Graffiti Japan

by Remo Camerota
Mark Batty Publisher, New York NY USA, 2008
128 pp. Trade, $27.95 US
ISBN: 0-9795546-0-8.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

When I showed the book Graffiti Japan to a Japanese colleague in my university Art department who’s about 50 years old, I laughed that all this must be like the graff he and his friends put up around Tokyo when he was in high school, right? He looked aghast at the suggestion, for a generation ago graffiti was unheard of in Japan.

There exists a shelf full of graffiti books that began with Norman Mailer’s appreciate essay 35 years ago. Camerota’s book is a welcome addition, yet raises some contextual and historical questions. To an American reader, there’s a frustrating blurring between commissioned decorative wall graphics, community murals and unauthorized midnight tagging. Perhaps these categories are more distinct in the US, with its long histories of these media in California cities and elsewhere.

The pictorial books is rich with notable works by Japanese spray can artists. Sklawl’s whiplike imagery is distinct even in work with collaborators like Missile and Suiko. There’s Eman, who also designs CD covers, and Fate’s geometrical work that looks like it’s by an athletic shoe company’s hipper-than-thou graphic designer. There’s Esow’s Buddhist humor and Bigfoot’s characteristic forest creature. There are animal motifs by Shizentomotel, realistic young women’s faces by Belx2, Vol, Fate and Phil, and cartoon exaggeration by Tenga/3AM that’s reminiscent of Ren & Stimpy’s animator Kricafalusi.

Yet beyond aesthetic appreciation, there are those nagging contextual questions. Some pieces pictured have corporate and business blessings, like the big Kichijoji Tokyo Tower Records store painted by Emar, the Sca crew and Nanashi. Now that the chain is bankrupt in the US, will the building’s ownership change? Or, as often the case, will the entire building be torn down? Kami and Sasu’s elegant floral graphic is another multistory piece that obviously required scaffolding, to cover the entire building and carefully avoid getting paint on the windows.

The Kanagawa countryside tunnels that Remo was taken to certainly appear to be an autonomous rebel grotto without official sanction, and there are photos of some rapidly-scrawled tagging on concrete walls beside freeways and bridges like you’d see outside any major US city. In one photo, a realist mural of a woman in a kimono is tagged by a graff writer named Toy. Does this mean the work was “parachute art” that suddenly appeared with no involvement of the kids and taggers in the neighborhood, so was fair game for further writing?

Artists passing through Japan left their mark, including Barry McGee and a bit of Remo’s own stencil work. Did Shepard Fairey personally wheatpaste those Andre the Giant OBEY visages, or did he ship them over, as paper or a downloadable file, for Japanese assistants to install? There are interviews with the practitioners, including Belex2, the “godmother” of Japanese graffiti writers, active since 1993, who are unfailingly polite and talk in (or are translated into) vague generalities. Facts on each city are listed at the beginning of each chapter like a gradeschooler’s recitation. Land area, population density, number of municipalities and districts: what do these to do with the production of graffiti in Japan? There appear to be little in Japanese graffiti that indicate their hometown neighborhoods, like the tag “Calle XIV” (14th Street) is seen San Francisco’s Mission district. And is there wall work that is characteristic of Korean communities in Japan? What of Okinawans?

Graffiti is supposed to demand attention to read, unraveling an exaggeratedly decorative ensemble of letters. In Japan, one can easily appreciate how the letterforms of Hiragana and Katakana are turned into grand wild-style compositions. But that’s no reason that the expository English text of this book needs to be difficult. The use of RNS Baruta Black works well for Japanese headers, but the irritating font Kursivschrift is often too light when it appears on a white background, too faint on a black background. It also has some problematic letters to which the reader needs some time to adjust., making words “how” looks like “horo” or “hom”, “work” looks like “mork”, “when” looks like “rohen” “writers” looks like “roriters”, “with” looks like “roith”, et cetera. This damn font makes the informative text hard to read, and an otherwise cool, elegant and informative book is marred by Christopher D. Salyers’ bad design choice. Mark Batty should have demanded better.

Despite its limitations, it’s a fun book, with nice foldouts of wide walls, that would make a fine gift, for Remo—who also runs website graffitijapan.com—has taken a lot of good photos of toss-ups. Plus, the book supports a case for graffiti’s importance. The Yugolavian scholar Aleksa Celebonovic once argued how the “bourgeois” realistic, painting style around 1880 that preceded (and was critically muscled out) by the Impressionists was a true “international style” in its official popularity in various European, North American and Latin American countries. Sixty years ago, the formally simplified, undecorated architecture that followed Le Courbusier and the Bauhaus architects was called the International Style. Thirty-five years ago, graff was praised in an essay by Norman Mailer, and Graffiti Japan now further proves that the wild-style look of graffiti in Brooklyn NY a quarter-century ago has grown into the true international style of the early twenty-first.