Original OK Basketball Shoe from 1950

While I was in Kobe, I got the chance to check out the ASICS Sports Museum, these are some of the pieces on display there, but barely the tip of the iceberg.

Marathon Tabi from 1953

Delegation shoes for the Japanese athletes at the 1952 Melbourne Olympics

Kenji Kimihara's Silver-Medal-Winning Magic Runner from the 1968 Olympic Games

Sakaguchi-san's pride and joy: Nylon wrestling shoe from 1955

The LIMBER LEATHER, the first sneaker to feature the now-famous Tiger Strike

Shoes worn by Yukio Kasaya on his Gold medal ski jump at the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, combination leather/rubber sole

Legendary Finnish runner Lasse Viren's Gold Medal winning RUNSPARKS from the 1976 Olympics

GEHRIG Baseball Spikes from 1974

Astronaut Training shoes inspired by traditional Japanese Tabi

Straight out of Brooklyn, NY Raval & Knight is an up-and-coming Menswear brand that was created “to move past national boundaries and manufactured conflicts in design and style.” Founded by my friend Man Hoang and his partner Samuel Hubler, the line features detailed, handmade pieces inspired by 1970′s American style but constructed with British fabrics and techniques. To see two 20-somethings create such focused and mature work is truly inspiring.

Visit their website and buy something from the store here

My song from our Midori game created by TEAMLAB. TEAMLAB is a group of Ultra Technologists that have been active in Tokyo since 2001. The group consists of a wide diversity of specialists including; Programmers, Network Engineers, Designers, Robot Engineers, Architects, CG Animators, Mathematicians and more. TEAMLAB carries out activities across a range of media, from developing web and robot technology, to installation art, video art and spatial design, making the border between Technology, Art, and Design more ambiguous.

We did a little interview with their leader Toshiyuki Inoko to explain the project, see below:

What is your approach towards “interactive design”?

People often say that men who are good at listening are popular with women but people actually enjoy talking more than just listening “if they could speak well”. To take it one step further, people enjoy expressing something more than just viewing a representation produced by someone else “if they could express it well”.

In the era of the mass media, the job of a designer was to attain a form of expression that was perfect in its quality. That was because the only point of contact with consumers was through mass media channels. However, the advent of the Internet and the networked society is changing the role of the designer. Since consumers enjoy expressing something if they could do so well, I believe that design should be about creating tools that enable people who are not professional creators to create things that make them want to “share it with friends”. It should be about tools that make the process of expression itself, something that they once struggled with, into a process that’s fun and enjoyable. It should be about constructing an environment that allows users to share their creations with friends. That is what I think interactive design is.

How did you work on the Midori concept?

Personally, I believe that in Japan, dichotomies such as nature and high-tech, or traditional and contemporary become mingled up, and it is exactly that which makes Japan interesting. For this project, I focused on creating a world with the Japanese “midori [green]”, that green which colours the ambiguous season when spring turns into early summer.
When I was a child, I felt that I could change the world in any way I wanted with my own hands using my imagination. I was always thrilled and excited. Just like when someone buys a new pairs of sneakers and goes out into the world running. It’s that excitement which I’d like players to be able to feel.

How do you and Team Lab regard Onitsuka Tiger’s values?

In a pre-Internet society, I think the priority was to let consumers know about a product or to induce yearning for it by utilizing the mass media and famous celebrities, or by placing products in big retailers. In a society where the Internet takes the centre stage, users consciously collect and evaluate information and share their experiences with the world. Team Lab believes that by focusing on the essential issues, and creating mind-blowing things that address them, users will support products and that will generate distribution. For us, mind-blowing things are an aggregate of details. That is why the values that Onitsuka Tiger upholds resonate with us, and we believe they are crucial for the coming society where users will begin to play a central role.

Please tell us about the Sketch Piston series (about its background)?

I talked about this for the approach to “interactive design” already, but we believe that users have more fun expressing something “if they could do so well”.

