My former teacher Hideki Kimura (at the Kyoto City University of Arts) wrote this article, reviewing my way from the wild student till today through his eye. He had a big influence on my life. May be everybody knows somebody like this. I was & still am very happy about this! But, if I look back over the last years of my life, in feel like looking at another person... And this is a strange feeling, don't you think?
Naoki Sakai: Design Concepter & Producer of Nissan's concept-car "Be-1",who was starting as an art student, with music events like MOJO WEST...
Brown-dyed long hair, a frilly shirt, light make-up, a lot of rings, and of course very dark sunglasses, a perfect outfit for being a
student in fine arts. The Kyoto City University of Arts (now: Art University) is a public school, full of art students, who are taking
the challenge of taking an examination, wearing grimy working clothes - all that was over 35 years ago. Those days starting with creating the revolutionary "Peacock-Fashion" for the singer Peter (real-name:
Shinosuke Ikehata). Later with the "Be-1" (Nissan) or his camera "O-Product" (Olympus), witch was selected for the permanent collection of the San Francisco MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), he had his break through as a designer. This is all about Naoki Sakai.
Sakai was born as the oldest son. His father was running the Sakai Transport Company in the city of Shijonawate (Osaka), the same city the famous writer Toko Kon describes as the "navel of Kawachi Town" (now East-Osaka). And that's not all. Like a real wild "Kawachi Guy" he was a part of the local rugby-team. His father came actually from Yosakoi-town (Kyoto), from a family with very high respect for Japanese classics. Even now his aunt is running a the antique house in
Hakubaicho (Kyoto) called "Sakai Shunyodo". And Naoki Sakai, with all this background switching bravery to fashion-business, could have been easy misunderstood as frivolity. But perhaps the mixture of his rough hometown Kawachi and the elegancy of the capital became the sources for his ideas...
While studying Visual Design at the Art University, he was fascinated by Andy Warhol's pop-art or the evolution of electronic media theory by Marshall McLuhan. Of course, it was impossible to chose such a study program at that time. But in his teacher Hideki Kimura and in the marketing-related design office "RR" he found something like that. Soon he went more often to the "RR" office then to the university...
All kind of traditional values has been reviewed at that time. "Good design" was may be good for the industrial society, but was is also desirable for the people? You could see the beauty of modernism in good design, but also it was inhumane. If you compare to that, there is a warmth of the human in bad design. Naoki Sakai holds doubt about the priority of modernization in the industrial society. Like no-one before him, he was interested in the Japanese tattoo (Irezumi). In his younger
days he liked Coca Cola so much, that he would like to use a tattoo of Coca Cola on his back. But this was just the beginning... For advertise his ideas, he made a presentation for "Dentsu" (the biggest PR agency in Japan), witch costs 100 million yen! It was just a fantastic plan, but then he seriously went to Dentsu to ask at their information desk! However, tattooing was too much connected with the image of branding iron a cow, and also in the American society a tabu! In the end his advertisement was rejected...
"It is good doing whatever, but just stop the tattoo...", it was such a hard day to hear this words from his own grandmother. But he did not stop it! He still was believing in his tattoo T-shirts, like kitsch-fashion. Carrying his T-shirts, he went to San Francisco where he found a Chinese investor, who saw a kind of "Japanese Art Nouveau" in Sakai's work. And, their were selling well! So they opened the "Tattoo Company", which became like a small boom! So those tattoo shirts became Naoki Sakai's debut and soon after he found himself at the starting point of designing and producing.
Then he was doing a presentation for Nissan's compact car "Be-1", and even now its limitation production continues at a company in Kyoto. "More, faster and cheeper", those are the keywords of mass-production, since the industrial revolution. And, with the Olympus camera "O-Product" he challenged to the industrial myth, that using plastic for the body of the camera was not possible. Naoki Sakai changed "the concept of the specialists" (of that time) entirely. He said that I just face upsquarely to feel fabulously interested from time to time. To inquire the professionals world on perspective of the common people. Production and marketing were caught in homogeneous dimension, but we had to remove the professionalism, that disturbs the motivation of the end-user. At the beginning criticized by those professionals, as "unprofessional" & "imitating", but after his success at European Motor-shows he became a "Design-Guru" by high reputation. His management of such big projects gained him without even noticing worldwide attention to his talent. The Asahi Newspaper described him as "The Techno Tarzan" at that time...
The origin of the word "Concepter" comes from conception (impregnation of Blessed Virgin Mary). Yasuhiro Hamano, who is producing anything from fashion to urban design, described it with a coined word as "Concept Work" (conception & method of thinking). The words describing someone "who is making thinks" may vary: producer, coordinator, director, designer - but what they are really doing is quite unclear! So as he thinks, a "Concepter" is integrating everything, like a fusion of designing and producing, more that the old system of dividing work due to specialists.
Back in 1968 the art-student Naoki Sakai was seeking some "cool stuff", something that people would "be mad about"! "We liked the street-life!" Going every-night to the disco, planning fashion-shows and pioneer "happenings", later known as rock-event called "TOO MUCH". Some times later, this "TOO MUCH" event became very popular in a club called MOJO WEST (in Kyoto), where the rock-movement was getting wilder and wilder... But the beginning of TOO MUCH and those events will be
unforgettable for all art-students.
