Bouncing Red Ball

Shohei’s illustrations, sketched with ballpoint pen, are characterized by sparse use of color, bold lines, high contrast and gritty subjects. “Intense”, as one website (NSFW) put it.
Loud and dynamic, Shohei’s artworks are illustrative of Japan’s manga-influenced style of drawing.
Many of his illustrations (four of which are shown below) are displayed at Hakuchi Land; many are [...]

A number of great Japanese magazine cover designs from the early 1900s posted by Will Schofield, a rare books collector, in his wonderful blog A Journey Round My Skull.

These covers come from Bookcover Design in Japan 1910s-40s (ISBN 4-89444-426-7) edited by Masayo Matsubara. Published in 2005 by PIE Books, this incredible book is already out-of-print [...]

Toshiro at HDRi Life has been walking the streets of Tokyo, photographing the people and structures of its urban scenery in HDR.
Shot with ultra-wide-angle and fisheye lenses, his photos present a disconcerting landscape of surreal colors and impossibly bent structures that make Japan’s megalopolis look more cold and inhospitable than it really is.
A lot more [...]

One of the few Japanese rock bands I like is Qomolangma Tomato and I hadn’t even heard of them until last week. That’s when I saw the cover artwork of their latest CD Camouflage , with (pink?) tentacles and slime in equal measure. How could you fail with a band name and cover art like [...]

If apocalyptic future will come through nuclear weapons, then only Japan (brought to its knees with two atomic bombs in the closing stages of World War II) has a first-hand experience of what it will look like.
Here Tokyo Genso (Tokyo Fantasy) gives us his images of Japan in a catastrophic future, with buildings in ruins [...]

This engaging short film about Tokyo was created by W0W, a Japanese creative design studio, to enhance Citizen’s booth at the recent BASELWORLD 2009, the watch and jewelry showcase event in Basel, Switzerland.
The theme of the movie is infinite possibilities for Eco-Drive, Citizen’s new model in its range. We cohesively combined images and meanings of [...]

A typical street in suburban Japan, lined on both sides with Sugi, silence broken only by bird calls. Female mannequins with foreign-sounding names skateboarding, hitting the pavement and disintegrating into undignified heaps.
The contrast couldn’t get more jarring than that.
Depending on your mood, this is either “upsetting, disorienting, dark, and mysterious” or “pretentious, incoherent and boring”. [...]

A new mascot was recently announced to take over the promotional role vacated by the scandal-plagued Tsuyoshi Kusanagi for the impending transition to all-digital broadcast in 2011.
Chidejika (a word-play on “terrestrial digital broadcast” and “deer”), the anemic-looking deer with antennae for antlers immediately spawned hundreds of antenna-horned characters, mostly cute little moe girls and parodies [...]