MUJI
Muji is good for you [Spine title]
Naoto Fukasawa, Kenya Hara, Kazuko Koike, Takashi Sugimoto
New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2010. First edition. Quarto. Kraft paper covered boards decorated with white thermography. Printed dust jacket with matching obi. 256 pp. Fully illustrated with color photography throughout. As new: a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
8.75 x 12-inch hardcover book with 256 pages of short essays fully illustrated with color product and location photography. This fascinating monograph provides an unprecedented view into the inner workings of Muji, one of the most influential brands leading sustainable design. A prescient advocate of sustainable consumption and the matchless utility of good design, Muji’s founding principle was to develop new and simple products at reasonable prices by making the best use of materials while minimizing their impact on the environment. From a humble inaugural line of eight products nearly three decades ago, the brand now sells nearly seven thousand different products in hundreds of its own stores in Asia, Europe, and North America.
Includes work by Konstatin Grcic, Jasper Morrison, Shigeo Fukuda, and all the Muji staff designers of course.
“MUJI is a lavishly illustrated celebration of thirty years of the Japanese lifestyle brand that has recently become a global phenomenon. Ironically, MUJI’s identity has shifted from a modest, everyday one in Japan – the name was derived from Mujirushi Ryohin, “no-label quality goods” – to an iconic brand of a global, design-conscious class. With short introductions by managing director Masaaki Kanai, directors John C. Jay and Bruce Mau, designer Jasper Morrison, and longer essays by creative director Kazuko Koike, product designer Naoto Fukasawa, art director Kenya Hara and interior designer Takashi Sugimoto, MUJI is an account written entirely by insiders. Consequently, the book’s tone is almost evangelical as the authors repeatedly espouse the MUJI philosophy of aesthetic refinement, simplicity, and modesty to an English-speaking audience of current and potential converts.
“The first section, “The Birth of MUJI,” by Kazuko Koike, traces the brand’s rapid evolution from a modest line of 40 household products for the Seiyu supermarket chain in 1980, to a complete range of offerings comprising products, clothes, and food for the 1983 opening of MUJI’s first independent store in Tokyo. Koike’s allusions to MUJI as an alternative to excessive Japanese consumerism of the 1980s are brief, and an expanded contextualization would have been a welcome inclusion, as would some reflection on changes in the brand as it expanded globally in the 1990s. From the beginning, notes Koike, MUJI was driven by a desire “to demonstrate the aesthetics of a whole lifestyle” (37) rather than by iconic products or signature designers. However, a strong cross-disciplinary approach to design was central to the brand’s strategy from its inception; it employed graphic designers (including the legendary Ikko Tanaka), interior designers, product designers, and copywriters, who were all involved in developing the distinctive and coherent MUJI identity (an approach also highlighted in the book’s equal consideration of each of these disciplines).
“Fukasawa’s chapter, “Product Design of MUJI,” describes the brand’s distinctive design philosophy and process: “product design is not a medium for emphasizing the individuality or lifestyles of designers or end users. A MUJI product takes an inevitable form, perfected through professional devotion to making tools for living. Its shape is determined by its purpose, and by continuous refinement over a long period of time” (82). Fukasawa also writes of the purity of “real furniture” that is simple and affordable, as well as honest in its use of natural materials. However, despite the insistence on anonymous products and inevitable forms, the text’s accompanying photographs of single chairs, tables, and bowls presented against neutral gray backgrounds or in empty rooms paradoxically frames them as rarefied objects of desire divorced from everyday life.
“In “Identity and Communication of MUJI,” Kenya Hara argues that the graphic identity of MUJI is one onto which consumers can project their own ideas: “Some think of MUJI as an urban refinement, while others think it’s about ecology. Some see MUJI as an affordable brand. Others think of it as a reflection of Zen ideology” (120). Despite this supposedly “empty sign”, Hara also notes the brand’s didactic function: “MUJI’s marketing is not about making products that respond generously to people’s desires. It’s about creating a new market by changing the quality of people’s appetite for living, and influencing the shape their desires take” (152) In the following chapter, “MUJI space,” interior designer Takashi Sugimoto reiterates the brand ethos as it is expressed through the spatial design of MUJI stores: a coherent and consistent aesthetic achieved through open spaces with clean lines, recycled timber, and simple product displays. Yet while Sugimoto alludes to the standardization of MUJI’s store design, the company’s systems and logistics, which surely contribute to their ongoing global success, were unfortunately not discussed in the book.
“Finally, intriguing but very short sections on MUJI “background music” CDs and MUJI’s Japanese campgrounds made me wonder whether MUJI was becoming a cult, or, alternatively, if a theme park might be in the works. The book’s final section, “The Future of MUJI: A Conversation,” provides answers that aren’t too far off from those guesses; in it, MUJI insiders rather self-indulgently discuss the future possibilities of a MUJI Hotel and MUJI Housing, and Koike notes the hotel’s potential role in “lifestyle education” (237),the assumption being, as Jasper Morrison succinctly puts it, that “MUJI is good for you.”
“Although it serves as a useful introduction for those not yet initiated into the cult of MUJI, the book MUJI fails to address the difference in the way the brand is consumed outside of as opposed to within Japan. Namely, in the West, consumption of its products seems to have become a badge of distinction for a cosmopolitan middle class whose taste for modernist minimalism is imbued with a moral, even spiritual value, given that the book consistently confirms a pre-existing image of Japanese design and culture as saturated with a Zen spirit of serenity and purity.” — D.J. Huppatz