Mr. was born in 1969 in the Japanese city of Cupa.  Even before he went to school, he was always covering surfaces of things with doodles and drawing invented characters everywhere. When we talk about Japanese artists, it is impossible to avoid an ‘otaku phase’ at some point in their life stories. Like his fellows, Mr., of course, spent his teenage years fanatically copying manga and anime. The pseudonym ‘Mr.’, which he adopted at a later stage, was a continuation of his status as an otaku in puberty.

The paradoxical moniker ‘Mister’ tells us nothing yet performs the function of a memory device.  It’s an adaptation of the outsider’s refusal to take part in social relations – an attitude that’s typical of members of the otaku subculture – to the reality of today’s world. Today we would call this ‘respectful distance’ or ‘gentle reserve’, something which the Japanese do their level best to conceal. It’s as if he is forever a ‘Mister’, and art is a way for him to affirm his existence and worth. When in actual fact he is an obsessive geek who has voluntarily locked himself in his studio. As if we are being introduced to an artist but will never know who he really is.

If, however, we stick to facts that can be gleaned from interviews Mr. has given, our reflections on the origin of his moniker will be stopped in their tracks. The actual explanation is prosaic: the name ‘Mr.’ derives from the nickname of the Japanese baseball player Shigeo Nagashima, ‘Mr. Giants’. Modestly, Mr. chose not to use the second part of this moniker, truncating it to a laconic form of address which wraps him in enigmatic anonymity. What could be more Japanese?

In his last years at school, when everyone was getting together in clubs based on specific interests, at one of the art clubs Mr. tried painting with oil paints for the first time. This was the moment he realized he would become an artist. But, as often happens, his plan did not develop in a smooth linear progression. He several times failed his entrance exams to the prestigious Tokyo University of the Arts. After four attempts, he decided to try instead for Sokei Academy of Fine Art and Design, a crafts school for which there is no entrance exam.

In 1996, after finishing his studies, Mr. started working as a rubbish collector – a profession which provided him with the material for his first works. Paper rubbish found on the streets, in cafés, or at the post office became literally the basis on which he drew. He covered supermarket receipts, advertising flyers, and scraps of paper of all kinds with charming depictions of young girls in Samurai dress.

In this use of whatever materials came to hand (or rather to foot), there is a clear similarity with methods used by artists from the generation of arte povera – the Italian art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Poor art’ took shape as a response to the economic collapse in Italy following the short period of recovery after the end of the Second World War. By deliberately choosing non-traditional and unappealing materials, artists from the arte povera movement expressed their dissatisfaction with the ignorance of consumer society and protested against the art scene of the time, which was geared exclusively to commercialization.

At the same time the ideas of arte povera were taken further by the Japanese-Korean mono-ha (‘school of things’) movement. ‘Raw’ industrial and natural materials were used by Japanese artists in the mono-ha movement for acts of non-creation of works of art. Stone, paper, wax, wire, wood, and glass were endowed with the natural autonomy inherent in them – and were transformed from materials into matter. Studying the characteristics of these untouched substances and comparing them with one another and the surrounding world was the process, result, and goal of mono-ha.

In addition to parallels with arte povera, the medium chosen by Mr. for his early works may be attributed to a characteristic that is part of everyday life – the attitude of the Japanese to rubbish in general. On islands there is simply not very much space for burying rubbish. This is one of the reasons why, in addition to strict rules for separating and recycling different kinds of rubbish, Japan has mottainai – the philosophy of rubbish-free living. So, why not use the reverse side of a restaurant receipt as a blank canvas? The receipts covered with drawings become something like collector’s cards – an auction item even more desirable than the rarest Pokemon cards. Works by Mr. are never repeated on each side – apart from the unique kawaii (cute) design on the reverse of the receipt, there is a no less unique reminder of where the canvas for the work has come from.

In 1998 Mr. expanded the range of media he was using in his art by trying his hand at creating videos. The result of his experiments with the moving image was Ours London, a clip in which he brandished a Samurai sword with complete lack of restraint, recording his emotional state after breaking up with his girlfriend. Frustration, disappointment, and anger are vented in a form that is typical of otaku – non-violent, introverted, but expressive. Like a character in anime, Mr. cuts the air with his sabre, as if fighting invisible demons. The secluded epic unfolds against the background of a distant motorway, which underlines his strong feelings of loneliness and simultaneous liberation. As if following the list of contents in a textbook on the history of 20th-century art, Mr. takes a step forward in his creative practice, repeating arte povera‘s evolution into performance art.

Ninja performances and kawaii (cute) customization of receipts brought Mr. to Takashi Murakami’s studio, Kaikai Kiki (formerly: Hiropon Factory). A year before finishing the academy, Mr. came to the attention of Murakami, master of ‘superflat’, and secured what was formally his first commission as an artist. There was no exclusive contract binding him to work in the studio, so he created other solo projects at the same time. Of course, Murakami’s ideas filtered into Mr.’s art from the corporate briefs, but he always interpreted them in curious ways. In 2000 Mr. was one of the artists who took part in the group exhibition Superflat, a showcase for the new art movement. It would therefore be no exaggeration to say that Mr.’s early works influenced how high-low art was defined in the manifesto Superflat, published by Murakami in 2001.

