Photos by the author.
I spent way too much of my precious youth sweating out a hangover in last night's clothes, stumbling around record fairs trying to find good, cheap records. I don't go to them anymore though and the main reason quite simply, is record collectors. Gross, tubby, balding, little pig-like men trying to snuffle out that original pressing of Wings Over America - it's like they've just given up on any kind of contact with other people that doesn't involve squealing about run out groove messages or foreign pressings.
Even worse than the record collectors though were the freaks there for "collectables"—things like science fiction trading cards and figurines. Star Trek geeks buying poorly rendered, ugly Deep Space Nine figures to jerk off to. I'd written off toy collectors as a subset of humanity best to ignore. I'd filed them in the bin along with record collectors, people who go to recovery parties and fuckers at shows who roll their eyes when you light a smoke. That was until I went to Japan.
The Japanese don't do anything by halves. Why have one toy store when you can have a whole suburban shopping centre made up of floors and floors of toy stores? The word "otaku" has been adopted by American manga and anime geeks as a word to describe each other. Most of them think it's a Japanese word meaning "fan" but really it translates more closely to shut in, obsessive loser who lives with his (and it's almost always his) parents and can't relate to people. It's a necessary term in Japan to separate your scary obsessive (the ones likely to end up dismembering small children), from your garden variety obsessive (almost every other Japanese person).
The Japanese aesthetic and attention to detail is light years beyond anyone else's so you know that when Japanese collectors start a company to make toys and collectables they're gonna have their shit together. The Tokyo based toy company Medicom are pretty much ‘it' when it comes to Japanese toys. They take their obsession with art, graffiti, music, film, and pop culture and turn it into beautifully rendered, fully articulated works of art. They collaborate with folks like Reas, PAM, Delta, Daft Punk and Kaws to create weird shit that other toy companies wouldn't even think of, much less have the balls to make. I don't have the cash to shell out on an original artwork by Futura so it's pretty nice to have limited edition 3D figures designed by him sitting on my mantelpiece. Jesus, it's only a matter of time until I turn into one of those toy collector assholes with a computer-catalogued collection and display cases in my lounge room.
Australian Medicom stockists and inquiries (03) 9521 5753