Sori Yanagi, the Japanese designer famous for his Butterfly Stool made from two identical plywood mouldings, has died in Tokyo aged 96. His career spanned a period which saw the birth of post-war Japan's industrialisation through to its relatively recent surrender to Korea and China as factory floors for the world's electronic goods.

Yanagi was born in Tokyo in 1915 and grew up in the Japanese equivalent of an Arts and Crafts house across the street from the Mingei Kan (Japanese Crafts Museum), which his father Soetsu established together with the ceramicists Shoji Hamada and Kanjiro Kawai. Their understanding of Korean and Japanese folk art was based on an intuitive appreciation of the beauty of things made unselfconsciously, and the discussions which their discoveries provoked led to a cultural awakening in pre-war Japan which had long been absent.

The inadequacy of industrial production and the importance and superiority of objects made by hand for unpretentious everyday purposes were constant themes of his father's essays. Looking at the hundreds of everyday objects which resulted from Yanagi's six-decade design career, from manhole covers to tea cups and drinking water fountains, it seems the message was well received, each one of these having about it all the spirit an object needs to overcome the orphan-like disadvantages of an industrial birth.

His students days were marked by the teaching of Charlotte Perriand, the French designer responsible for most of the furniture attributed to Le Corbusier, who travelled to Japan in the 1940s on a government grant with a mission to inspire young Japanese designers. In 1957 he travelled to Milan, then in its heyday as the design capital of the world, for the 11th Milan Triennale where he exhibited his Butterfly Stool. Back in Tokyo his design office finally settled in the studio where he was to continue working for the last four decades of his career.