Kenji Ekuan, Japanese Designer Who Gave Soy Sauce Its Curves, Dies at 85

TOKYO — Kenji Ekuan, the Japanese industrial designer whose instantly recognizable soy sauce bottle — red-capped and elegantly teardrop-shaped — became one of his country’s most ubiquitous postwar exports, died on Sunday. He was 85.

His death, of heart failure, was confirmed by GK Design Group, which Mr. Ekuan helped found in the 1950s and he continued to lead as chairman. He had a form of arrhythmia and had been hospitalized since early this month.

Mr. Ekuan was a prolific and widely lauded designer whose work shaped products closely associated with modern Japan, including Yamaha motorcycles and a bullet train used in the country’s Shinkansen high-speed rail network.

Kenji Ekuan was born on Sept. 11, 1929, in Tokyo. When he was a year old, he moved with his family to Hawaii, where his father worked as a Buddhist missionary. They returned to Japan when Kenji was 7. He never married, and he is survived by a brother and a sister.

Makiko Inoue and Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.

The New York Times