Tokyo Bento: Letter Forms

Typography shapes the urban landscape – on façades, signs, posters and shop windows – conveying moods before we even understand their meaning.  This becomes especially apparent when we  do not understand the language. The meaning of the words recedes into the background  and the writing itself becomes an image: form, weight, colour, rhythm and arrangement can suggest loud or quiet, restrained or  playful, refined or cheap. Living in a city without being able to read its language may even make us perceive typography in the urban environment more directly – less as information and more as part of its  visual identity.

Removed from their context and visually  isolated, individual characters begin to take on a life of their own. For this book, I deliberately chose characters from the Japanese writing systems Katakana and Hiragana.I excluded Kanji, which originated in Chinese writing and, as meaning-bearing characters, are already more inherently pictorial. Colour abstraction further detaches the characters from their original context and surroundings.

What remains are forms.


52 pages, digital print Print run: 6 copies 2026, printed in Japan  
A publication in the  Tokyo Bento series  
Edition of six Zines in a  polystyrene sushi container 


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Other titles in the series: 

Tape Town 
Tokyo Zombie 
Guide Lines 
Tokyo after Dark 
Tree Spotting