Japan Japanese
From the Publisher. “The quiet beauty of things Japanese. It is the foreign forms, the foreign sounds which are so fascinating. The unmistakable, monotone Sutra recitation of Buddhist monks. The windy, mystical sound of the shakuhachi bamboo flute. The delicate, thin sound of the who mouth organ in the music of Gagaku and Bugaku.
“It is a fine world which exists despite the noise of the time. A world, which does not come forward, but one which invites to enter.
My curiosity having been aroused by Utamaro’s erotic lines and inspired by Emil Ruder, I landed naive and experienced at the age of twenty-four in Japan.
“Once in Osaka I received a letter from Rudolf Hostettler, editor of the Swiss journal Typografische Monatsblätter. He invited me to write contributions about Japanese forms and objects from typographer’s viewpoint.
“I called the series ’Japan Japanese’ because I intended to show my own understanding of Japan: a Japan that existed and still exists, yet one that needs to be discovered. After more than 40 years the TM articles are being given a new life (with minor changes and with additional texts).”
—Helmut Schmid
Helmut Schmid is a graphic designer born in Austria in 1942. Currently Schmid lives in Japan and continues to work vigorously. Without question, his book Typography Today, released in 1980, is one of the most significant contributions to the development of typographic design in the last few decades, but Japan Japanese is also a unique book, which revisits Schmid’s early work (1968–73) on the Swiss typography and photography magazine Typografische Monatsblätter. As a look at the precursors to the contents of Typography Today, this book offers a visual historiography of contemporary typography.
ヘルムート・シュミットはオーストリア生まれ(1942)のグラフィックデザイナー・タイポグラファーである。現在、大阪に在住しながら勢力的に活動を展開し、日本では大塚製薬「ポカリスエット」、資生堂 「ELIXIR」、「IPSA」のロゴデザインを手掛けたことでも知られるが、1980年に発表された書籍TYPOGRAPHY TODAYこそが重要な一冊であり、それに至るまでの文脈理解こそが今学ばれるべきだろう。この意味のいて、 japan japaneseはスイスのティポグラフィシェ・モナーツブレッテル(TM)誌に連載（1968年1月～1973年3月）した内容をまとめた大変資料価値の高い一冊である。
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