![]() ![]() He also started teaching kendo at the Evergreen park gymnasium, while his mother taught Japanese at the Nichiren temple, where Cedrick also attended Japanese language classes. His father found employment with the Rafu Shimpo newspapers but moved on to selling insurance and later fertilizer. At the time, his father was running a sizable cotton farm in the Imperial Valley but when the price of cotton collapsed, the family moved to Boyle Heights, where Cedrick grew up in a multi-cultural neighborhood, surrounded by Japanese, Russians, Mexicans, Italians, Jews and African Americans. ![]() Shimo was born in Heber, Calif., in the Imperial Valley. However, Shimo’s maternal family was originally from the Kagoshima region and had fought alongside Saigo Takamori. ![]() Shimo was the only child born to Tamori and Yoshiko Urakami Shimo, both from Okayama, Japan. Click on the image to watch Cedrick’s 2009 Densho interview.Ĭedrick Masaki Shimo, a World War II military resister and an executive at American Honda Motors, USA, passed away peacefully on April 1. Hope everyone is holding up under these strange times.” photo: Densho. Martha writes: “Cedrick passed away at White Memorial Hospital but it was not related to the COVID-19 virus. This is a longer version of the obituary which will appear in the Rafu Shimpo and Nichi Bei Weekly. We both really enjoyed working freely and not having to focus on designing a marketable product.Guest post by contributor Martha Nakagawa. ![]() It became a “ping-pong project”, because we were constantly sending ideas back and forth to each other. He sent me a bunch of drawings that gave me a few interesting ideas, which I sent back to him. And then we decided: It’s our turn! A while later, shortly before the Christmas holidays, Oki called me and told me about his idea of working with the Japanese method of joining verses together, called “kami no ku”. We spoke over coffee about the past, about the collaboration between Ettore Sottsass and Shiro Kuramata – there used to be lots of collaborations between European and Japanese designers. We saw this as a sign that a new generation of designers is on the rise. We both quickly discovered that there are lots of parallels between us – Oki was guest of honor at this year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair, I was guest of honor at the imm Cologne. It all came about spontaneously after we met in Japan. What form did your collaboration take? Nichetto: Oki and I did not plan our cooperation in advance. What could have been more fitting than to ask at least one of the two to answer a few of our questions about their creative formula N = N? Luca stepped up. Moreover the pair, N + N, have given all the products born of their cooperative design process original names: “Shelves in a comic”, “Paper Ice Cream” or “Fish skin on the roof”, to name just a few. And so it went back and forth in just a few days the result not only being a great many exciting sketches, but seven different products, and a friendship. And Luca sent his to Oki, who got to work developing them. So, Oki sent his draft ideas to Luca, who continued work on them. For there is a method in Japanese poetry whereby one person begins and writes the first few lines – kami no ku – while the other then finishes the poem – shimo no ku. Japanese poetry even played its part here. Oki Sato came up with an idea of how to make it work without the two being in the same place. Then they started trying it out themselves. First the two designers met for a coffee and had a chat about design and collaborations between designers such as Sottsass and Kuramata. But it also stands for a highly productive dialog between Luca and Oki, Nichetto and Sato, Italy and Japan, Venice and Tokyo. N = N quite simply means: Nichetto = Nendo or Nendo = Nichetto. ![]()
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