Do you know anything about Kamon?
Kamon, in Japan, is a heraldic emblem (Japanese coat-of arms) used to identify individuals or families.
Growing up in a head family in the countryside, Kamon is a familiar part of my life. The lanterns used during the Bon Festival bore our Kamon, and when we visited our ancestors' graves, the tombstones also had the Kamon on them. They were a common sight in daily life, and I didn't pay them much special attention.
After that, going to a school in Tokyo and finding quite a few classmates who didn't know their own Kamon was a bit of a culture shock. Maybe that was the trigger, but around that time, I started to become interested in Kamon.
Kamon as a topic is so wide that it cannot be done in just one post. So today, I'd like to give a rough overview to those who are completely unfamiliar with them, hoping to spark some interest.
After centuries of diversification, there are nowadays about 26,000 known kamon in Japan. Their designs are inspired by natural elements, such as clouds, waves or thunder; birds and insects, plants and flowers; but also buddhist symbols, man-made objects, yin and yang cosmology, Chinese traditional motifs, Christian representations (since the 16h century), etc.
They not only serve as family emblems, but also as logotypes for international companies, official insignias for institutions and government agencies, typographical designs for books and magazines, avatars for internet profiles... Kamon have permeated every aspects of past and modern Japanese culture and society, and yet more and more people are actually oblivious to them. Not knowing one’s own family emblem is nowadays the norm rather than the exception in Japan. On the other hand, there seems to be a growing interest for kamon internationally, often with foreign martial arts or tea enthusiasts who study Japanese history and culture.
This international attraction for Japanese heraldic designs could grow even further when creative people around the world, artists and designers, realize the vast knowledge and potential kamon have to offer in terms of graphic composition, geometric scaling and symmetries, or abstraction: one could say that with kamon, the Japanese invented graphic design centuries before everybody else.
The fascination of Kamon, above all, lies in their exceptional composition. Despite their minimalistic expression, they accurately represent objects and are both simple and beautiful. Kamon embody the essence of Japanese sophistication.
With that, I probably haven't even covered 1% of the world of Kamon. If the response to this post is good, I'd like to write again about the history of kamon, their varieties, the structure of their designs, and so on.
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