Exploring Japanese Design

About this book

This free textbook is based on notes from a previous course of mine called “Design and Society”, which was then updated for a new “Liberal Arts Experience” course on Japanese design, taught in the College of Global Liberal Arts at Ritsumeikan University. Unimaginatively, the new course is called “Exploring Japanese Design”, and, for now, so is the book.

The notes have been transformed into chapters at various times throughout 2025-2026, so some chapters may feel a little different to others. I hope people find them useful.

About the author

See here: https://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~haimes/

Structure

The first half introduces key concepts in Japanese aesthetics and examines the Mingei movement alongside traditional arts and crafts, including pottery, textiles, calligraphy, sumi ink painting, and woodblock printing. The second half explores modern and contemporary design in Japan, focusing on graphic design, environmental design (architecture), and product design.

For now, there are no introduction on conclusion chapters, but I may write these in the future if I feel there is a need for them.

Chapters

Each link below opens a PDF of the chapter. These files have been compressed to keep file sizes below 1MB.

1. Aesthetics in Japan
2. The Mingei Movement
3. Pottery and Textiles
4. Ink Brushes, Seals, and Printmaking
5. Graphic Design
6. Environmental Design
7. Product Design

You can also download a combined PDF version, containing all seven chapters:

• compressed version here (File size approx 2.5MB)
• uncompressed version here (File size approx 163MB!!)

Licence

This work is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike licence. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Why free and open source?

Initially, I intended to submit these as part of a book to a publisher, but decided instead to self-release them here: open access, free for anyone to read and use, or reproduce (with permission and attribution of my original work). There are quite a few reasons why. But mainly:

• In my experience, textbooks written in English are prohibitively expensive in Japan, where I am based. I want to ensure that my work is available to students from non-wealthy backgrounds too.
• Several non-academic readers have contacted me about my previous research on Japanese design and aesthetics. I do not want this work to be hidden behind an expensive paywall or price tag.
• Some academic publishers have shown limited interest in this topic, and I would rather spend my time on other projects than trying to persuade them of its value.
• Following on from the previous points, universities and governments fund research, while academics write, review, and edit scholarly work. Commercial publishers then sell access to that work, often at considerable profit. Making this book freely available is one way to help ensure that publicly supported knowledge remains accessible to everyone.

And to my students, you’re getting a whole textbook for free, so no excuses for not reading it! :-)

Typesetting and Editing

The material is edited with Grammarly for the sake of structure and clarity. The pages are typeset in EB Garamond with XeLaTeX and the source is on Github here. For the ease of typesetting, all Japanese words in the text are rendered in Rōmaji (romanization of Japanese words) and not in Japanese script. All figures are the original work of the author, unless stated otherwise.

Please contact the author if you find any typos or other errors!

Back to top | © Paul Haimes at Ritsumeikan University