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Hitotoki
One morning in the spring of 2007, Chris and Paul were sitting at a diner with Craig, sharing stories from some of our favorite spots around Tokyo, and lamenting the gap between how residents and tourists navigate the city. Imagine how much richer a week in Tokyo could be informed by years of wandering.
By the second round of coffee, we had each written a short story about our favorite place in Tokyo. A week later we had a website prototype, and by May we launched Hitotoki, a collection of personal stories about cities, starting with ten stories from Tokyo.
Each story includes a photo or illustration, a profile of the author, footnotes, and a map. By 2009, we published over 100 stories in six cities, including writings by Roland Kelts, Khoi Vinh, Adam Greenfield, Jean Snow and Momus.
As stories accumulated, we began to understand the power of these stories beyond their utility as an alternative guidebook. For the author, the act of writing a Hitotoki reactivated dormant memories and emotions, drawing contrasts between then and now, and tagging them for possible re-exploration. This secondary use inspired us to re-launch Hitotoki in 2010, powered and newly democratized by Twitter.
This latest iteration retains the full DNA of the original (a person, a moment, a location and an image), but allows anyone, anywhere to record their memory as it’s happening. Though still in its infancy, it has attracted the love of authors in over 70 cities, from Korea to Kenya.
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The Hitotoki identity combines a roman script contained within the silhouette of Japanese Katakana characters, carved from stones traditionally used for personal seals to "sign" official documents in Japan.
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Hitotoki.org circa 2010. Moments are plotted onto a Google Map of each city using Twitter's GPS tagging.
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Hitotoki places, city pages, and moments
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Hitotoki Classic (2007 — 2009)
Blog
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AQ Event Report: the Induction of the Little Printer
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