Yoshida Shoya, the doctor who designed everyday life

By profession he was an ear, nose and throat specialist, yet he went down in history as one of the key figures of 20th-century Japanese design. From 15 October to 20 December 2026 the Panasonic Shiodome Museum of Art in Tokyo devotes to Yoshida Shoya (1898 - 1972) the first exhibition in the capital to bear his name in its title, with some three hundred works and documents, largely on loan from the Tottori Folk Crafts Museum that he himself founded. To understand Yoshida, one has to start with Mingei, the movement that emerged in the mid-1920s around the philosopher Yanagi Muneyoshi and the potters Kawai Kanjiro and Hamada Shoji. The term, meaning "art of the people", referred to the beauty of everyday objects made by anonymous craftspeople, as opposed to industrial production and elite art. If Yanagi was the movement's theorist, so much so that he was called its father, Kawai called Yoshida the "mother" of Mingei: it was he who put those ideas into practice. After opening his clinic in Tottori in 1931, Yoshida began working with potters, woodworkers, metalworkers, dyers, weavers and papermakers in the region, designing prototypes for objects suited to modern life but rooted in traditional techniques. This was the birth of "New Mingei", launched with the revival of Ushinoto ware in his hometown. Yoshida did not stop at design: he built a complete supply chain, with a shop in Tottori and later in Tokyo for sales, a museum to display his collection and a network of workshops for production. The work of a producer, even before that of a designer. The exhibition follows his life in six chapters, from a youth shaped by the literary magazine Shirakaba to the years spent in China from 1938 to 1945, first as a military doctor and then in Beijing, where he continued to work with local craftspeople. On show are ceramic plates, lamps, textiles, neckties, knives, bamboo bags and furniture, including a Chinese-inspired bentwood chair. Also featured are his relationships with leading figures of the movement, from Bernard Leach to Hamada, and his commitment in later years to protecting the landscape and heritage of Tottori, from its famous sand dunes to the Jinpukaku villa. Yoshida dreamed of being an architect, and personally designed the spaces of his clinic, right down to the examination chairs and medicine bottle organisers. The museum recreates some of these rooms at full scale, together with those of his home, to present Mingei as a way of living. He described himself as a doctor driven by the spirit of Mingei, convinced that his two vocations were in fact one and the same.