15:07 p.m. In front of the JR Shinjuku St. East ticket gate. Ian didn’t come yet. The time we promised to meet was already passed. I called him. I thought this was the first time I called a native English speaker. “Hi! where are you now?” He seemed to wait at the Central East ticket gate. I thought my explanation might have been wrong to tell him where the meeting place was. And then, I found he was coming toward me.

I kept in touch with Ian since I met him last meeting, but we didn’ t have enough time to meet together due to our hard schedule, so we couldn’t arrange the meeting for a while. I’ve been wondering whether the meeting was held for sure, but we decided the meeting day at last! As I thought it was a rare chance to meet with an interesting type guy, I decided I would take my friends, Yutaka Ozawa, who started solo project for Japanese font recently, and Akira Yoshino, who worked for a publisher in Japan and is also a moderator on MyFonts com forum, together.

After each self introduction, we shared each other’s works. First, Ozawa-san showed his East-Asian style Calligraphy works, he also do Western Calligraphy though, and he showed his new type design in progress. Second, I showed Ian my portfolio included my package designs, logo designs and digital type faces that I’m going on. Ian seemed to be interested in my works, so he told me some opinion and asked some questions. And at last Akira presented some novels he worked for to Ian.

Ian knew some Japanese rumor concerns a famous font well. He asked Ozawa some questions about Ozawa’s Calligraphy works and also asked a question to Yoshino-san about the letter space for Japanese punctuations cited the mystery novel Yoshno-san brought. Ian often used Japanese text for his works, so he seemed to be interested in Japanese fonts and typography. Ian asked us some questions from Western style point of view. He pointed out Japanese custom. He seemed to be curious the difference between Japanese and Latin text.

I felt silly that I couldn’t explain fluently about my works in English. There seem to be some type guys who comes from overseas in Japan, so I would like to communicate with them. I’ll try to get a chance and plan a meeting at some point.

Thank you for your coming in spite of a rainy day, Ian. I hope we meet again soon.

P.S.
He also wrote this meeting on this blog “Viewers Like You”. Thakns, Ian!

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