As a centre of gravity to Takanawa Gateway City, Japan Rail East’s landmark new district on the former Shinagawa freight yard. It’s a place that is open to the neighbourhood, connected to the world and built with a deliberately open brief: here to host culture, Japanese and global, ancient and contemporary, as a single story — one that never stops being written.

MoN was founded on the belief that culture is not something you place behind glass — it’s something you participate in, living, evolving and shared. That single idea became the grounding force for everything Pentagram built with and for MoN: the brand strategy, the name, the verbal identity and the visual system.

The name

How do you name a museum that isn’t a museum — and in multiple languages at once, too? MoN (mon) means gate in Japanese, and Takanawa, the Tokyo district where the museum sits, is historically known as the gateway to Japan. MoN also stands for the Museum of Narratives; a place where culture is a story we share, a story that connects past to present, language to language, and place to idea. 

The idea: Dimensional time

The brief asked for something that could hold an enormous cultural range — from Tezuka's Phoenix to traditional rakugo storytelling, from ballet to electronica — without flattening it into a generic "arts destination". The starting point was already embedded in MoN's own thinking: a plan for circular curation. Working from that foundation, Pentagram developed the strategic idea of dimensional time — the understanding that while we experience time as linear, ideas, traditions and culture don't behave that way. They recur, get reinterpreted, loop back to find new meaning in a different age.

This framing gave MoN a genuinely distinctive position. Where a conventional museum might present culture as history — something fixed, archived, sequential — MoN positions itself as a place where the timeline is live, where audiences are participants in an ongoing narrative, and certainly not observers of a concluded one.

The identity

The logo is the most direct expression of our dimensional time idea. Built from the spiral (in its abstracted geometry, you can read M, O, N), this same spiral generates the entire layout logic for the visual system. It is animated and given momentum through a zoom mechanic that moves from the full arc of MoN's hundred-year programming outlook down to a single evening's event, one coherent system operating at every scale.

Paired with the spiral is a bar, the same idea linearised — the narrative thread, before it coils. Where the spiral carries the concept, the bars do the practical work of holding and framing content across layouts. With no hard stops, and the bar intentionally pressing off edges, the system implies continuation — everything is mid-story. 

Typography runs bilingual throughout, treating Japanese and English with equal weight — from display scale headlines down to caption and wayfinding detail. The colour palette draws on natural cycles: three brand colours of sun, land and water — forces that shape every coastline, every city, every human settlement; colours that give MoN’s palette both universal resonance and a genuine sense of place in Takanawa.

Verbal identity and tone of voice

Culture is a story we tell about ourselves — who we are, where we came from, what we carry forward. At MoN, stories (or ‘narratives’) are the programme. Stories — ancient and contemporary, Japanese and global, performed and debated and passed between strangers in the same room — are what the museum makes, and what it is made of.

The verbal identity Pentagram developed holds both of those things at once. It speaks with warmth and openness to a broad, international audience — MoN was always conceived as a place that welcomes the world. But it is also firmly rooted in community: in the neighbourhood of Takanawa, in the living traditions of Japanese culture, in the idea that culture is something you participate in rather than something you witness from a respectful distance.

The opening theme, Life as Culture - 生きるは、ブンカだ, captures that duality. The Japanese and English sit side by side, neither translating the other exactly, and both being authentic and true. Culture isn’t something you visit — it’s something we’re already living. And the stories that connect us — across centuries, across languages, across the distance between a performer and an audience, a designer and a reader — are always still being written.