The Soy Sauce Bottle Designed to Bring Happiness
Behind the Design is a series of sleek and concise videos about the design of everyday objects we take for granted. This episode tells the story about how a former Buddhist monk designed the...
==========
The design of this soy sauce bottle goes back to 1945 in Japan. A teenager named Kenji Ekuan had witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bomb falling on his hometown hiroshima and was mourning the loss of his sister and father. After seeing the devastation, Ekuan’s path changed. He first enrolled as a Buddhist monk following in the footsteps of his father. But instead he decided to become a "creator of things" and bring happiness to people. As a young designer, Ekuan got a contract to design a table top soy sauce bottle for food company Kikkoman. Soy sauce is a must for Japanese meals, but it was originally sold in big bottles that were hard to hold. It took Ekuan three years and about a hundred prototypes to complete the design in 1961. The resul...
==========
The design of this soy sauce bottle goes back to 1945 in Japan. A teenager named Kenji Ekuan had witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bomb falling on his hometown hiroshima and was mourning the loss of his sister and father. After seeing the devastation, Ekuan’s path changed. He first enrolled as a Buddhist monk following in the footsteps of his father. But instead he decided to become a "creator of things" and bring happiness to people. As a young designer, Ekuan got a contract to design a table top soy sauce bottle for food company Kikkoman. Soy sauce is a must for Japanese meals, but it was originally sold in big bottles that were hard to hold. It took Ekuan three years and about a hundred prototypes to complete the design in 1961. The resul...
