Takuhito Kawashima is an editor and creative director based between Tokyo and Paris. He joins us this week as the fourth issue of his magazine Partners is published.

Partners is an annual magazine about relationships between people, ideas and things. Each issue is built around a single question posed by Takuhito, bringing together artists, writers, photographers and researchers to explore the question from their own perspectives. ‘We try to make each step of the process as thoughtful as possible—not just communicating by email, but meeting people in person and talking, and giving them four to six months to make their submission,’ explains Takuhito, ‘Some people submit completely new work, some go back into their archives, and others mix the two.’

The question for issue four is, ‘What do you follow?’

Takuhito is also the co-founder and creative director of kontakt, a creative studio working across fashion and cultural projects.

What are you doing this morning?
I’m answering these questions from Tokyo. Life in Tokyo is actually pretty regular compared to when I’m in Paris. I usually wake up around 8:00–8:30 every morning and get to the office by 10:00. For breakfast, lately I’ve been alternating between having fermented soybean, kimchi and avocado mixed together at home, and oatmeal at the office. Then I usually end up working until around midnight.

Alongside Partners, I’m also a co-founder and creative director at kontakt, so I’m juggling quite a few different things at the moment. For example, I’m preparing for two fashion brand campaign shoots coming up in October, and I’m also directing and producing a free paper for an outdoor brand. At the same time, I’ve just started thinking about the spatial concept for a fashion brand’s presentation during Paris Fashion Week next January. So, I usually work on Partners on weekends like today, or after 9pm on weekdays.

Describe your work environment.
The kontakt office in Tokyo is in Harajuku, a neighbourhood famous for fashion. Rather than being surrounded by big office buildings, the area is full of smaller five- or six-storey buildings, with clothing stores, hair salons, cafés and all sorts of other places mixed in. It has a very lively, street-level kind of atmosphere.

There are currently close to 20 people working at kontakt, while the core team at Partners Studio is just three of us. We have a Partners Studio meeting once a week, every Friday. We spend most of that day just talking. It’s more like, ‘Something interesting happened to me last week—what do you think about it?’ It’s not really a proper meeting, just a genuine conversation. If a meeting is about taking the shortest route towards a particular goal, then for me, a casual conversation is about discovering unexpected connections and questions within a conversation that doesn’t necessarily have a purpose. It takes more time, of course, and we don’t try to come up with answers straight away. But I think those little detours are actually what lead to the way Partners is made. So it’s an important part of the process—and honestly, it’s a lot of fun.

Which magazine do you first remember?
It was Huge, a Japanese fashion and culture magazine. When I was in high school in Shanghai, my sister brought a copy over from Japan and handed it to me, saying something like, ‘This is cool—you should read it.’ At that age, my idea of what was ‘cool’ was almost synonymous with having a hero or someone you look up to. So I basically took everything in the magazine as being ‘cool’ and read it that way.

Luckily, after graduating from university, I ended up joining Huge. I worked there for five years, and after that, I started kontakt with my business partner, Haruki Kanda.

Aside from yours, what’s your favourite magazine/zine? 
I’d say Bill and Apartamento. With Bill, I learned that you can read photography, rather than simply look at it. That feeling comes from being incredibly meticulous about everything, right down to the choice of paper. It also taught me that a magazine doesn’t necessarily have to be about simply providing ‘information.’

With Apartamento, I think the editorial idea is brilliant. I realised that what I’m interested in isn’t really beautiful interiors, but the homes of interesting or cool people. It’s such a simple shift in perspective, but I found it really inspiring. It made me realise again how interesting people’s individual quirks and obsessions can be.

What other piece of media would you recommend?
I don’t have a TV at home, and I don’t really listen to podcasts either. So now that I think about it, I’m actually wondering how I get my daily dose of news… I suppose I pick up a lot of information through conversations with friends, colleagues, clients and creatives I work with. Things come up naturally in conversation, and I think that’s probably how I stay connected to what’s going on.

Describe Partners magazine in three words
Asking (Questioning) / Listening / Connecting

How do you collect the photography and plan it into pages? 
All the editing of the image sequence is left to art director Julie Peeters. Of course, I don’t just send everything over to her. First, I put together a rough sequence based on how I’m imagining the issue, make a dummy book, and show it to Julie. From there, she starts moving things around and developing the sequence in her own way. That’s how we worked on both issues thee and four.

With Partners, we ask the same question to around 20–30 contributors for each issue. So, in a way, the main things we as editors do are come up with the question and decide who we want to ask it to. But we try to make each step of the process as thoughtful as possible—not just communicating by email, but meeting people in person and talking, and giving them four to six months to make their submission. Some people submit completely new work, some go back into their archives, and others mix the two. We generally try to take a “listening” approach to all of this. We don’t really tell our contributors, “We want this particular series from you.” We’d rather ask the question and see where it takes them.