We wanted to create a tool that would make drawing and scribbling as fun as it used to be when we were children. When we were young, we let our rich imagination free and drew worlds which we enjoyed exploring. The reason I started the Sketch Piston series was my desire to create a drawing tool that would work to compensate for the lack of that bustling imagination, one that would make adults who are not good at drawing create works that they would want to share with others.

The Sketch Piston series includes a diverse array of works. Some focus on animation while others present comedy-show-like humour. For this project, our focus was on music and the concept was to create a musical instrument that could be drawn and played. I want people to enjoy creating music freely just like when we were children, when everything around us like plates and cutlery could instantly turn into musical instruments.

I want people to draw freely led by their creativity and mischievousness onto the green Midori world of Japan, and enjoy playing with different sounds.

LimberUp Moscow x Takeshi from Onitsuka Tiger on Vimeo.

In the man’s own words.
Shot by LightUp Film
Music by my little brother SkyRoyal

As part of our Made of Japan campaign, Onitsuka Tiger is working with Japanese-influenced creatives from around the world who embody the idea of East Meets West. Our Ryoshis, as we are calling them come from a diverse spread of personal and artistic backgrounds that all reflect a sense of artistic purity and focus on craft that is at the core of Japanese creative culture. Throughout the year we’ll be bringing you content from our Ryoshis as they give us their interpretations of our history, products and values.
When it was time to begin work on the campaign, the first person I wanted to reach out to was my friend Emeric “Takeshi” Trahand. Having worked with him during my agency days, I knew not only how talented he was but also how important Japan was to his artistic process. I’ve always considered what Emeric does a certain type of magic, when you view his pieces, you’re almost immediately overwhelmed by the vivid colours and the surreal combination of divergent elements he puts together. Once the “whoa” factor goes away, your eyes begin to explore the intricacies of each piece, putting together the visual story, seeing that every element is perfectly placed in a way that illuminates the meaning of the whole, which always contains a greater narrative meaning.

For Onitsuka Tiger, I wanted Emeric to take one of our more overlooked silhouettes and create something stunning that expressed an important part of our brand history. We talked about a few different subjects related to the LimberUp, which was created as a warm-up shoe for the Japanese Olympic team that was supposed to compete at the 1980 Olympic games. I found it interesting that we created a shoe for a team that never reached the Olympics due to the US-led Boycott of the games. Which led to a discussion on the boycott and the controversy around it.
I think that focusing on the boycott would have been taking the easy way out, since that is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the Moscow Olympics. We decided to look at that time in sporting history in a less obvious way and ended up finding out that one of the biggest stories at the Games that year was the emergence of female athletes at the Olympics.

In many ways the 1980 Olympics were a turning point for women in sports: 21% of the Athletes at the Games were female, which at the time was the largest representation of women in the history of the Olympics, three of the world records that were set at the 1980 Olympic games still stand today and all three of them were set by women, and individuals like Ines Diers, Caren Metschuck, and Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci all received multiple medal honours.

With that in mind, Emeric came up with what you see here, a dedication to the female athletes of the 1980 Summer Olympics, that incorporates the silhouette of the sneaker and Japanese-style ikebana flower arrangements. The bursting flourishes of the flowers mirror the burst of feminine talent and energy at the Games, while the shoe anchors the arrangement to that time period. Of course the presence of the Ikebana arrangement is Emeric’s dedication to Japan and its influence on his art.

See you Wednesday January 19th, in Berlin

Tsuri Collection: Autumn/Winter 2010 by The Savants Collective from Onitsuka Tiger on Vimeo.

Onitsuka Tiger came together with the extremely talented Savants Collective to create this unique visual piece inspired by our Tsuri Collection.

Capturing the fading colours of autumn, the inspiration behind the Tsuri Autumn-Winter range comes from lake fishing in the mountains of Japan. Both apparel and footwear feature a multicoloured check pattern based on the ‘Katsuo’ pattern, which is inspired by the gradient stripes on the belly of a tuna fish. The pattern’s warm palette echoes the colour explosion of autumn trees.

