IT'S HARD TO know what to expect when meeting Teruo Kurosaki. He's been dubbed eccentric and left-field and frequently praised by lifestyle publications as the Terence Conran of Japan. Icon magazine called him the most influential figure in contemporary Japanese design. So, it's a pleasant surprise to step into his modest office in Tokyo's trendy Harajuku district to find a shy, soft-spoken man in everyday clothes. Possessing looks that hover between avuncular and boyish, the 57-year-old iconoclast seems more like a semi-retired geography teacher than one of Japan's most consistently innovative design entrepreneurs, talent-spotters and philanthropists. The easy-going surface belies a keen mind and remarkable resume. Kurosaki has helped put the sleek, minimalist designs of Japanese interiors, furniture and fittings on the world map with his Idee lifestyle store and Sputnik design group, pioneered one of the most remarkable design events on the international circuit, the annual Tokyo Designers Block, and nurtured a generation of stellar talent that includes France's Philippe Starck and Sydney-born Marc Newson. Among his current initiatives is an ambitious publishing project to fund UN peace programmes, and plans to set up design offices and galleries in Hong Kong and Beijing. As a sideline, Kurosaki operates restaurants and a design consultancy, renovates old buildings, runs a tea plantation in Bali and oversees a school for creative people in Tokyo. 'Life is always interesting,' he says. Remarkable, given that he's not actually a designer, doesn't build things and hates the tag most often attached to his name. 'No, I don't like the word entrepreneur,' he says. 'I'm maybe a dreamer who sometimes makes money. But money is not my main issue. My life is like a dream. I just think: what if I try this? And I try it out.' Despite his considerable commercial success, there is still something of the anti-corporate idealist about Kurosaki, who holds a degree in applied physics and escaped a career in engineering in his early 20s to travel the world as a Pink Floyd-loving hippie. Last week, he sold most of his interests in Idee and Sputnik to the Muji retail chain because 'they had got too big'. He says: 'I prefer something smaller, you know? Idee had 350 staff and a turnover of US$50 million. When those bankers and stockbrokers come in, I just want to leave the room. That's not my thing.' Kurosaki's forte is incubating start-ups and small projects, and he stays involved only as long as they hold his restless interest. It's a basic philosophy that's guided his eclectic career; from his early, post-hippie days exporting antiques from London, to the post-bubble economy years when he built a retail business that sold affordable furniture and housewares using the groundbreaking product designs of the young talent he championed - such as Newson and Shiro Kuramata. Fiona Wilson, Tokyo editor of the design and lifestyle bible Wallpaper*, says his support for young talent is one of Kurosaki's most distinctive qualities. 'He gave a lot of designers their chance. He's on their side rather than the business and that's why so many designers like him,' she says. 'He supports them even if they don't make money because he's genuinely passionate about design. Sputnik was the ultimate in that idea because he allowed designers to do what they like. It was incredibly uncommercial.' Over the years, he's continued to draw admirers and famous fans, including British fashion guru Paul Smith, who recently opened a four-storey store in Aoyama district, in the shell of Kurosaki's Sputnik building. 'I've known and admired Kurosaki-san for years,' Smith told the Japan Times this month. Smith calls the new enterprise 'a kind of homage to [Kurosaki's] spirit and energy', and says, as a tribute, it will include a space that artists and creative people can use for free. A strong philanthropist streak run through Kurosaki's long and winding career. He invested enormous amounts of energy (and his own money, he says) organising the Tokyo Designers Block, a street festival of design talent that now attracts top names from all over the world. His R-Project has rescued old buildings all over Tokyo from the wrecker's ball, and he also devotes two days a week to teaching 250 postgraduate students of design, communication and movie-making in an abandoned public school in Setagaya, west Tokyo. The Ikejiri school epitomises Kurosaki's approach to design culture: open-ended, free-spirited and irreverent. 'For most university students in Japan, the most important thing is how to get the answer and how to get it quickly. Even in design, they ask: 'What is a good design?' I always say I don't know; that's why I'm working at it. 'Some just want to make money, you know? So I question the question: What is the problem? What do you want to do? It's a totally opposite approach.' Some of the talent from this creative wellspring will no doubt find its way into the next Kurosaki venture, perhaps a housing-design project he runs in Shonan, southwest of Tokyo, which will try to, as he puts, it 'renovate ideas about architecture and interiors in Japan', or in his typically eccentric attempt to design a new international peace logo. 'You know, there are many icons: the peace sign, anti-nuclear sign, doves and olives: all these are icons of peace. But I want to redesign the image.' The task has been farmed out to dozens of prominent creative people and Kurosaki has enlisted the help of the publisher Heibonsha, and Japan's advertising behemoths, Dentsu and Hakuhodo. The idea is to copyright the new peace logo and charge royalties every time it's used, and send the money to the UN. It sounds odd, improbable even, but given Kurosaki's track record and his contacts - the rector of the UN University in Tokyo, Hans van Ginkel, among them - few would bet against its chances of success. 'He knows absolutely everybody,' says Wilson. 'So it's not just pie in the sky.' The peace project and Kurosaki's hippy veneer is even odder given his antecedents - 'a long line of army generals', he says. 'My grand-uncle invented aircraft for Mitsubishi and my family has a lot of army people. We're a bit mad,' he says, laughing. He thinks the project might help Japan's relations with China, 'once they realise we're sincere about peace'. When not teaching or overseeing his empire, Kurosaki travels. His itinerary in the coming months includes stops in the US, Indonesia, Ireland and Hong Kong, where he's just opened a small branch of his design consultancy, Flowstone, with British designer Michael Young. On the mainland, he recently worked on the Commune by the Great Wall, providing furniture and fittings for the experimental development, and he's setting up a design gallery in Beijing. 'My sense in China is that art is very advanced there, but design still has some way to go,' he says. He's determined to hand these projects over to others once they grow too unwieldy. 'Usually I start something small and the money people come so I just want to stop. Everybody wants to be big, big; but I'm fed up with that,' he says. 'Stay small. That's my motto.' But, as busy as he is, Kurosaki says he seldom stops having fun, or loses sight of his priorities. 'You know, the best part of my job is meeting interesting people. You can never tell what will happen when people get together. My real talent is meeting people, nurturing relationships, and good timing. I'm lucky.'