"Faced with that nothingness…I decided to be a maker of things"
Just 16 and recently released from a naval academy, Kenji Ekuan witnessed Hiroshima’s devastation from the train taking him home. ‘Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture,’ he recalled from the offices of G. K. Design, the firm he co-founded in Tokyo in 1952. ‘I needed something to touch, to look at,’ he added.
‘Right then I decided to be a maker of things.’ One of the most enduring objects in his 60-year design career — which includes the Akita bullet train and Yamaha motorbikes — is the Kikkoman soy-sauce dispenser.