Chapter 2 — The Birth of “Eat Yourself” Collection

When I launched my brand in 2008,
I still hadn’t found an expression that truly felt like my own.

To create something that wouldn’t be swept away by trends
and that wouldn’t resemble anyone else’s work,
I realized I had to express the one thing that exists only once in this world — myself.
That idea slowly began to shape my direction.

The obsessions, impulses, instincts,
and the slightly cynical sense of humor inside me —
I felt that if I allowed those elements to appear as they were,
a style no one could imitate would naturally emerge.

One symbolic part of who I am has always been my strong appetite.
From there came the idea of projecting myself onto animals and expressing
a kind of “gluttonous” creature.

This led to the concept of “an animal driven to the extreme by hunger, 
tempted by itself when there is nothing left to eat,”
and in 2012, the first piece of what would become the Eat Yourself collection was completed —

the Fox Ring
(Why a fox? I’ll share that story in a future chapter.)

It is the small tragedy of an animal so hungry that it begins to wonder
if it could eat itself.

The collection expresses that moment with a touch of humor,
softening a slightly dark theme and transforming it into something beautiful.

This poetic, slightly dark, subtly cynical world
has roots in the American cartoons I watched in Japan as a child —
stories full of absurd situations, humor, and a touch of cruelty that fascinated me deeply.

Later, when I began sculpting wax prototypes,
I realized that the animals I carved carried a distinctly “manga-like” quality.
The visual language I grew up with — born from flat, 2D manga —
was appearing naturally in my three-dimensional work.

At first, that “slightly manga-like expression” felt like a weakness.
But now, working in France and far from Japan,
I see it as a strength — a form of expression that only I, as a Japanese artist, can create.

Over time, Eat Yourself became the foundation of my creative universe,
but I no longer confine myself to that concept:
today, I also create animals that carry entirely different stories.

But no matter the character,
I always focus on capturing the moment when the animal feels “alive.”
Those bursts of instinctive emotion are what bring my sculptures to life.

A flicker of instinct, a moment of weakness, a hint of humor,
a subtle shade of cynicism —to capture those brief, vivid instants,
I continue sculpting animals every day in my Paris atelier.

See the Eat Yourself Collection here.

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