Was your art used a lot after that appearance in TV Magazine?Yeah, lots. I got even more hardcore about it once I hit middle school, even sending things to fashion and women’s magazines like POPEYE, Olive, anan, and Ryuko Tsushin, so I was a complete submission machine (laughs). I picked up on strategies and inclinations on what to draw in what style to get my work used, and soon became a regular on the submission pages. A lot of times back then, having your work used would earn you book coupons, so I’d save up my earnings and then go buy albums at the record shop behind the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Shinjuku. That went on up until around when I was in high school.
Is that when you started to get commissioned to do illustrations?I started doing paid work around my first or second year of high school. My first came when my mom put me in touch with this editor she knew who was looking for someone to do illustrations for English language school reference books. I was a cheeky little bastard who thought drawing scenes of a white girl chatting with a Japanese girl felt way too easy to me. From there I kept doing it off and on, kind of like a part-time job.
I remember reading in an article that you went to a fine arts high school.I was so dumb that I failed all of my high school entrance exams. I was wondering what to do, not too excited about the prospect of working, when one day I found a small ad in the newspaper looking for new students at Bunka Gakuin. They had built a new branch of their main Ochanomizu school in Kasukabe City, Saitama, and apparently anyone could enroll with just an interview. It’s not like I had any other options, so I started going there with kind of an “I’ll just check it out” attitude. It was really far away, though, like we’re talking 3 hours and 20 minutes one-way each day, since we didn’t have the Saikyō Line yet back then. Pretty brutal, right? We had normal classes, but art was really the focus, so we had a lot of freedom. That was the first time I learned proper drawing techniques, like academic-style sketching.
One of my art teachers there had a huge influence on me, to the point where you could essentially call him my master. He was really attentive and taught me all the other non-technical stuff, too, like “don’t confuse sloppy for bold”, or “don’t lose focus at the edges of the canvas”. This teacher did find out I went on to do design and illustration for a career, but he passed away before I started holding exhibitions as an artist, so even now there’s a part of me that wishes he could’ve seen my work.
Did having a proper education in art change your awareness of images?It did. I had my first foray into oil painting at that school, a so-called still life with a bottle of wine, apples and the like, and even I was surprised at how well it went. I’m the type to thrive on praise, so when my first oil painting went miraculously well, to the point that even my teacher said it was really good, it was like an awakening of sorts.
I’d had my head in the subculture scene up to that point, so I was more focused on album covers and illustrations. Fine art just wasn’t on my radar. But partly because of the neo-expressionist boom, artists I liked were coming to Japan for exhibitions and I started to consciously look at all kinds of paintings. I encountered stuff like the New York contemporary art movement and gradually got inspired, coming to a realization that, out of all the other stuff like three-dimensional art and installations and video, I liked painting the best. I loved guys like Julian Schnabel and David Salle, copying them even though I was still in high school. This was back in the days before we had the Internet, so I’d be going into the bookstores and looking at the tiny pics of their work in the magazines thinking they were so cool.
How about after you graduated?After you finished the normal high school section, Bunka Gakuin also offered specialization sections like ceramics, oil painting, or sculpture, so those who wanted to could move on to those courses after they graduated. But that’s not what I did. My teachers tried to keep me there, and I was even chosen to make an address at graduation as valedictorian. But I was through commuting that far, and just over going to school in general. I had this vague notion that I’d enter the workforce, but my dad was a company man who worried about appearances, so he told me to go to university, to just enroll at an art school even if I flunked out later. We talked about it lots of times, but in the end it pretty much devolved into arguing. But I had no desire to do entrance exams, so that was that...until I found a school that didn’t require them.
That sounds just like how you found your high school...Exactly! It’s funny, huh. Musashino Art University had a vocational school in Kichijoji, one that would also accept anybody, so it attracted all kinds of people like music nuts and other super eccentric types. The funny thing was, even though I’d finally found a school, I suddenly got into music instead
In the end, I turned out to be way more serious than expected about my studies at a vocational school, too. I was trying pretty hard, but since this was like a prep school for the art university, it attracted killer illustrators and painters from around the nation. I got a little taste of frustration as I realized I couldn’t hope to contend with those guys there on those terms. But guys who were technically solid were also generally not cool, so I started feeling it was pointless to compete with them. I started going to school less and less as I came to feel that I’d already learned this illustration stuff, so now it was time to strike off in another direction and hone my sense instead. In the end, I forged my dad’s signature on a notice of withdrawal and dropped out. And so began the hell of part-time jobs.
Jobs related to art?I was mainly working as a floor cleaner in offices, then when that ended, I’d hit the izakaya for drinks. That was every day. I had joked about “working until I collapsed”, but then I actually went and did it—pushed myself so hard I passed out on the job
Were you still making art then?I was. Just as a hobby, though. I was submitting work to various public exhibitions, like the graphic art shows Parco did back in those days. Sadly, I didn’t make the cut in a single one of them. I’d been a regular on the submission pages of magazines as a kid, but now I couldn’t win a place in a public exhibition to save my life. But looking back on it now, I think that was a good experience for me, especially since it gave me this fierce kind of negative energy that I could channel into wanting to prove them wrong!
Did you spend your earnings from your part-time job on records and clothes?Yeah, I guess. I was also in a band. I started one playing drums with some friends from the Nihon University College of Art, but then some guys we’d played with said they wanted to join our band. One of them just so happened to be a guy who was way better at drums than me, so I got put on trumpet duty
What type of music did your band play?Fake jazz, maybe...? We had a drums, bass, keyboard, alto sax, trumpet, and trombone, so that part at least was kind of jazz-like. But the music we played was more like new wave junk
You realized you should stick with art?You could say that, but I still didn’t think I could make a living with art at that point. Still, I had been designing posters and flyers for plays since I was in high school, so I figured maybe I could keep myself fed with graphic design. This was back in the days when we still made block copies using phototypesetting, and I had a decent grasp of the process. I had a friend who worked at a design firm teach me about getting stuff ready for the printers, and from there I cut my teeth doing flyers for club events. In the course of doing those jobs, I started to have musicians contact me.
And that’s how you gradually built up steady work as a graphic designer?In the 1990s I was also doing illustration alongside design. One person I had to thank for that was Hiroko Yoshida, editor of the magazine Illustration at that time. I’d been sending stuff to their public submissions section “the Choice” since I was young, but none of it was ever used. Hiroko knew about that and eventually took a liking to me, and from there I started to get more illustration jobs.
Meeting Jun Tsunoda (who was an art director in those days) was also huge for me. He was a super interesting guy and heaped praise on me the very first time we met, saying, “Your stuff’s great—I’ll totally hit you up if something comes up.” And he was good to his word, commissioning me to do CD jackets for Kiyoshiro Imawano and artwork featuring UA for Barfout!