Article from the New York Times.

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.