Tag: japan
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Simplicity in Japan
Simplicity, says Kenya Hara, creative director of Muji, is a “central aesthetic principle” in Japan and is what differentiates the visual appeal of the East from that of the West. In an interview for The New York Times looking at the unique design of Japanese bentō, Hara provides a comparison of the East and West’s…
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The Seven Wastes
One of the principal goals of the Toyota Production System (TPS) is to identify steps that add value (and those which do not) and then design out waste. Muda is one of the three types of waste (the other two being muri and mura) and the one that has been given the most attention since the TPS…
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The Universality of Happiness
Or not. Research looking at how different cultures (specifically, Americans and Japanese) perceive the concept of happiness has shown that it’s not a universal constant, at least in terms of how we define it. [The researchers] systematically analyzed American and Japanese participants’ spontaneously produced descriptions of [happiness and unhappiness] and observed, as predicted, that whereas Americans…
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Japan Travel
Hoping to have an extended visit to Japan in the near future? You may be as pleased as I was when I stumbled upon a site offering 10 Japanese Customs You Must Know Before a Trip to Japan. A perfect compliment to Tim Ferriss’ Hacking Japan: Inside Tokyo for Less Than New York (part two).…