Takashi Murakami

My company, Kaikai Kiki, is unique because it's an art business. I had to find out how to do this by myself.

Manga uses Japanese traditional structures in how to teach the student and to transmit a very direct message. You learn from the teacher by watching from behind his back. The whole teacher-master thing is part of Asian culture, I think.

In Japan, I focus mostly on sending messages through Twitter, trying to spread my minority way of thinking.

My own belief is that rather than getting involved in trying to change the reality of social-political things, creators can be involved in and express in different ways and be meaningful in different ways, so for me, it's important to leave messages to people of the future and to be engaged with the people now.

It's true that I pick up many ideas from different Japanese things.

I'm always very interested in breeding. Raising cacti is breeding. My lotus plant collection is breeding. The insects are breeding.

For children of my generation, anime was an escape from Japan's loser complex following World War II. Anime wasn't foreign. It was our own.

I grew up in a low-income area of Tokyo. Like most homes in Tokyo, ours was small. It was a free-standing, two-family rental duplex built 30 years earlier.

Our family was poor, but my parents gave us money for education.

I don't think it's an unnatural thing at all for my collaborations or projects to be seen as art but entertainment at the same time.

My mum and dad were a little like tiger parents. I hate that, but at the same time, I am a little bit proud.

My parents came from the Kyushu Island in the Southern part of Japan to find work in Tokyo. So we could only afford to live downtown, in a low-income area. It was just by the river, and whenever a typhoon came around, we were under water up to, like, here. That's the kind of place we lived in.