century — and he said he was revolutionise to do it after the nuclear dud annihilated his base in Hiroshima .

If you ’ve ever pullulate soy sauce from the tear pearl Kikkoman bottle or trap over a sixties Yamaha motorcycle , you experience Ekuan ’s designs . The flushed - capped bottle , whichEkuan plan in 1961 , was the paradigm of sleek , futurist world of 1960s Japan — a area that was just beginning to emerge out of the brutal post - War era and into an economical and cultural boom time . Ekuan also designed the Komachi bullet gear , which hit the rails as one of the first mellow - speed fastball geartrain in the domain .

He was the voice behind some of the most compelling technologies of the 20th 100 — Japan ’s result toRaymond Loewy — whose work articulated the speed and futurism of the modernistic age but never ignored the humans using it .

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Images : The Yamaha YA-1 , viaYamaha Community.fr ; Komachi bullet train wagon train byykanazawa1999 / CC .

Ekuan enunciate that the human - centered aspect of his work had its roots in the bombardment of Hiroshima in 1945 . He was just a teenager when the bomb calorimeter hit the city , killing his sister and father . In aninterview from 2010 , he describes how the repulsion and devastation of that time root on him to become a designer :

When I decided to be a clothes designer , I was in Hiroshima . The sentence was ripe after the warfare . After the atomic bomb everything became nothing . So there I am stand up in the burned urban center , seem down at my house , but nothing . I was so shaken . And I decide to connect the substantial things , because for a long metre , human organism have connected with material things . I consider to myself , we need something to convey back the material things to human aliveness . To do something practiced for people , and good for myself . So I decided to be a clothes designer .

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So he examine to become an industrial designer , link up with a mathematical group of like - minded fellow scholar and forminga company through which he would workfor decades . That pipeline of reasoning — that aim should be source of comfort , of pleasure and joyfulness — escape through his entire career , which array from motorcycles to sewing machines to trains to , yes , soy sauce bottles .

Juicy Rai / CC .

It was in that same 2010 interview that Ekuan described the everlasting epitaph , asQuartz point out this morning , speaking about the life of objects and the lives of humans : “ Just like a man is born , and becomes erstwhile , ill and dies , ” he read . “ Even in a manufactory thing are born , and they have very utile years , and then finally , become flat . It ’s all the same . ”

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