Imitating Nature: Japanese packaging design
How to Wrap Five More Eggs: Traditional Japanese Packaging by Hideyuki Oka is an easy read with the story told primarily through the book’s pictures. As the title suggests, it’s all about a traditional form of Japanese packaging, which mostly incorporates food. The idea behind it is that when you present someone with a cake, for instance, and it’s nicely packaged, that they get a feeling that you want them to enjoy the cake. The five eggs of the title are bound with straw and woven in an indigenous way. Hideyuki Oka characterizes the packaging as being as ‘born out of necessity meant to preserve food and make it easily portable, made of whatever material found at hand in the rural areas of their origin’.
Tagged: bamboo, japanese packaging design, nature
- 0
- 2
RELATED
This traditional packaging for sasa-dango dumplings consists entirely of bamboo grass and a straw thread, and was borne out of the need to preserve the food and ‘make it easily portable‘. On the Ping Magazine website, Hideyuki Oka explains that: ‘Such packages were not products of contemplation, nor yet of theory. They assumed their shapes over years and years of unconscious use and experimentation’.
All you photographers out there, a word up on one of the most prodigious emerging photographers in Australia. And if you’re nursing an inadequacy complex, seeing Nirrimi Hakanson’s folio might propel you to briefly flee your aspirations and think about getting a job at the local supermarket. Hopefully, it will inspire you. The self-taught sixteen-year-old Hakanson has been taking photos on a digital SLR since the age of thirteen, after starting out on a disposable camera. Her distinctive style is ethereal and reminiscent of photo albums filled with enchanted childhood memories. Read more
The Telegraph just posted some photos of the migration of golden rays (also known as cownose rays) off the coast of Mexico. It’s guaranteed to restore your sense of wonder at the world.
Also by STACEY HOWARD
Originally from Australia, Long Walk Home are now residing and making awesome music in Berlin. Their music is modern and alternative with a great guitarist and drummer and a touch of funky electro that makes the melodies soft and catchy.
Since 2000, Brooklyn-based indie band Longwave have been recording killer albums. Their most recent album — The Strangest Things — was released 2007 and won fans including The Strokes and The Vines. Hot, hot, hot.
Linda Farrow and House of Holland
It’s summer in New York, it’s sunny, and I’m bored of my everyday pair of sunnies. But who has the glasses for me? Designer Linda Farrow does! Her range has so many innovative designs, without the stripes on the lenses like the Kayne West glasses sold at every street vendor in the village. Linda Farrow has the most fabulous vintage shades, and the collaboration between her and House of Holland is a gem in a sea of sunnies.
YOU'RE SAYING (2)
Rochelle said | 7 March, 2008
The Japanese always seems to find ways of incorporating art in packaging. Its so simple and yet so beautiful. Eco-friendly too. In the northern parts of Luzon Island in the Philippines, there is a delicacy known as binungay. It is also sweet glutinous rice cooked inside a bamboo stalk. In order to eat it, the bamboo needs to be “hacked”. There is also another traditional food that is served and often sold in empty coconut husks. Its called Kalamay.
Great article. Love the eggs.
Sincerely,
Rochelle
abc-packaging.com
HAVE YOUR SAY
Wow, here’s some work that just made my Friday all the sweeter. Finnish artist Ville Savimaa creates the most clean, beautiful, and bizarre images, filled with chunky, abstract characters and creatures, as if viewed through an old fashioned grainy, black and white lens. It feels a lot like the trippiest noir film you never saw. Even when colour occasionally comes into the mix, Savimaa manages to gracefully maintain that sculptural sensibility, leaving the viewer feeling as suspended as the characters themselves. Read more
This striking design — still in the planning stages — aims to covert a desolate, disused sand mine into a thriving environmental preserve and eco-resort. The development lists an impressive array of green designs, including living walls and a five-acre green roof, and effortlessly succeeds in that all important eco-feature of blending in with its surrounding environment. Read more
Quiksilver, the surfing apparel company, has just released what is being considered the world’s first eco-friendly watch. Made of sustainable ebony wood and running on automatic movement instead of batteries, this limited-edition watch is green down to the shipping of the raw materials. Every raw material used in making this watch is recyclable (the aluminum, the steel, and the mineral crystal are all 100% recyclable), and it also includes solvent free links and is shipped by sea rather than by air. The Ray has a five-year warranty, meaning that it has a longer life than normal watches.
