SoraNews24 —Japan News—

Bringing you yesterday's news from Japan and Asia, today.

TOP

» Japan
» Who’s that Dad? Curious and political Father’s Day portraits show up at a supermarket in Japan

Featured

Weird
Studio Ghibli
Jobs

Who’s that Dad? Curious and political Father’s Day portraits show up at a supermarket in Japan

SoraNews24 Jun 20, 2018
Tweet

Japanese Twitter gets a good laugh out of these great examples of a common elementary school exercise. Happy Father’s Day!

Many countries celebrate Father’s Day on the third Sunday in June, and Japan is no exception. Friday, June 17 saw the gifting of many an adorable hand-drawn card, not to mention huge amounts of beer, cake sets and bitter chocolate. Sometimes even local shops get in on the action, having customers (presumably young children, but not always) construct crafts or draw pictures to celebrate their ever-toiling papas.

Twitter user @NITKC_gorilla snapped a picture of a particularly grand exhibition of these drawings and shared it with Twitter. It’s so lovely when children put in hard work to capture their parents, isn’t it?

▼ “Perfect timing! LMAO”
https://twitter.com/NITKC_gorilla/status/1006726506024857600

Each of the papers is labelled ‘A Picture of Dad‘. The gentleman on the left, allegedly drawn by “Yusuke Hayashi”, has very expressive eyebrows, and appears to be alarmed by the spectral images surrounding him: perhaps a creative imagining of the classic angel and devil on the shoulder? Though wait, the craggly stick figure on the left of him is labelled “Me”. and the one to the right is labelled “Mama”. Whoops.

Mr. Hayashi thanks his father for “always working hard at your job and making our days bright”. We wonder if he got some assistance with this piece? The stick figures seem to be drawn by an entirely different hand, and display none of the technical knowledge of shadow and light that went into depicting his father. We also have a weird feeling we’ve seen this face before?

▼ 57th Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe

Must just be my imagination.

Moving on to the image in the center, “Moemi Taki” has drawn her father with a dignified and curlicued hairstyle and distinctive crow’s feet. Pretty obvious that her dad is a foreigner, what with the pronounced, lengthy nose compared to the other portraits – so it’s unsurprising that her message is in flawless English. “Thank you for being awesome!” isn’t said to enough dads in general, is it? Though, uh, now that we think on it, this dad looks familiar too…

▼ 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump

The last portrait is of a jolly looking dad in glasses. The message by artist “Takahiro Fukui” is cut off, but seems to be the tune of “Thanks for all your hard work!”. Again, we have some beautiful interplay of shadow here, particularly to define the features, and – wait, hold on a minute!

▼ This is just a traced picture of 1st Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Il-sung!

The first two artists cite their ages as “22 years old”, which explains the dexterity with which “they”(?) recreated these politicians’ images. Presumably Fukui is the same age, but we can’t see it in the picture.

The original poster helpfully provided a nice comparison image.

https://twitter.com/NITKC_gorilla/status/1007253540673384448

In the resulting thread there was a copious amount of laughter at the uncanny resemblances, applauding the obvious adult who pulled it off, and puzzling over why the artist chose to draw Kim Il-sung rather than his more currently relevant grandson Kim Jong-un. One user lamented “I wish they’d drawn Ms. Akie Abe more accurately”, but hey, Mother’s Day was back in May. It’s officially Mr. Abe’s time to shine.

More than one user questioned the veracity of the pictures, but @NITKC_gorilla stood firm that the posters were hung up in a local supermarket. Personally, I think it looks like one child’s father saw his kid working on a portrait and was inspired to whip up his own art in response, and here at SoraNews24 we’re all about that kind of mutual creativity!

Source: Twitter/@NITKC_gorilla
Featured image: Twitter/@NITKC_gorilla
Insert images: Wikimedia Commons/Asmithca, Wikimedia Commons/Stemoc, Wikimedia Commons/Agranome et Chofers