Using a unique combination of mediums, Savants Collective was able to distill the meaning of the collection into this emotionally stirring, visually stunning short film that mixes 2d and 3d animation with Practical photography and a handmade miniature set.

Interview with Savants Collective Below:

Who are Hello Savants How did you come together, what have you worked on in the past?
Hello Savants started this year as a network of friends working in graphic design, illustration and music who decided to come together as a formal collective. This year we worked on several projects some are broadcast and commercial and some are just for our own personal, artistic expression.
There are curren 6 people in the group doing video, music and programming.

What would you call signature parts of your style?
We have a lot of different approaches. I would say, that drawings and sketches get incorporated into our work a lot. A lot of work is inspired by space, experiential shapes and geometry.
In general though, we’re still very open, and our work is never tied down by a signature, we try to find new artistic explorations and experiment with new things every time.

What made the Tsuri concept interesting to you?
The freedom and openness of the concept was inviting, as well as the challenging of building a set and mixing a lot of different elements into one piece. We ended up with four elements: we went out and shot some footage of real lakes and forests, built a miniature set and then incorporated 2d and 3d animation in a single piece,

What did you know about Onitsuka Tiger before beginning the project?
One of the group always wears Onitsuka Tiger, you could say he’s a real aficionado [Laughs]. We knew they had done some work before with miniature concepts in building the different shoes, but we tried not to let that influence the project.

Were there any unforseen challenges in mixing the four elements?
The biggest challenge was creating the right light setup. Recreating the light conditions, especially considering the Autumn inspired landscape, in a way that was realistic was very difficult. We toyed around with a lot of different light sources, projects and even experimented with using an iPhone as a light source but in the end the most spontaneous and “edgy” choice was what we went with.
Sometimes the most important part of the project is discovering new things almost by accident, often those things transmit more emotion. So it doesn’t look too perfect, but it projects more feeling.

How did the influence the final product?
The music influenced the visual a lot. As soon as it was completed, the music just felt right, and was incredible visual to us, as soon as it was done we felt like it fit the mood and concept extremely well. It guided the process from the beginning

What inspired the music?
One of the members of the group is in an electronic brand called Plastic Joy, and they create a lot of the music for our pieces. Another big inspiration was Takagi Masakatsu, he’s a japanese visual artist, and his style was an inspiration for the Japanese influence on the music.

How much are you inspired by Japan in general?
I’ve actually been to Japan twice this year, we love Japan, we love seeing the different sides of their culture. It’s a beautiful country and we loved seeing the different ways they express themselves and their culture. Everything from Japanese calligraphy to architecture has inspired a lot of what we do. We always tune our antennae toward Japan to see what’s going on and what kind of new inspiration we can get.
Something a lot of people don’t know is that we’re all Italian and in Italy, we all grew up watching Japanese cartoons. It’s a really big thing for Italians, and it’s pretty unique in Europe, you ask around and other people [from other countries] don’t really have that, but we grew up watching all of these Japanese cartoons which made us all passionate about everything Japanese, we love Japanese toys…robots…girls [all laugh]

On the Central Message of the Piece:
Obviously the piece is quite abstract, we wanted to create a vision more than create a story. We wanted to bring the viewer into a timeless, imaginary place where they could find the meaning beyond perception.

Onitsuka Tiger x Tillmann Lauterbach from Onitsuka Tiger on Vimeo.

Another excellent upcoming collaboration for OT.
Thanks again to Ken-Tonio Yamamoto for helping us put this together.

ASICS x Slam Jam Interview from ASICS on Vimeo.

Spoke to Matteo Teruzzi (one R) about the upcoming Slam Jam x ASICS Gel Lyte III
Once again produced, edited & directed by Ken-Tonio Yamamoto
camera by Denys Shypil

Music by Serphonic