Tokyo’s scents are provocative. That first whiff of natto (fermented soybeans), a common Japanese breakfast item, can be unpleasant, but unforgettable. Japanese Osmanthus trees that produce a strongly scented flower in the autumn engulf the city with their powerful, sweet fragrance that, once inhaled, is memorized and cherished for life.

Scent designer Kaori Oishi

Inspired by Tokyo’s fashion-forward areas, scent designer Kaori Oishi used essential oils and a blend of potpourri to create a palette of scents that evoke the characteristics of Aoyama, Jingumae, Nakameguro, Sarugakucho and Shimokitazawa.

Kaori’s name means ‘weaving fragrances’ in kanji (Chinese characters) and using Japanese ingredients like shiso and yuzu, she is fulfilling her destiny.

In order to recreate Tokyo’s “scent-scape” for Pret a Porter and its visitors, we drew inspiration from each area, putting together a list of adjectives that describe them.

Nakameguro, for example, to us felt “masculine and underground”. Using these basic references, Kaori put together her own checklist of words to create a picture to inspire her: roots, trees, leaves, earth, river, heavy and rubber. These translated into references of heavy woody notes, leather and patchouli scents to create a subtle but exciting fragrance.

Our perception of Aoyama was ‘conceptual design’. Kaori re-imagined this to be sophisticated, stylish, elegant, modern and white/silver. From a scent perspective, this was interpreted as a fragrance containing marine, floral and shiso notes.

Jingumae for us represented “up-and-coming fashion”. For Kaori the meaning was deeper: temple, wind, air, fresh, light, azure, transparent and edgy. Light woody notes and yuzu were chosen, yuzu because it’s more authentic a citrus note than lemon or bergamot.

Sarugakucho, incidentally close to the Five by Fifty office, is we think “quirky, cute and eccentric”, and for Kaori: powdery, calm, European and a “milky water reflection”. The scent produced is a aromatic and powdery with almond and mimosa notes.

Finally, Shimokitazawa, a “bohemian” area famous for vintage stores and popular with students, was imagined as: indies, noisy, vintage silk, heavy dried flowers, old clothes and papers, by Kaori. This was turned into a floral, spicy and oriental scent.

The final stage of this process involved Kaori blending wood resins and raisins to form a bespoke potpourri, adding each fragrance to create a custom blended scent that forms an olfactory image of Tokyo’s trendiest neighbourhoods. To learn more about this process, Kaori can be contacted at kaparfum [at] gmail.com

Tokyo’s soundtrack can be seasonal, like the deafening cicada chirping in summer and the sweet potato vendor peddling his snacks in winter.

At other times, the soundtrack is plain infuriating, such as the incessantly beeping pedestrian crossings and loud “danger” message of reversing trucks on a quiet street.

Sound designer Yasuharu Ohkouchi.

Talented sound designer Yasuharu Ohkouchi was the one who turned our concept into reality.

After we recorded around 100 unique urban sounds (birdsongs in Yoyogi Park, the 5pm music telling children to go home, trains on the Yamanote Line, etc.), Yasuharu (Hal), layered these sounds to create a story of his own.

“The music starts with a young man arriving from Narita, riding the mainline train into Shibuya station, as the cherry blossom petals fall onto windows,” explains Hal.
Utilizing the skills of co-collaborating musician Jeff Wichmann, who sent samples original koto compositions from his base in Chicago, Hal added a classical element to the urban soundscape.

Musician Jeff Wichmann

Jeff is an experimental composer and musician who blends koto with trumpet and other instruments to form new sonic sculptures for use in performance, theater, advertising and design.
Jeff has collaborated with junkyard automobile shredders, dancers, electronics wizards, string telephone artists, Bavarian zither players, actors, rock bands and poets.
“For this project with Hal, using the Japanese koto and a certain surreal/wabisabi /Issa haiku perception, I attempted to express the figurative sounds of spring and fall in Tokyo. I tried to create sonic vignettes to mirror cascading sakura petals in the wind; rain drops on one’s umbrella and the sidewalk; fading leaves and echoes of summer memories. Within these audible sculptures are the emotions of hope in spring and beautiful sadness in fall,” explains Jeff.

Armed with a Mac, Pro Tools, KORG MTR and KORG Kaoss Pad, Hal manipulated and blended all the sounds together to create our Tokyo Soundtrack.

Hear the piece at:

Yasuharu Ohkouchi’s MySpace
Jeff Wichmann’s MySpace

Video artist Stuart Ward

Tokyo is the world’s most populous metropolitan city with 35 million people living in an area 50km radius, which equates to more than the entire population of Canada living in an area a little bit smaller than Puerto Rico.

“35 Million Stories” is a short film dedicated to those people.

“There are millions of interacting stories in Tokyo,” explains video artist Stuart Ward. “Filming them all would be impossible, so instead I created a film that focuses on slices of Tokyo life or snippets of the scene in totality.”
Stuart is a video artist from Canada who has made his home in Tokyo. Initially trained in Fine Arts, focusing on painting, he made the jump to digital media in 2000 starting with photography and progressing to video a few years later.

Specializing in live video performance and exhibition, he has performed at fashion events such as Steve Madden’s Shoe Parade and the Salon De Glamorous; at luxury events such as the Peninsula’s Cirque Culinaire for Dom Perignon and is part of the pair of resident Video Artists at Black List Tokyo, an exclusive monthly event, and with DJs at clubs like the venerable Womb in Shibuya.

