Kenji EkuanAs with many elite industrial designers, you know his work even if you don't know his name. Decades after Kenji Ekuan created Kikkoman's iconic soy sauce bottles with their red caps, he designed Japan's Komachi bullet train, in a career driven by a desire to make good design accessible to everyone.
Ekuan died Sunday in Tokyo at age 85; Japanese news outlets say he had suffered from a heart disorder.
A native of Hiroshima, Ekuan was 17 when the city was hit by an atomic bomb toward the end of World War II. In the blast, he lost his sister and father, who was a Buddhist priest. He later said the devastation motivated him to start building things.
"Faced with brutal nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for something to touch, something to look at," he told Japanese broadcaster NHK. "The existence of tangible things is important. It's evidence that we're here as human beings."
The designer created his most ubiquitous product in 1961: a flask-shaped and leak-resistant soy sauce dispenser that is now used around the world. Ekuan, who was also a Buddhist monk, was credited with numerous corporate logos during Japan's industrial boom era, as well as creating the look of Yamaha's VMAX motorcycles and the Narita Express train that ferries passengers to and from Tokyo's main international gateway.
