ASICS SportsStyle TOOK US TO JAPAN
In design-obsessed Japan, ASICS occupies a rare space: a sports brand held with the same cultural respect usually reserved for architecture studios or traditional craft houses. This trip, however, was like none other the storied athletics brand had offered before. As the first official press-trip hosted by ASICS SportsStyle—the lifestyle arm that carries the brand’s performance spirit into the everyday—they were sure to roll out all the stops.
So when they brought us to Kobe to see where the GEL-KAYANO 12.1 had taken shape, expectations were high long before we reached the building. Rising from ground in impressive concrete slabs, the Institute of Sports Science (ISS) felt totally in tune with the precision happening inside.
The ISS had been ASICS’s main research site since 1985, when the company brought several smaller divisions together under one roof. By 1990, the facility in Nishi Ward was fully established, and in 2015 it expanded again to strengthen its growing R&D ambitions. The team described their approach as “human-centric science,” a phrase that felt broad at first but quickly made sense as we saw how much of their work centred on observing real movement, testing ideas carefully and refining them until they held up in the real world.
Researchers observed how people moved in everyday conditions, including the small imperfections that appear when runners tire, lose focus or shift form without meaning to. They measured force, gait, pressure distribution, material behaviour and even the psychological elements that influence performance.
Testament to their commitment to boundary pushing research, a three-metre robot leg stole everyone’s attention. It slammed down onto prototypes with a rhythm that felt harsh but also weirdly mesmerising. I noted that the forces the robot applied would be impossible for any runner to generate. ASICS wasn’t stress-testing shoes so much as trying to future-proof them. For a stability model like the 12.1, which had to keep runners supported even when form broke down, this level of testing finally made sense.
Upstairs sat the archives. If the track was about the future, the archives were about context. Shelves held everything from early prototypes inspired by the suction cups of octopus arms, to actual pairs worn in Olympic finals. There were even a pair of mukluks donned with actual seal fur from an era when ASICS experimented with waterproofing solutions for extreme conditions.
That day, I’d worn my beloved pair of red US4-S GEL-TERRAIN and couldn’t resist asking where they were stored. I took it upon myself to ask one of the biggest names at ASICS, Toshikazu Kayano, who was graciously showing us the archives himself. We walked the aisles together hunting, but when he realised there wasn’t a pair in the archives, he looked genuinely surprised but simultaneously delighted. It’s not every day you manage to stump the person who practically built ASICS’s design language.
Kayano joined ASICS in 1987. Six years later he created the first GEL-KAYANO, a shoe that has remained central to the brand ever since. The new 12.1 built on that legacy, incorporating updated understandings of movement, load distribution and stability. When he spoke about it, he didn’t talk about aesthetics or nostalgia. He talked about refinement. The line moved forward through kaizen—continuous improvement—the same philosophy that had shaped his entire career.
The stag beetle came up when we asked about his earliest inspirations. For him, the beetle’s exoskeleton represented a structure that didn’t rely on heaviness. He studied it as a natural example of stability, one that protected without restricting. The comparison didn’t sound abstract coming from him.
Before we left, I asked whether he’d ever experienced a designer’s equivalent of a runner’s “a-ha” moment. He said those moments rarely arrived as revelations. They appeared in small observations, usually when he watched someone run from a specific angle and the motion of the shoe clicked. Those glimpses of alignment pushed him forward more than anything else.
The next day and one shinkansen later, we were in Tokyo. Here, ASICS shifted us from research to reality by taking us to the World Athletics Championships held in the architecturally jaw dropping Japan National Stadium. The men’s high jump final carried the energy of a hometown favourite. Ryoichi Akamatsu cleared 2.24 metres and finished eighth, and while the result mattered, the atmosphere mattered more. Every attempt from him pulled the crowd tighter and in core-shaking unified claps.
The sprint finals moved at an entirely different frequency. The women’s 100m delivered a standout moment: Melissa Jefferson-Wooden crossed the line in 10.61 to set a championship record. Then came the men’s 100m. Oblique Seville ran a personal-best 9.77 and secured a long-awaited global title for Jamaica. I was lucky enough to find myself sitting directly next to a huge Jamaican contingency, and shared in their unbridled joy at double wins for track and field’s most celebrated competitor.
Seeing competition at that level right after touring the ISS drew a practical line between research and reality. With countless brands present at the games, the point wasn’t who showed up—it was why ASICS keeps rewriting the blueprint for movement. Kobe was data and repeatable outcomes; Tokyo was impact under pressure and the variables a machine can’t mimic.
And fittingly, it was SportStyle that wanted us to see it first—carrying that same lineage into the everyday, for a new audience that still values function, comfort and the considered spirit of sport. Taken together, the contrast clarified how the brand designs stability: less about correcting runners, more about supporting them long after form wavers and conditions shift.