Mr. first put forward ideas on the superflat style in art at an exhibition in Paris in 2003. At Galerie Perrotin he presented a series of works in which combined the ukiyo-e aesthetic with the visual language of anime. On a traditional Japanese kakemono (kakejiku) scroll, on craft envelopes, on lids of used industrial bobbins, and on canvases stretched on frames (a more familiar medium for viewers) he placed anime-like scenes of a man interacting with young girls.

History, it may be observed, does not unfold linearly. It is more like the doodlings accompanying the texts in a private diary. A kind of silent, cartoon-like story-telling that has no culmination and illustrates Mr.’s personal life – or dreams about this life. Mr.’s ukiyo-e style comics are candid and reflect changing emotions; they are ‘pictures of the changeable world’, his inner world. They are full of hyperbole – the lyrical main character is depicted as possessing what are almost the proportions of an ancient colossus against the background of miniature, almost doll-like girls (Gotta go with udon, 2003). Fortunately, his phallic attributes escape this gigantomania and are depicted extremely modestly – minimizing the risk of vulgarization and giving these portraits a metaphorical nakedness. 

A tremor bordering on obsession is present in each place where these micro-lolitas are held – not in the hands, but, kawaii-style, on the palm. The micro-lolitas seize Mr.‘s world – whether this is the real world or the space of his mind (Me, 2003). In some of these works Mr. depicts himself as a classic geek, a young man with dishevelled hair, in glasses, his gaze conveying the puzzlement with which he observes these miniature girls – as if (as well may be the case) he doesn’t know what to do with them. Memories, fantasies, and compulsive ideas stray through the pictures in the form of pretty girls with conventionally pretty pink hair. Or hide, mimicking other obsessions – pretending, for instance, to be Damien Hirst’s homeopathic polka dots of motley colours (Honylala, 2003).

These early micro-lolitas do not yet exhibit mature hypersexuality. A different, sensual nakedness, used to depict all the participants in these works, repulses us – or at least makes us blush with embarrassment. The uncomfortable feeling of being inserted into the artist’s private world is reinforced by the installation spread on the gallery floor. A typical Japanese futon has been carelessly thrown down on a tatami mat, with cuddly toys peeping out from under the blanket. You can imagine Mr. also there, under the blanket, directing his thoughtful glances towards the lolicon motif (Inside the brain, 2003).      

The interpretations of lolicon (the Lolita complex) in Mr.’s works reflect this phenomenon’s real ambiguity. The word lolicon (also lolicom, roricon) combines the two words, ‘Lolita’ and ‘complex’, referring to Lolita, the novel by Vladimir Nabokov (1955). This term came into use in Japan in the 1970s, a period which saw the publication of a translation of Russell Trainer’s The Lolita Complex (1966) in which the author uses this expression to describe the male attraction for altogether young girls.

An important precursor of manga in the lolicon style was shojo manga – ‘manga for girls’ – oriented on a young female market audience. Shojo comics were notable for conveying a particular female image. The archetypal shojo was a young girl, usually a teenager, with a pretty, innocent appearance, dressed in an infantile manner, often in school uniform. In the 1970s the shojo genre underwent a renaissance, with an expansion of its themes and styles. Shojo authors began drawing sexual subjects that were borderline and had not previously been touched upon, thus attracting more adult male fans of manga. Initially addressed to teenage girls, shojo comics were now consumed by all genders and ages. At the same time, female shojo images became increasingly entwined with sexualization and were regarded by their fans as idealized.

Lolicon is seen as having been pioneered by the manga-ka (manga artist) Hideo Azuma, also well known for his ‘absurd’ manga. Azuma founded Siberu, the first lolicon doujinshi (self-published) magazine, which opened the doors to further expansion. In 1979 Siberu published a fanzine that memorably contained an erotic parody on Azuma’s Little Red Riding Hood. Instead of the sharp outlines of pornographic gekiga, Azuma drew figures that were rounded and prettily pudgy, like characters drawn by Osamu Tezuka, with the distinctive eyes common in shojo manga – huge eyes that glinted with shiny stars. The combination of these traits marked the emergence of the ‘kawaii (cute) eroticism’ aesthetic. A step forwards in terms of candidness – and coquettish kawaii became lolicon.

Essentially, lolicon manga is comics with erotic or pornographic content in which the characters are underage girls who look like kawaii idols. The boom in lolicon occurred in the 1980s. Its heyday was closely bound up with the simultaneous development of the otaku subculture after the word otaku had been coined by Burikki magazine in 1983. In 1989 lolicon became a hot topic for discussion following the arrest of Tsutomi Miyazaki, a young man who murdered four girls. When Miyazaki’s room was searched, the team of investigators found videocassettes with horror films, as well as loads of manga, including shojo and lolicon. Public debates led to Miyazaki being labelled otaku; works of lolicon art with their erosion of the boundaries between reality and invention were regarded as a motivating factor in his crimes.

