This publication is edited by John Herschend and Will Rogan. Kota issue utilized the entire THING. It was our first issue in which the issue itself was the whole. Much of Kota's work has been about interpretation and modes of translation. And his contribution to THE THING was not an exception to this. His issue consisted of the standard THING box stamped in Cyrillic (Russian), a letter from the editor translated in to Mandarin, and a simple white cotton baseball cap with Arabic Text embroidered onto the front. Subscribers were only given a very small clue as to what the translation might be (a URL in English, buried in the Mandarin text). The result for many became a search for meaning and an interaction with a text that had symbolic feel but little relevance to their daily lives (unless they spoke the languages). Many subscribers took the letter to their local Chinese restaurant and asked for help, or they wore the hat around for days and weeks until someone told them what it meant. Kota Ezawa's issue of THE THING has to do with translation, and at this point that has probably become obvious. The other work that Kota has made also has to do with translation, but it is a translation of a visual language rather then a textual one. He focuses in on something and through a process of translation into different visual languages he shows the viewer something new in something that he or she has most likely seen many times before. According to the editors, when Kota approached us with his idea, he told us about this hat, this white baseball hat that we couldn't really picture on Kota's head. It just seemed like the wrong kind of hat for Kota. He told us he bought a hat like this one in Chinatown in San Francisco. He bought it because it was raining, and it served its purpose of keeping the rain off of his head. When he tells the story we see it like this: It was raining in Chinatown. His head was getting wet. He looked in a shop window and saw the hat glowing white. The hat then sat around Kota's house because we think that it is not the kind of hat that Kota would wear unless he was being soaked by the rain. It sat there in his house and when asked to be the artist for Issue 3 of THE THING, it was the first object that came to Kota's mind. The other thing that immediately came to Kota's mind was the text for the hat. He knew that it had to be in Arabic, and he knew that it had to state exactly what the object was: THE THING 3. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.