Design critic. Professor Emeritus at Musashino Art University and Honorary Fellow at the Royal College of Art. Born in Kobe in 1946. Graduated from Musashino Art University. After working as an editor, became an associate professor at Tokyo Zōkei University in 1983. Started at his current position in 1996. His works include Design no 20 seiki (The 20th Century of Design) (NHK Shuppan, 1992), Housework no seiji gaku (The Politics of Housework) (Seidosha, 1995), and Nichijitsu no bunka shi (The Cultural History of Daily Items) (Iwanami Shoten, 1999). He is the author of Modern Design Critique (Iwanami Shoten, 2002), Cultural Theory of ‘Shikiri’ (Kodansha, 2004), The Life Force of Visual Culture (Iwanami Shoten, 2017), and many others.

Graduated from the Department of Industrial Design at Hansung University in 1992 and completed a master’s program at the same university in 1997. In 2003, he graduated from the Visual Communication Design program at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, and in 2006, completed the doctoral coursework at the Graduate School of International Information and Communication at Waseda University. In 2012, he earned a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Media, Communication, and Tourism Studies at Hokkaido University.

He translated Asking Typography to Japan and Reorganizing the Design of Fukuda Shigeo and has published numerous research papers on typography. He is currently an associate professor at Hokkaido University of Education.