ABSTRACT
Japanese imagination meets Western heritage under the commercially managed imprint of a global design house. The quality of the leather and stitching is of minimal interest; the look governs, and the projection of status predominates. The craft for which the Japanese are developing a nostalgia is more that of risk than design; the pre-industrialized exposure to material form and purposive structures to which the skill of the worker must be brought under the impress of lengthy apprenticeships, habituated generational expectations and rigorously embodied ceremony. The risk comes in allowing nature into the house whose apparent simplicity has very little to do with the stripped-back, tidy and efficient designs favoured by Western rationalism and its obsession with the new. It is to these aspects of Japanese craft that we bring o-sushi or sushi. Sushi is the serving of raw fish on a softly packed ball of slightly salted, vinegared rice.
