I love graffiti. Being an artist and photographer inspired me to create a graffiti book
different from any I have ever seen. While a small number of books about graffiti in Japan
exist, this one, thanks to all the artists kind enough to welcome me into their communities
when I lived in their country, is the most definitive, relaying to readers how the
Japanese have absorbed and reinterpreted this Western art form.
At the onset of this project, I knew plenty about the graffiti and street art scene in my
hometown of Melbourne, Australia, but I knew very little about Japanese graffiti. Thanks
to the internet, I was able to get the basic lay of the land. I found websites that really
caught my eye and emailed. SUIKO was the first to respond.
I had already booked a ticket for Japan, but didn’t really know where to start. SUIKO
invited me to stay at his place and photograph his work. I didn’t know it at the time
but this trip was to change my life. SUIKO lives in Hiroshima, which wasn’t high on my
list of places to visit. But it was a great contact, an amazingly generous offer and I
really dug SUIKO’s work so I figured it was essential to go down there.
Sticking out like a sore thumb and unable to speak the language, I arrived in Hiroshima.
I called SUIKO; we had never actually spoken to one another and communication was tough,
to say the least. This resulted in him trying to meet me at the back of the train station,
while I was waiting out front. Two hours later he finally figured I was somewhere else
and found me. We went to his home, a small flat on the edge of a river in Hiroshima that
he shares with the rest of his family. In no time, we were out on the streets checking
out graffiti. SUIKO took me to huge walls that he and his friends had painted, basically
showing me the scene from the ground up. I would never have found some of these places
without his help.
We hung out for a week then it was time for me to go to Tokyo where I had booked a hostel.
SUIKO decided to visit his friend EMAR, so the two of us took the train to Tokyo.
We arrived in the middle of a torrential rain, and before we even got far from the train
station, I came to learn that my camera screen had cracked and my laptop had busted after
it was dropped. Both got fixed, but it wasn’t a great start to this leg of the journey.
EMAR’s place is a tiny fifth-floor room in the Honancho neighborhood of Tokyo. The room
was big enough for three men to sit in and that’s it. It was there on that floor where I
tinkered with my computer, and eventually got it working again. I was getting ready to
head out to the hostel but EMAR insisted that I sleep on floor, right there next to him and
SUIKO. Anyone who has ever traveled knows that you can’t turn down such hospitality, and
so it was that I spent the night on the extremely dusty and uncomfortable floor, in EMAR’s
words, in “ a very funny situation,” the first of many such situations to follow.
I ended up spending a month on EMAR’s floor, forging a new relationship with another great
artist, which resulted in my being accepted into the NANASHI crew. While it all felt so
natural at the time, later I met someone that was quite impressed by the fact that I
had been welcomed into this crew, as the artists are on guard all the time, skeptical
of strangers. During that month, EMAR and I set out and toured all over Tokyo. Through
him and SUIKO I met all of the artists featured in this book, and was able to see work
that people outside the scenes of the crews have never seen, like when BELX2 drove EMAR
and me to Yokohama. We visited her old neighborhood – yakuza territory. She had to phone
ahead to make sure that we would not hassled for walking around with cameras. It was
still a scary situation.
On this first fact-finding trip to Japan, not only did I get to visit and document all the
hot-spots, I also participated in wall paintings and went to gallery openings and met
writers and editors from the Japanese graffiti magazine Kaze. I got a first-hand taste of
the graffiti in Japan, prompting me to move there. With my cameras and computer I went
to live in sunny Shimokitazawa, allowing me to compile this book with the blessing of
all the featured artists – the most prolific graffiti artists in the country. I lived with
them and like them, shooting 10,000 or so photographs, which have been edited down to
comprise this book.
Please enjoy Graffiti Japan.
