The Japanese designer responsible for both the classic soy sauce bottle and the train connecting Tokyo to its major international airport has died, his company said Monday.

Kenji Ekuan, who was 85, was the brains behind the sauce dispenser first used by Kikkoman in Japan in 1961.

The upside-down funnel shape with a red cap was subsequently exported around the globe and became visual shorthand for soy sauce as the craze for Japanese food swept abroad.

Ekuan, who was also a Buddhist monk, was credited with numerous corporate logos during Japan’s industrial boom era, as well as creating the look of Yamaha’s VMAX motorcycles and the Narita Express train that ferries passengers to and from Tokyo’s main international gateway.

A former president of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, and a recipient of the council’s Colin King Grand Prix, Ekuan was also made officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France and awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by Japan.

The company he founded, GK Design Group, said he died on Sunday after suffering from sinus problems.

Jean Redpath, Prolific Scottish Folk Singer, Dies at 77

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Jean Redpath, shown in 1986, drew on a deep historical knowledge to record some 40 albums. Credit Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Jean Redpath, an esteemed Scottish folk singer whose arresting repertoire of ancient ballads, Robert Burns poems and contemporary tunes helped energize a genre she described as a “brew of pure flavor and pure emotion,” died on Thursday at a hospice in Arizona. She was 77.

The conventional wisdom among animal scientists in the 1950s was that birds were genetically programmed to sing, that monkeys made noise to vent their emotions, and that animal communication, in general, was less like human conversation than like a bodily function.

Then Peter Marler, a British-born animal behaviorist, showed that certain songbirds not only learned their songs, but also learned to sing in a dialect peculiar to the region in which they were born. And that a vervet monkey made one noise to warn its troop of an approaching leopard, another to report the sighting of an eagle, and a third to alert the group to a python on the forest floor.

These and other discoveries by Dr. Marler, who died July 5 in Winters, Calif., at 86, heralded a sea change in the study of animal intelligence. At a time when animal behavior was seen as a set of instinctive, almost robotic responses to environmental stimuli, he was one of the first scientists to embrace the possibility that some animals, like humans, were capable of learning and transmitting their knowledge to other members of their species. His hypothesis attracted a legion of new researchers in ethology, as animal behavior research is also known, and continues to influence thinking about cognition.

Dr. Marler, who made his most enduring contributions in the field of birdsong, wrote more than a hundred papers during a long career that began at Cambridge University, where he received his Ph.D. in zoology in 1954 (the second of his two Ph.D.s.), and that took him around the world conducting field research while teaching at a succession of American universities.

Dr. Marler taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1957 to 1966; at Rockefeller University in New York from 1966 to 1989; and at the University of California, Davis, where he led animal behavior research, from 1989 to 1994. He was an emeritus professor there at his death.

Two technological breakthroughs were central to his field research — the portable tape recorder and the sonic spectrograph, a device developed in World War II for recording and graphing the signature sounds of enemy ships’ propellers.

Using both, Dr. Marler was one of the first ethologists to produce graphic snapshots of birdsong — streaks of ink on paper, like an electrocardiogram, showing the wave-frequency, modulation and pitch of various calls and songs.

From that data, Dr. Marler and his colleagues discovered that some species had repertoires of only a few songs while others had as many as 100. They found they could analyze and differentiate calls within the same species — calls for roosting, seeking food, mating, territory-marking, warning of danger and summoning help, known as mobbing, to ward off an intruder. (...)