About
Founded in 2007, Spoon & Tamago is an international blog that is based out of New York City and Tokyo Japan. It is written by artist and writer Johnny Strategy. Drawing from an extensive multicultural database and resources, Spoon & Tamago attempts to comprehensively cover all aspects of Japanese design from fine art and architecture to product and graphic design.
So, what’s this all about?
What we’re trying to do is tell a story. That story is, what’s going on in the Japanese art & design industry and where is it headed. What we’re not trying to do is find recycled eye candy or re-post press releases. With that in mind, here are some of the things we think about when writing.
- Significance – who is doing it, why are they doing it, and why does it matter? What role does it play within its larger design discipline?
- Relevance – What is the context of the topic? Does it have a history or a future? Is the topic current? If not, why write about it now?
- Unique Content – Has this topic received exposure on other sites? If so, what kind of value can we add to the topic?
Where do you get your stories from
Our content is largely based on independent research. That means we meticulously aggregate data from the websites,blogs and twitter feeds of architects, designers, galleries, shops and other relevant individuals or institutions. That’s why you won’t find attribution (“via…” or “found on…”) on many of our posts. It’s because we originated the story. But if we do find something on other blogs we always give proper credit.
We rarely accept submissions (of course, there are exceptions) because submissions are made only by a small piece of the pie – those who have the means, and the desire, to submit their content. It is certainly a time-consuming task but as a result, at any given time, roughly 90% of our posts are original content. We are proud of our model of delivering unbiased and well-researched writing and believe it is one of the ways we add value in an increasingly crowded arena of information.
What are people saying?
“Your commentary and interpretation is what is valuable to me. It’s valuable to the design community.” (translated)
Keiji Ashizawa, Architect
“Thanks for [your] article. It is interesting, because we can’t find an article in Japanese which has own opinion on our works.”
On Za Line, Artist/Designer
“I really admire your blog, it is quite wonderful! I feel really honored to have my work there.”
Miya Ando, Artist
“Spoon & Tamago offers a keen observational eye into a wide range of Japanese art, design and architecture — in other words, it’s a blog you should be reading.”
Craig Mod, Writer/Designer/Publisher
So what is Spoon & Tamago anyway?
Spoon & Tamago means spoon and egg, tamago being the Japanese word for egg. It was derived from an online personality test Johnny and his then-to-be wife took many years ago. It likened his wife to a spoon and Johnny to an egg. The details remain murky but they liked the associations that an egg and a spoon had – think egg and spoon race – and decided to play along. Spoon & Tamago is now primarily run by the husband-and-wife team.
We get a lot of questions about our header image. The header image itself is a close-up shot of our studio where we have on rotation random magazine clipping and images that inspire us! The two dolls (Spoon and Tamago) were designed by the Kyoto-based design collective groovisions.
