社団法人 日本グラフィックデザイナー協会 JAGDA

Message from the awardee

There is a used bookstore that I have always just passed by, but on the day before I received the news of my winning the Yusaku Kamekura Design Award, I happened to go into a used bookstore as if being pulled into it. While walking down a narrow aisle in a jumble of old books not looking for anything specific, I caught sight of a spine. It was “Kamekura Yusaku’s Straight Speeches.” I pulled the book from the shelf, and opened it to a page at about the middle of the book. It happened to be a page on Makoto Nakamura who was my former boss at Shiseido. I had heard someone saying some years ago, “Kamekura-san does not seem to recognize Nakamura-san,” and his words have weighed on my mind ever since. I began reading the article with mental preparedness that a similar thing might be written. In fact, Kamekura-san understood the position of the art director in Shiseido and appreciated the design works of Nakamura-san with a fair eye. While reading it, the art director was replaced by myself acting as the art director of the same company, and I felt Kamekura-san was encouraging me. Shiseido began its business as a western-style dispensing pharmacy 140 years ago. Since its foundation, arabesque patterns have been applied for its graphic designs. Decorating the surfaces of product packages and other goods, designers in these days put their prayers for eternity into the arabesque patterns symbolizing the ever-growing energy of plants. My great predecessors may have engraved their respective arabesque patterns imagining the presence of eternal beauty. Considering the origin of the company, they might have attempted to gain an insight into the nature of beauty by discovering the right order of the invisible, like medicine, not just giving surface decorations. I never thought that I would hear over the telephone the name of author of the book that I held in my hands a day before. I hurried to the secondhand bookstore, picked up and firmly held the book and proceeded to the cashier, before the warm connection I had developed with Kamekura-san would vanish.