Japandi Is Not a Place

Japandi is not a place. There is no Japandic region, no Japandi people, no tradition anyone grew up inside. It is a portmanteau — Japanese plus Scandinavian — and I could not establish who coined it. No origin, no coiner, no date. It simply appeared, fully formed, as a category you could shop.

That is worth pausing on, because we are now several years into treating it as though it describes something.

But the interesting finding from digging into this is not that trend labels are fake. It is that the distinction between the authentic and the invented barely survives contact with the evidence. Some of the most respectable terms in design turn out to have been named by commerce. And at least one concept endlessly cited as ancient Japanese wisdom appears to be about a hundred years old.

The one that genuinely surprised me

If you read anything about Japandi, you will meet ma — the Japanese concept of negative space, the meaningful emptiness between things. It is invariably presented as an ancient aesthetic principle.

The scholar Michael Lucken, writing in the Journal of World Philosophies in 2021, traces the concept in its current form to the philosopher Nakai Masakazu, around 1929 — developed partly through an engagement with Heidegger. It spread in the 1960s, and was exported westward by Günter Nitschke's 1966 writing and Arata Isozaki's 1978 Paris exhibition.

Lucken's line on what the word meant before all this:

Until recently, the notion of ma in Japanese was like that of distance in French or English… it had no generic value.

He calls it a constructed tradition. Not a fabrication — the aesthetic sensibility it describes is real — but a modern framing of it, partly shaped by a German philosopher, and then sold back to the West as timeless Eastern wisdom.

Two respectable labels, both invented by commerce

Now the reverse case. Two terms nobody would call trendy turn out to have been named after the fact, by the market.

Mid-century modern — a phrase that sounds like an art-historical period — comes from the title of Cara Greenberg's 1984 book. Speaking to Dezeen in 2024, Greenberg said she had not known the phrase was already in use. The furniture is entirely real. The category is a book title that stuck.

Scandinavian design is more deliberate still. The Lunning Prize, awarded from 1951 to 1970, was, as the record puts it, "instrumental in making Scandinavian design a recognized commodity." A prize, funded by a retailer, that turned a regional output into an internationally legible brand. It worked so well that seventy years later we use it as though it were a description of geography.

So: a genuine movement can be retrospectively branded, and a marketing category can point at genuine work. The binary does not hold.

On how architectural styles get named — and whether the names describe anything.

The etymologies are mostly wrong

A brisk correction of things you have probably read:

Lagom, the Swedish "just the right amount", is widely explained as deriving from laget om — "around the team" — a Viking mead horn passed around so everyone got a fair share. It is a lovely story and it is a false etymology. The word is an archaic dative form of lag, meaning law.

Brutalism has nothing to do with brutality. It comes from béton brut — raw concrete.

Wabi-sabi is the genuine article: a real aesthetic philosophy with real history. But Leonard Koren, who wrote the book that introduced it to a Western design audience, has watched what happened next with visible discomfort: "there are probably thirty books with wabi-sabi in the title, some quite absurd to me."

The hygge tell

The single best piece of evidence that a lifestyle-word boom is a publishing event rather than a cultural one comes from Denmark.

By 2017 there were over 500 hygge titles on Amazon UK.

Not one of them was produced by a Danish publisher.

The Copenhagen publisher Lars Erik Strandberg explained why, and it is the most efficient demolition available:

A book about it would sound false in Denmark. — Lars Erik Strandberg

You do not write a manual for your own ordinary Tuesday evening. Hygge is real; the hygge industry was an export product, manufactured elsewhere, for people who wanted to buy a feeling they had been told they lacked.

Denmark's own foreign ministry, while happily promoting the concept, concedes something the candle catalogues do not: that hygge can be "non-inclusive". Danish even has a word — hyggeracisme — for the way cosy in-group warmth can shade into exclusion. That is a considerably more complicated idea than a blanket.

An actual Japanese house, rather than the idea of one.

Being borrowed from, in your own words

It is easy to write this piece as though the cultures being packaged have no view. They do, and they are more interesting than Western hand-wringing about appropriation.

The Korean curator Hye-Jin Ris Kim on what international attention actually demands of designers:

We often are obligated to be Korean in a certain way. — Hye-Jin Ris Kim

Not "stop looking at us" — something sharper. The market will accept your work provided it performs its origin legibly. Be Korean, but in the manner already understood.

Titi Ogufere, founder of Design Week Lagos, puts the constructive version:

Designers are drawing from culture not as ornament but as intelligence. — Titi Ogufere

That is the distinction worth carrying. Culture as ornament is a pattern lifted onto a cushion. Culture as intelligence is a way of solving a problem — how to sit, how to store, how to handle heat, how to age well — which is transferable in a way a motif is not.

What actually travelled

Some influence is deep and long, and it deserves separating from the label churn.

Japanese architecture genuinely changed Western building. The clarity of the plan, the modular discipline, the screen as a movable wall, the relationship between inside and garden — these entered Western practice properly, through architects who studied them, and stayed.

Danish modernism genuinely exported, through decades of manufacturing and a serious cabinetmaking tradition. Bauhaus ideas travelled with the people who fled Europe.

The difference between that and Japandi is duration and depth. One is a century of exchange between practitioners. The other is a shopping category with a hyphen in it.

What is arriving now

The current wave is broader and, on the evidence, more serious. West African design has genuine institutional weight behind it — Design Week Lagos among others. Indian craft, Mexican and wider Latin American work, and Korean design are all moving into international visibility through named designers rather than through anonymous aesthetics.

That is the healthier pattern. When a movement arrives attached to people who can be credited and paid, it is exchange. When it arrives as an adjective attached to a paint chart, somebody has removed the people.

Where does that leave Ireland?

Awkwardly, and worth saying plainly: Ireland has no equivalent export label. There is no Irish word doing the work hygge does.

That is arguably a good thing. The countries with the strongest lifestyle-word exports are the ones that have most efficiently flattened themselves for foreign consumption, and Denmark's own diplomats now issue caveats about it.

But it does mean that Irish domestic design travels, when it travels, as individual makers rather than as a movement — which is harder, slower and considerably more honest.

So what do you do with any of this?

Not stop using the words. They are useful shorthand and the objects they point at are often lovely.

The one question worth asking is whether the label is doing descriptive work or selling work. "Japandi" on a magazine page describing a room is fine. "Japandi" on a laminate flooring range is a word doing a job, and the job is not describing the flooring.

And when something is presented as ancient wisdom, it is worth a moment's scepticism. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is a philosopher in Kyoto in 1929, reading Heidegger.

A note on the sourcing

Etymologies and coinage claims in this area are widely repeated and frequently wrong, so each one here was traced to a scholarly or primary source rather than to design writing. Where we could not establish an origin — as with Japandi itself — we have said so rather than repeating an attractive guess.

Voices from the cultures being borrowed from were sought deliberately rather than relying on Western commentary alone. Two limits: we could not access a key Guardian piece on the hygge boom, and Oxford's dictionary records were unavailable, so some etymological claims rest on a single scholarly source rather than two.

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