What is the fascination with Japanese culture?
I am not 100% sure and to be truthful I didn’t really notice my obsession until others pulled me up on it. My guess is that as I grew up in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne where there were a lot of Asian immigrants moving in at the time, so most of my friends were from China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Japan. I would go to their houses and watch anime and read manga, we would draw and create our own characters on our schoolbooks and collect all sorts of ‘fancy goods’ and stationary. The Asian aesthetic feels natural to me, in fact even when I lived in Japan I never really felt any feeling of ‘culture shock’. Here in Melbourne I experience it much more often. I clearly remember at age 14 being the only one in a class of 35 that had visited the National Gallery of Victoria more than once and adversely the only one not to have been to a football game. There is definitely a deeper appreciation for the drawn image in Japan, just recently a manga on wine appreciation was released, it became a