In describing, “35 Million Stories”, he continues: “I investigated the individual as a part of a greater form, and the greater form being composed of seemingly insignificant pieces. Without the individual, Tokyo would not exist, yet without the greater form, the individual appears purposeless.”

Watch the film:

]]> http://fivebyfifty.com/2009/01/27/see-35-million-stories-by-stuart-ward/feed/ 0 http://fivebyfifty.com/2009/01/27/touch-konbini-culture-by-nicole-fall/ http://fivebyfifty.com/2009/01/27/touch-konbini-culture-by-nicole-fall/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:59:56 +0000 http://www.fivebyfifty.com/?p=1680 As a symbol of modern Tokyo, nothing says more than a convenience store.

Convenience is more than a benefit in Tokyo. It’s an ethos – a way of life.  Punctual trains, clean streets and helpful policemen. These are not luxuries; they are the fabric of daily life.

The vortex of a convenient lifestyle is the convenience store, otherwise known as “konbini” (even the language is convenient).  There are more than 40,000 konbini across Japan, and it has been estimated that the average Tokyoite at least once a day to stock up on essentials, settle bills, post packages, reserve concert tickets, book an airplane seat… or just to buy stuff. For some, browsing the magazines in a konbini is simply a way to pass the time – no purchase necessary.

We interpreted consumption further by focusing on five of Tokyo’s most forward areas to provide a barometer of current trends in form and function.

“The turnover of products in a Japanese convenience store is remarkable,” says Five by Fifty Trend Director Nicole Fall. “Not only are they a reflection of micro-innovation, the products in any given convenience store also reflect consumers’ moods, aspirations and well as daily challenges.”

Each konbini carries a different product assortment to reflect the demographic needs of the store’s local population. No two konbinis are the same in terms of what they sell and the kind of people it attracts, which means every konbini becomes a microscopic lab of a neighborhood’s characteristics.

Some of the items on available to be experienced at Prêt à Porter Paris include: manga and instant rice from Naka Meguro; French-style chocolates from Aoyama; yuzu-flavored rice topping from Sarugakucho; super-cheap instant noodles from Shimokitazawa; and pretty-pack cigarettes and high fashion magazines from Jingumae.

Five by Fifty regularly analyses konbini trends for its clients. A visit to such a store is always included on its “Consumer Insight Safaris” that introduce visiting executives to Japanese consumer behavior.

Five hundred square meters of Prêt à Porter Paris is dedicated to an inspirational trends area called Explosion de Modes, a space displaying colors, fabrics and ideas.
The theme for Autumn-Winter 2010 is “New Generation Cities”, with Tokyo, Rio, Stockholm and Los Angeles as well as Paris selected by Explosion de Modes curator Alexandra Senes as the world’s new wave of urban influencers.

Five by Fifty set out to recreate Tokyo’s pulse and spirit to convey current consumer and societal trends within the parameters of an 80-square-meter space. Utilizing the five senses to create a contextual experience, we assembled a cast of collaborators to demonstrate the inspirational diversity and contradictions of the world’s most populous city. This was a challenging task but it felt logical to interpret what Tokyo meant through the five senses because it’s a city that touches each sense uniquely.

We collaborated with musicians Yasuharu Ohkouchi and Jeff Wichmann, film creator Stuart Ward and scent artist Kaori Oishi. We also transported tons of convenience store merchandise (drinks, snacks, cosmetics – all available only in Japan) to Paris to give visitors a tangible sense of consumerism and innovation in Tokyo today.

Within this sensory backdrop, we also decided to pick five areas of Tokyo we love and highlight these more intimately within our space; Aoyama, Jingumae, Nakameguro, Sarugakucho and Shimokitazawa.
We then visited a convenience store in each area and bought products that we thought represented each area’s characteristics and its demographics, and presented these items in huge, specially made ‘obento’ boxes at the show.

So imagine if you will: a backdrop featuring a movie, a soundtrack featuring Tokyo’s most unique sounds, scents specially created to demonstrate each of our chosen five area’s characteristics’, five big obento displays featuring cool items you would find in a typical Tokyo convenience store and even some snacks that people could try.

This is what Tokyo means to us:

“Tokyo is a paradox. It is both friendly yet alien, crazy but serious, modern yet traditional. It’s the world’s most populated city; a confusing neon jungle that overwhelms on arrival but on closer inspection offers calm shelters. If that sounds like a cliché, the paradox is that it’s true.

Tokyo’s sights, sounds and smells are a sensory overload. Its residents live in a state of apparent chaos yet there is organization to the mayhem.  Tokyo is one of the world’s safest cities but its not run under dictatorial rules. Its inhabitants have intense social obligations to live by but there is also an overwhelming sense of playfulness and liberality to its culture.

Trying to describe and convey the spirit of Tokyo means discarding the rulebook. Its sheer vibrancy is always inspiring, sometimes strange but never dull. Living in Tokyo is a daily adventure, with little hope of unraveling its mysteries.

Tokyo has no core but is multi-layered. Each time a layer is torn away, a new one appears, as indefinite as the last.”

Nicole Fall
Trend Director
January 28, 2009

Read more in our ongoing Prêt à Porter coverage.

Five by Fifty was invited to Pret à Porter Paris  by SAS, young trend agency orchestrated  by  Alexandra Senes.

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