Competition

There's a big difference between Graffiti in Japan and the rest of the world. All over the world Graffiti artists have to compete with local gangs for spaces that they tag. Gangs mark their territory over artists tags and other gangs mark over that.

Japan doesn't seem to have this problem. While gangs do exist in Japan, they aren't as violent or controlling as the other street gangs around the world. A powerful local Yakuza controls the territories and seem relatively unconcerned with tagging. This leaves the area wide open to Grafitti artists where all they need to watch out for is the police and the worst thing that can happen to their work is for it to be white-washed by the locals. Even white-washing itself isn't a bad thing as it once again creates a blank page for another artists work.

Insead of competition between taggers, there is a respect and mutual cooperation in most cases. No rival crews will tag over anothers work. Often they will try to do a piece next to or near their rivals work that is better or bigger. Because of this, the graffiti in Japan on a whole is more artistic. That's not to say that there isn't a lot of artistic graffiti elsewhere in world but that in those places, it tends to be mixed in with gang work or covered by the competition making it look shoddy or poorly planned out.

The biggest challenges that face graffiti artists in Japan are not other artists but placing large, intricate, graffiti in hard to reach, high profile places.

Shibuya Tags

So I've been out to Shibuya the last couple of nights collecting graffiti and tags for my final. It was quite an amazing few nights. Going at night, you really get the feeling and impression of the neighborhoods and the graffiti artists. Almost all of them are put up in the dark of night to leave impressions once the sun rises. It seemed fitting that I too go on my quest to capture their art by cover of night.

At a graffiti shop that sells caps, spray paint and other assorted tagger goods, I was fortunate enough to meet a world famous graffiti artist that goes by the moniker "Jace." The late-twenties Frenchmen that now lives in Madagascar told me about his world-wide trecks to put up graffiti. To better explain he pulled out two published books of his work to show me. He showed me that he uses the surrounding space to influence what he creates. One of the pictures showed me a figure getting sucked up by a large metal pipe in an abandoned industrial plant.

After talking to him for a bit he wished me luck and told me where to look for some of his works currently up near the station in Ueno with a short, laughing story on evading arrest by the Ueno Police.