I’m so excited to have stumbled across the work of Berkeley, California artist Weston Teruya. On first glance, his work feels purely abstract, like black and white grids with dots of colour here and there, undulating across clean backgrounds. On closer inspection, however, perfectly rendered chairs, life savers, netting, plants and various ephemera come to light. I’m always excited when I come across an artist who can so successfully merge the realistic and abstract, and Teruya does it with aplomb. Read more
There are few more joys an artist has in life than coming across great resources for inspiration. Lately I’ve been studying typography, the meaning of words, and then something as simple as trying to find all the ‘7 letter words’ I can so that it might fit into my latest musings. Read more
In Japan, when one makes squeezing gestures with both hands at chest level, one is gesturing that one wants candy — soft, round, bouncy candy. At least, that’s what this commercial would have us believe.
Yat-Kha are a stunning Tuvan band that combines throatsinging and traditional folk music with straight-up rock. Their album ReCovers is an awesome collection of covers of songs by Led Zeppelin, Joy Division, and Motörhead among many others, reflecting their general approach to music on the rest of their impressive catalog. Despite the modern elements, the Moscow-based group still conjures the vast steppes and endless skies of the small Russian republic in southern Siberia.
WE'RE RESPECTING
WE'RE POSTING / SOME OF THE BEST
There is not a medium that UK illustrator Lizzy Stewart cannot wrap around her little finger to make the most beautiful, whimsical images. Read more
Charlie Immer’s pastel-pallete sometimes obfuscates the gory violence in his surreal images. At other times, it heightens the gut-wrenching and visceral effect of his work. Read more
Forget battery powered vehicles. Cars made from ice are the future of transportation: no pollution, no honking horns, no painful rap music blasting out of souped up stereos. And if they melt, they melt. You just swim the rest of the way down the slipstream.
Scanners’ new single Salvation
I love this track by London based rock group, Scanners, which is off their latest album, Submarine. Having toured with acts such as The Horrors, The Wedding Present, The Charlatans, Electric Six, and Juliette & The Licks, Scanners could well blow up in 2010. Figuratively speaking, not literally. No, that wouldn’t be fun.
Amazing cake designs by Charm City Cakes
Baltimore company Charm City Cakes produces the most innovative wedding and party cakes on the market. Inspiration for these creative bakers comes from everywhere: art, fabric, furniture, architecture, landscapes, science, and music, and each cake is individually designed to match your personality, and the theme of the occasion you are celebrating. Don’t miss these cakey engineering masterpieces. Read more
Thanks to Sony Australia, four Lost At E Minor readers will win personal audio prizes, including the new 8GB Walkman S series video MP3 player and the MDRXB500 Extra Bass headphones. Read more
This Powder Necklace features a pearlized Turbo Cinereus shell with tiny holes drilled into the bottom, filled with a sparkling silver-colored powder that when gently tapped, sprinkles a light dusting on the wearer’s chest. Designed by Stephanie Simek. Read more
FOLLOW US
DISCOVER MORE
SO...
SEARCH: Can't find what you're looking for? Do a search..
IS IT GOOD FOR YOU TOO?
We hope you're enjoying your time on Lost At E Minor, but it’s not over yet. Got something to share? Tell us about it and we'll look to publish it. If you want to have your work featured on the site, we'd love to hear from you. Pssst, we also have an online store stocking some of the goodies we feature on the site.
If you're a media agency and want to use this platform to connect with our readership, then drop us a line and tell us about it. Oh yeah, and we do digital consulting for cool brands that want to reach the sort of demographic that visits this site.
Gary said | 6 March, 2008
Very interesting. Over here in Malaysia, many of the traditional delicacies are wonderfully wrapped like a “ketupat” which is rice (occasionally glutinous rice) wrapped in a woven palm leaf/bamboo leaf pouch which is then boiled or steamed.
I totally agree with Oka that the packaging is ‘born out of necessity meant to preserve food and make it easily portable, made of whatever material found at hand in the rural areas of their origin.’ I really like his egg-packaging. It looks very decorative as well as being functional at the same time.