Interview (2024)
Let’s start by having you tell us a bit about your origin or background. What kind of environment did you spend your childhood years in?There were four of us: my parents, me, and my brother, who’s five years older than me. Our home is just about 20 steps away from this studio. My dad was a designer at an advertising agency who then later climbed the ranks and became a creative director. My mom was a full-time homemaker, but she had a taste for jazz and started working at a jazz café when I was in my teens.
If your father was a designer, did that mean you had art books and the like around the house?We did, but he was hardly ever home because of work, so I don’t have even a single one of those fun “playing catch with dad” memories you hear so often. Partly because that’s how things were, my mom and dad’s relationship got worse and worse until they were fighting all the time. Then when I was in high school, my mom left, like the classic moving away under the cover of night, and I helped. But sometimes she’d come back to make food or drink while dad was away. I’d go hang out at the jazz café where mom worked with my friends, and she and I did get along more like friends, too, but my home situation was really messed up. Definitely not a happy household.
Since your family home is here in the neighborhood, does that mean you purposely picked a local studio?No, that was a coincidence. I’d been doing illustration and design here and there from around the time my folks started living apart, and with my room at home being small, I started looking for somewhere a little bigger to rent. I searched for what seemed like forever for a spot the middle of the city, but never came across anything that was exactly what I was after. Then one day I saw that this building had all of its windows open. It’s been here since I was a kid, and was originally a spool factory. I knew the landlord next door as it happened, so I asked if it was available. The answer was yes, and that they hadn’t been able to find a new tenant. So I decided to rent it right then and there. I wasn’t doing any big pieces back then since I hadn’t broken into the art world yet, so I had more flexibility to make these drop-of-the-hat moves.
What kind of kid were you?I’ve talked about this a lot in other interviews, but I was a very shy, introverted kid. I liked being on my own, making stuff with clay, painting, building plastic models, and so on. Like I’d grudgingly tag along if a friend invited me to go play baseball with everyone, but in my heart of hearts I really just wanted to hang out at home.
It seems your love of painting hasn’t changed since you were little. What about your shy nature?Honestly, I think there may still be a bit of that shyness in me. But around my fourth year of elementary school, along came this transfer student who loved pro wrestling. His interests rubbed off on me, and before too long I was a fan, too. That’s when I began to change. The introverted boy started playing at being a wrestler, turning into an active, sociable person almost overnight. So pro wrestling changed me. It was all I thought about through my middle and high school years
Was the music your mother’s influence?My older brother had a big hand in it. He taught me everything about not just music but other subculture stuff, too. We shared the same room back then, so I helped myself to any magazines or records he bought. That’s also when I learned about Yokoo Tadanori and Yumura Teruhiko. So, you could say my brother laid the foundation for who I became. If he had been into completely different things, I don’t think I’d be who I am now.
You said you had been drawing since you were little. When did you first discover the fun of expressing yourself through art?When I was in kindergarten, I suppose. My teachers and friends would tell me the stuff I drew was amazing. It wasn’t like I was getting much praise for anything else, so hearing that made me really, really happy. By “drawings”, we’re talking like Mazinger Z and other anime characters, but the other kids would still line up asking me to draw stuff for them.
So it wasn’t just that you liked drawing—it’s that you were always good at it.Yeah, I suppose you could say that. But those were copies or just simple imitations of things in manga. My older brother was also a super good artist, and he and his friends would trade comics they made with their own stories. I thought all this was really cool and read them, and then started imitating my brother again by drawing manga. No joke, pretty much all I did was copy my brother.
A lot of times, people like drawing when they’re little but then stop as they get older. You stuck to it, though, so did you have some form of motivation?I think it was really that drawing was what I did best. I mean, I was a pretty terrible student. It was to the point that when I was little and we’d go to the shrine on New Year for our first visit, my prayer would be for selfish stuff like getting better at art. But I guess maybe I got my wish in the end.
Kodansha had this kid’s magazine called TV Magazine, and it had a section where readers could submit their own art. Anyway, I drew a picture on a postcard, sent it in, and it got used. That was when I was 9. This drawing of Kenichi Hagiwara from Taiyō ni Hoero! ended up being my media debut