When I was a kid, the magazines I found laying around my graphic design professor dad’s offices at various state universities were Graphis, novum gebrauchsgraphik, and Print. Lounging on decrepit couches or padded office chairs, I read these from cover to cover, fascinated with what I found within, from Polish circus (CYRK) posters, elaborate packaging, and, undoubtedly, examples of graphic and other design from Japan.

My dad’s specialty was propaganda, and while he sometimes contributed amusing drawings to projects for clients, his real concern was with the use of his trade for manipulation, and not always just for consumer goals. With his dear friend Neil Kleinman, he wrote The Dream that was no more a dream: A Search for Aesthetic Reality in Germany, 1890-1945. (Harper & Row, 1969) [link] I was six when this came out, and it held a certain weight in my young mind and in my understanding of the responsibilities of those who do creative work in all design fields. My dad was also one of the early adopters of the Mac/computer design, and continued to search for those who saw this future. This quest sent him to University of Baltimore, to SUNY Buffalo and even to teach at some design schools in Japan in what would be the last year of his life. I was so grateful that he came to see what I saw in my small village. It was his guidance that led me to the re-thatching project I undertook in 1999.

Formally, I was educated in philosophy and math at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and as a teenager, I audited a magazine article writing class at Penn State University. When I was 13, my mom started a boutique toy company from our house in central Pennsylvania, Charleen Kinser Designs: Forever Toys. [link] She was a creator most skilled in sculptural design, with an uncanny ability to reproduce nature’s details and accurately render gestures in drawings and soft sculpture. I was her first employee, and because her creatures required some explanation, she was my first editor; from 1977 on, I wrote all of the hang tags and most of the catalogs. By the time she retired in 2000, she had designed–and I had described–over 110 pieces, from lifelike, articulated toads made of pigskin to the final glorious expression of her creativity, Vanity: A Dragon. egnome.com is an exclusive online realtor for Charleen Kinser Designs. [link]

I graduated from St. John’s and, enthralled with a fellow student/boyfriend who was an unlikely Japanese citizen, the grandson of White Russians who had fled the revolution and left their own children stateless by moving to Harbin, China, I took a few months of intensive Japanese at PSU and moved to Japan, a year ahead of the boyfriend. There, luck, pluck and naivete conspired, and I was soon writing for the very magazines I’d read as a kid, and interviewing some of the great postwar designers in Japan. My Japanese improved as I went along, and Graphis magazine turned out to be my primary client. 

Years later, married to a Japanese artist who painted, made washi and created balanced sculpture with found natural materials, I became familiar with an antiquated version of Japanese culture; we lived in a 100 year-old thatched farmhouse in a small isolated village in northern Kyoto Prefecture, where we raised our three kids in what felt exactly like Miyazaki’s Totoro universe. The neighbors, who taught me to mother, to farm my small plot of not very good land, and to forage by the season, were almost exclusively either widows or “foreigners”, a group that included anyone not originally from the area–both a German/Japanese family and our next door neighbors, who came from Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main islands. 

In the ninth (what turned out to be the last) year of our lives there, I coordinated a cross-cultural rethatching project of our poor farmhouse. Our village was renowned for its thatched roofs and the craft was a dying one. A few young thatchers, who were the craft’s last best bet for survival, had discovered British thatching, which long ago had undergone technological updates that would save Japanese thatchers time and homeowners money. As a bilingual writer and owner of a failing roof myself, I felt I could find a way to help. Two years of planning led to the successful rethatching of our house, with reed from northern Japan. The work was overseen by a master British thatcher assisted by a cadre of young Japanese thatchers. Energized by the possibilities of revitalizing the local thatching industry, I organized work study opportunities and a symposium, and wrote about the project for English-language media. When TV Tokyo approached me to make a documentary about the project, [link] I agreed. 

I work as a partner in Takumi Translation [link], a collaboration formed in the late 1990s with fellow design writer and translator Yukiko Naito. We’ve worked for a variety of clients in the creative fields, primary among which are MUJI, the Nippon Design Center, and the Hara Design Institute.

As a writer, I continue to write books and contribute to magazines and newspapers, focusing on creators and their motivations.