Every time I visit Japan, a country famous for its handicrafts, I always can’t help buying many handmade products and bring them home with me. In my recent trip to Kyushu, I was deeply impressed by Arita-yaki, Hakata-ori, Hagoita, Nagasaki kite, as well as Sori Yanagi’s kitchenware. Products like the southern iron pans, birch spoons and butter knives are tear-jerkingly handy.

Tired of mass-produced products that come with poor quality, handmade products are becoming popular again in Japan since recent years as localism rises against globalisation. Japan’s renowned craftsmanship is crowned by human-centric and considerate designs with practicality. Sori Yanagi, a design giant in the Japanese design industry, is good at adding craftsmen’s touch to industrial designs, providing consumers with products with comfortable user experience, quality and practicality. Classic products such as butterfly stools and stainless tableware are always popular items in the market even today. According to Sori Yanagi, a real design should go against the trends. In Essays by Sori Yanagi, he wrote about folk art and anonymous design, as well as criticism on how modern industrial designs encourage consumers to buy new generations of products regularly and their impracticality. His articles are really inspiring.

Industrial designs are actually more related to the publishing industry than most people would have thought. Japanese designers are famous for their design theories, which make them increasingly popular among readers from Chinese-speaking regions in recent years. Japanese designers (Kenya Hara, as the representative) not only explain complex design methods in simple manners but also pay close attention to craftsmanship and traditional folk crafts. For example, A Journey of Japanese Folk Art and The Way of Crafts from Sori Yanagi’s father Soetsu Yanagi, a leading figure in the mingei (folk craft) movement, and Yonematsu Shiono’s Saving Handicrafts document the aesthetics and values of everyday objects that people use through systematic field studies and research. They actively voice out for ordinary items that are perceived as low-end and ugly.

In the last few years, the growth of the book market has slowed down. Bookstores are no longer just simply selling books, but everyday life aesthetics. Faced with fierce competition from online bookstores, big brick-and-mortar bookstores can’t appeal to consumers solely through offering book selection and discount services. Instead, physical bookstores are making efforts to educate consumers on taste. The Eslite Bookstore from Taiwan has a deep understanding of this philosophy and it is expanding its cultural and creative product section and everyday product section while providing customers with a cosy café in the bookstore. The Eslite Bookstore also purchases high-end lifestyle products, imported stationeries and even set up workshops on wood carving, glass blowing, etc. Takeo, a small city in Kyushu, has pumped new blood to the local economy by building a library of lifestyle aesthetics. The Takeo City Library has a friendly and moderate design that offers visitors a comfortable library experience. With the Tsutaya Books, Starbucks and a featured special craft area set up in the library, the Takeo City Library has attracted over one million visits in one year. When I visited the library on a very rainy day, the library was crowded with visitors who were fully immersed in the reading atmosphere and enjoying the overall experience.

Not all hipsters love drinking coffee and reading books or buying pretty but useless cultural and creative products. But it doesn’t mean these things don’t have a market at all. Once creative ideas are translated into everyday products with practical use and are priced reasonable for the craftsmanship, they generally can do very well in the market. For instance, Tokyo National Museum’s “Unrivaled Calligraphy: Yan Zhenqing and His Legacy” exhibition had gone viral on WeChat moments as it featured the calligraphy sage’s Draft of a Requiem to My Nephew. Two Chinese characters, love (愛) and heart (心), from the draft, inspired the museum to roll out sauce dishes with the fonts. The dishes became even more popular than the exhibition catalogue among hipsters.

“Without integrity and characters, everyday things cannot become ideal items,” Soetsu Yanagi wrote in Recollection of 40 Years in Folk Arts, expressing that practicality is the beauty of crafts. Craftsmanship strips crafts naked because the crafts need to cater to actual functions. Sori Yanagi had successfully followed his father’s path and took the beauty of practicality further. He believes that only first-hand experience can allow consumers to know whether the products are of good quality or not. Every time I am holding the stainless steel pot he designed I would naturally feel a sense of joy. It felt like someone was whispering to me, “I know all the troubles you are facing in life and this tool is produced to solve them and serve you.” Those so-called creative products might look fancy and get your attention. But they can’t really last long in a market that values minimalism nowadays. Only creative ideas that prioritise practicality can really touch users’ heart and become timeless.