©F. L. Blumberg 2025

The Sticker Graffiti of Osaka

F. L. Blumberg

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do the sticker-graffiti artists of Osaka.

Doors, air-conditioning units, gas metres, and ventilation ducts shall not be spared their surface area! Small signs can be slapped onto any and all exteriors! Most of all: poles! The cylinder was meant for adornment. Gather your printouts and paste them guerilla-style to add to an urban patchwork of kookiness. These, I imagine, are the watchwords of adhesive street art.

Walk through Osaka's busiest streets and it is bound to catch your eye. Sticker graffiti (グラフィティステッカー —Gurafiti Sutekkā) comprises a variety of often intermixed genres and modes. There are advertisements (mainly for shops and bands) with embedded QR codes that hope to convey a cool and intriguing style. The most numerous and interesting, however, can broadly be called quirky artistic expression: humorous, parodic, uplifting, philosophical, lightly erotic, or, most commonly, the utterly wacky and bafflingly weird.

Then there are the lampposts. Frequently one finds them plastered with stickers. Even those street lights commissioned as art projects are not always left as they were first embellished. In Ame-mura, the street where you'll find plenty of American vintage clothing, there are humanoid-styled street lights. Stickers adorn the lower half of this pole and fit in seamlessly.

I have found pole stickers (as I have taken to calling them) fascinating and, over the years, have taken many photos of them in different locales. Yet I am not always sure what these postmodern emblems attempt to communicate. They create an aesthetic akin to the denim jacket covered in patches, the backpack festooned with pins, a laptop adorned with stickers, skin dense with tattoos.

Stop and look: you are playing image roulette.

Are they a celebration of randomness? Or are they a testimony to the digital grotesque, DIY wryness reminding us how strange the world has become? Perhaps their purpose is to place some distortion in our view, disrupt our expectations, and tempt interpretation. As Camus wrote: 'At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face'. The sticker-graffiti artists will make sure of that. Somehow it is pleasing to know that, amid the polite folkways and everyday homogeneity, viscid surrealism awaits you on the avenue. At times, I think that they are a commentary on the peculiar fortuity of human life: there because they didn't have to be.