The Muyazaki case was one of a number of reasons why public attitudes to otaku subculture turned sharply negative and its participants were seen as sexually unfulfilled adult men with paedophile tendencies. Lolicon was subjected to numerous studies, but public opinion nevertheless remained divided. Most people defined lolicon as a form of self-expression, a way of identifying one’s sexuality; attempts were made to strip it of the stamp of paedophilia. There is a hypothesis that lolicon’s emergence was due to changes in the hierarchy of genders in Japan: the development of the feminist agenda and the growing power enjoyed by women in the 1970s and 1980s evidently provoked in men a desire to interact (even if only through the pages of a manga magazine) with shojo – with girls who are infantile, subordinate, and scantily dressed. It is notable that the view of lolicon, like otaku, as something entertaining belongs mainly to the western world. Inside Japan, these phenomena are still in a grey area but, it seems, the Japanese are not embarrassed at such an exotic export.

It was superflat that highlighted the controversial nature of lolicon in contemporary art. Mr. became one of the first artists to analyse the phenomenon and to make lolicon‘s ambiguity part of his artistic language. He is clearly not embarrassed (in the Japanese mentality there are other, weightier occasions for that) to convey his fascination with young girls in pre-puberty or puberty, like the girl who was the object of Humbert Humbert’s obsession. However, what he does in his art is clearly different from literal sexualization. And in his works nymphettes are depicted strangely neurotically.

The wide-open eyes contain a mix of kawaii glints and troubling vacancy in equal measure. These blankly smiling girls are dressed deliberately provocatively; they hitch up their skirts and adopt unnatural poses but at the same time seem frozen and unreceptive to male desire. Instead, their introversion, self-isolation, and lack of orientation or inability to interact illustrates yet another insuperable challenge to the ‘experienced’ otaku, whose fear of real physical contact forces him to retreat into the safe and secluded space of his own room. The latter syndrome even has its own name: hikikomori, ‘retreat into oneself’, an antisocial otaku-complication, a rejection of interaction in real life and a striving for an extreme degree of seclusion, things that are natural for both teenagers and adults.

Lolicon creates a deceptively infantile image of women. Where there is obsession with anything (or anyone), there is always some kind of emptiness, a lacuna, a lack of realization, things that are compensated for by the object of addiction. Seen from this point of view, the person who is vulnerable is the consumer and not the person who supplies what is desired from the other side of the screen. This paradoxical swapping of roles was explored by Mr. as far back as in his first works, mentioned above. The unrealized desire for interaction with and proximity to a young girl in the end turns into evasive flight, which the artist skilfully masks as a state of slight puzzlement or embarrassment. In actual fact this is a standard case of being stopped by awe. Power has been transferred to the female figure, however innocent and small (literally) this figure may be.

In his sculpture Penyo-Henyo (2004-2006) Mr. depicts a non-seriousness and, to be blunt, a lack of development and social adaptation. The man is here a boy. His trousers have slipped helplessly down to his knees, and, peeping out in an altogether neurotic manner from underneath his white office shirt, his underwear reveals childish drawings. In the eyes of this Japanese Pinocchio we see both vacancy and the lights of the fluorescent screens he is watching as if entranced. Even his body has frozen – albeit in a kind of absurd childish dance. This apparent reference to mindless Tic Toc lip-synching is just one reason why this work is being talked about again today. Politically oriented critics continue to pile up conspirological interpretations of the boy Penyo, reading in the weak-willed teenager and commanding lolicon girl a metaphor for relations between Japan and the US. But we can stop speculating and recognize the blindingly obvious: the plastic underwear shamelessly lowered on this caricature-like teenager is capable of provoking a very real enmity.

Japanese culture cannot escape the need to reflect in one way or another on the experience of its post-war trauma. Mr. undertook this task in his own distinctive and contradictory manner. He began working on a series of pictures in which themes from battle painting are painted in the language of manga and anime. For these and later works, see

the second part of this piece.

In addition to parallels with arte povera, the medium chosen by Mr. for his early works may be attributed to a characteristic that is part of everyday life – the attitude of the Japanese to rubbish in general. On islands there is simply not very much space for burying rubbish. This is one of the reasons why, in addition to strict rules for separating and recycling different kinds of rubbish, Japan has mottainai – the philosophy of rubbish-free living. So, why not use the reverse side of a restaurant receipt as a blank canvas? The receipts covered with drawings become something like collector’s cards – an auction item even more desirable than the rarest Pokemon cards. Works by Mr. are never repeated on each side – apart from the unique kawaii (cute) design on the reverse of the receipt, there is a no less unique reminder of where the canvas for the work has come from.

Mr. first put forward ideas on the superflat style in art at an exhibition in Paris in 2003. At Galerie Perrotin he presented a series of works in which combined the ukiyo-e aesthetic with the visual language of anime. On a traditional Japanese kakemono (kakejiku) scroll, on craft envelopes, on lids of used industrial bobbins, and on canvases stretched on frames (a more familiar medium for viewers) he placed anime-like scenes of a man interacting with young girls.