The late Kenji Ekuan, Japanese industrial designer-extraordinaire, created one of the most common culinary objects in the world today. J. BROOKS SPECTOR looks back at Ekuan’s life and impact.

Almost twenty years ago, the writer was a guest at one of those big, formal reception extravaganzas in Tokyo, hosted by Keidanren, the mighty Japanese Federation of Economic Organisations. At an event like that one, there are hundreds of guests in attendance. To feed the multitudes, there are a couple of huge buffet tables, various stations around the room for beverages, foods cooked on the spot, roast beef carved as one waits, or hand-made bits of sushi, prepared by specialists while one watched. One moved through the crowd, nibbling and introducing oneself to appropriately influential people and – crucially – exchanging one’s meishi, business cards, with these people so one could call upon them later for professional reasons.

At that particular event, the writer was doing what was the right thing to do while balancing a drink, a plate of food, handing out his business cards and receiving other people’s cards – and all without dropping anything on the carpet or one’s shoes. Along the way, he happened to meet the top man at Kikkoman – the company that makes the ocean of soya sauce that is regularly consumed in Japan and other East Asian nations and exported around the world to wherever Asian food is consumed. That is one heckuva lot of soya sauce.

Trying to find an easy way to break the conversational ice, the writer vigorously complimented Mr-Kikkoman-company-top-dog on that marvellous, iconic dispenser bottle they sold much of their product in all around the globe. Readers surely know that bottle, yes? Just in case, it is the one with that pinched waist high up on the bottle and comes with a red plastic top and two small spouts coming from the top. Miraculously, it never, ever drips. And it is on the tables of virtually Asian-style restaurant in the world, as well as in the kitchen cupboards of millions more households. Eventually, Mr-Kikkoman-company-top-dog permitted himself a small smile and explained, “Ah yes; our soya sauce dispenser, that was one of my first projects with the company, working with the designer, Kenji Ekuan.”

Kenji Ekuan passed away on 8 February at the age of 85. He was an internationally renowned industrial designer who had worked on projects as varied as that ubiquitous soya sauce dispenser as well as the Yamaha VMAX motorbike, Japan’s newest bullet trains, and the super-speedy airport rail shuttles that bring millions of people yearly into downtown Tokyo from faraway Narita International Airport.

Ekuan was a kind of special embodiment of the new post-war Japanese temperament or ethos – an attitude that combined pacifism and an increasingly exuberant materialism. This was an approach Ekuan’s nation had embraced with a true vengeance after the disasters of World War II.

Ekuan was born into a Buddhist priest family based in Hiroshima, although he had actually been away from that city in a military training school, the day the atomic bomb was dropped over that city. Three years ago, after witnessing the destruction of his hometown soon afterwards, he told an interviewer about those early post-war years, that “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.” And in a brochure he had prepared for an exhibition of his designs, he described his reactions to the bombing of his city, writing that he heard the voices of street cars, bicycles and other objects mangled and abandoned, saying they had wished to have been utilised more.

In post-war Japan, Ekuan first studied to become a Buddhist priest so he could follow in his father’s footsteps (something that often happens in Japan still), but soon afterwards, he gave in to his real love, the world of industrial design. Still, his Buddhist training seemed to influence his life’s design work. In a serialised memoir of his life that appeared in a leading Japanese newspaper, Ekuan wrote, “The path of Buddha is the path to salvation for all living things, but I realised that, for me, the path to salvation lay in objects. Objects have their own world. Making an object means imbuing it with its own spirit.” And while a famous family-owned Buddhist painting depicting heaven and hell was destroyed when Hiroshima was bombed, Ekuan insisted its images remained in his mind as “one of my design ideals”.

But beyond his affinity for Japanese culture and aesthetics, Ekuan was a fan of American material culture – things like the comic strip, “Blondie”, as well as the smartly pressed, gabardine uniforms of the US occupation era troops and Jeeps seen all around Tokyo. But, by the time he entered Tokyo’s National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1950, he was urging fellow students to give life to a unique, contemporary “Japanese lifestyle.” But perhaps his affinity for American style may even have been given early encouragement from the seven years he spent in Hawaii as a child when his father had worked there as a Buddhist missionary.

Photo: Ekuan in 1973.

When he won the soya sauce bottle contract from Kikkoman, he was still only in his 20s. It took him three years and a hundred different prototypes (sounds a bit like Thomas Edison) before he came up with the winning formula. He always said that ultimately his inspiration for the bottle was a memory of his mother awkwardly pouring soya sauce from a large storage container into a smaller container for the table. The company figures it has now sold over 300 million of these little bottles.

While Ekuan often worked with advanced technology like his stunning designs for bullet trains and Yamaha motorcycles, he insisted he was never a fan of mindless futurism. As he said, “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.”

Late in life, in 1998, he wrote and designed a true gem of a book, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox. His goal – through both text and illustration – was to explain how even seemingly simple, utilitarian objects like the familiar lunchbox that contains several different courses – each in small, separate compartments, each designed to appeal with varied taste sensations, and that is also a feast for the eye – can be a window into much deeper textures of Japanese life.

As he wrote in that book, “There can be no doubt that the sensitivities of people from other countries who have chosen Japanese products are tuned into the frequencies that broadcast the beauty and quality we here in Japan produce. The lunchbox spirit is something that can be understood and absorbed by people the world over. When I see those in other countries buying, enjoying, and using all manner of Japanese goods, I am ever more convinced that everyone posses tuning bands broad enough to receive this signal of quality.” That credo sounds just like something Steve Jobs or Raymond Loewy (one of America’s foremost 20th century industrial designers) might have written just as easily.

An Amazon.com review of The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, explaining the appeal of both the book and the lunchbox added, “Ekuan reads the Japanese lunchbox as both object and metaphor. It is one of this book’s many charms that he is able to see it as both simultaneously. He compares the visual pleasures of the Zen lunchbox to an aerial view of the Japanese archipelago; he invites us to savor its quadripartite structure as we savor the four seasons. In so doing, he unlocks the secrets of ancient Japanese rituals, celebrates the aesthetics of Japanese design, explores the contours of Japanese landscapes and technology…. With an agility more characteristic of poetry than of design criticism, he connects everything from food, television, motorcycles, package tours, and department stores to landscape, ecology, computers, and radios, all the while keeping his eye on his subject.”

It is a fair bet people will be using and loving Ekuan’s designs for generations still to come – and unconsciously imbibing his appreciation for the relationship between traditional and modern material culture. DM

Main photo: Ekuan’s iconic non-drip bottle design.

Read more:

Kenji Ekuan, Who Gave Soy Sauce Its Graceful Curves, Dies at 85 at the New York Times

Kenji Ekuan, industrial designer of bullet trains and soy bottles, dies at the Guardian

Japan soy sauce bottle designer Kenji Ekuan dies at the BBC

Review: The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox at com