The magazine is calm and ethereal; how do you hope the reader will respond to it?
I think this is the first time someone has described Partners as ‘calm and ethereal.’ I’m really happy to hear that. It actually reminded me of something Masafumi Sanai, one of the photographers and contributors to issue four, once said to me, ‘There’s something gentle about it. That’s why you can keep looking at it again and again. If something is too much, you feel full after seeing it just once, right?’

So I am wondering where does that sense of calm, ethereal quality, or gentleness come from. I think it might come from the fact that we’re not really that interested in the idea of a ‘work’ or an ‘artwork’ itself. What we’re really interested in is something that exists before it becomes a work—the time, thought, experience or process that goes into making something.

When we ask our contributors to respond to our question, we also encourage them to answer as personally as possible—not with a ‘we,’ but with an ‘I.’ And perhaps because of that, people end up submitting things that aren’t necessarily driven by visual or photographic beauty alone. They can be much more personal, intimate, and sometimes even a little unresolved. I think that might be where some of the gentleness comes from.

How do the magazine and the creative studio relate to each other?
I suppose the difference is between commissioned work and self-initiated projects. Commissioned work begins with a question from a brand, while Partners begins with a question of our own. But they come from the same place. Partners is not a side project of kontakt; it is where we explore the ideas and perspectives that inform our creative work. Fundamentally, both are ways of using editing to interpret the world we live in.

Recently, we also launched a new media project called Too Good. It’s a community paper about garbage that I started with Shuichi Oyama, a university professor and researcher at Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, where he studies organic circulation and related systems. The idea for this paper isn’t to make producing garbage into something morally wrong. Producing waste is simply part of being human. What we wanted to explore is how we might rebuild our relationship with waste. I’d also like to eventually make UK and French editions.

We’re also currently working on a hotel rebranding project—thinking about things like the tone of voice, how the staff communicate and speak to guests, and what kind of visual communication the hotel should have. At the same time, we’re working with local governments on ways to support and bring more attention to Japanese mingei, or folk crafts.

So whether it’s garbage, hotels or crafts, they’re all really about reconstructing relationships—between people, or between people and things. As you can probably tell, people tend to connect with Partners less because of a particular style of expression, and more because they identify with the way we make things and the way we think.

Highlight one story in the issue that sums up the new issue
I would choose Osma Harvilahti’s series (opening three spreads above), which actually gave us the initial idea for the theme of this issue, ‘What do you follow?” I first saw his work when we were having coffee together. He was telling me about a birthday present he had given to his partner and showed me these photographs. They were taken almost secretly—pictures of his partner from behind while they were travelling in different places. There was something very personal and very much Osma about the series. And, more than anything, one of the things we wanted to explore in this issue was how to make the passing of time visible on the page.

As our contributor Tim Ingold writes in the issue, the word ‘follow’ isn’t really a point; it’s more like a line connecting the past and the present. You can feel a sense of time moving through it. So for me, Osma’s contribution felt very personal, and also incredibly generous. It really captured something we wanted this issue to be about.

What has publishing taught you that may be helpful to anybody else planning to make their own magazine?
I didn’t start making a magazine because I wanted to make a magazine. It actually came from something much more personal. For example, say I meet an interesting person through a commercial project. We might work closely together for two or three months, communicating constantly while making the project and shooting together. But once it’s finished, it’s just, ‘Okay, bye.’ I always found that a little sad.

Having a magazine gives me a reason to reconnect with those people. Maybe I get to see another side of them that I didn’t know before. And having a magazine also gives me an excuse to reach out to all kinds of people I might otherwise never have a reason to contact. That’s probably one of the things I’m happiest about when it comes to making Partners.

Even without a background in design, I can still make a magazine. I can’t use Illustrator or InDesign, and I’m not a photographer. So I’ve naturally ended up making the magazine in a very editorial way. Rather than starting from the art-direction question of “How should we show this?”, I tend to start with the editorial question of “What should we show?” Of course, I can put it into the magazine because I have specialists like Julie, and because the members of Partners Studio are willing to sit with me through all those long, seemingly endless conversations.

What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
Looking at my calendar for tomorrow, I have a meeting with the printer at 11am. We’re working on a printed matter with Robbie Lawrence at the moment, so we’ll be discussing the specifications and figuring out all the details. I also have a few meetings at bookstores planned throughout the week to deliver copies of the magazine in person. In Japan and across Asia, we distribute Partners directly ourselves rather than working with a distributor, so I’m always really curious to see what the booksellers think when they see the new issue. I’m actually really looking forward to that.

Art director Julie Peeters

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