When you move to Japan, it doesn't take long to become used to the warm, fuzzy illustrations which are hidden in plain view just about anywhere in public. The small icons, symbols, and pictures which bear this style are so prevalent that they are easy to miss unless you take the time to think about them. For me, the overwhelming experience of moving to Japan with near-zero language skill kept me from noticing the illustrations, as my day to day life was spent navigating each new situation with clumsy intuition. However, even though I didn't know it at the time, I like to imagine that these strangely coherent and unobtrusive little pictures helped guide me through the trials of Japan’s novelty. Through this article, I hope they’ll help you learn a little more about Japanese culture.
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How I Found the Free Japanese Illustrations at Irasutoya
When I began a new life in the global center of kawaii culture, the eye-grabbing appeals of inane advertisements on TV and in public captured my ironic sense of humor. Meanwhile, I spent each passing day unaware that I was surrounded by small, unambiguous visual messages which led me to the right counter at the immigration center and showed images of which food that huge kanji-laden signs were trying to sell me. As the loud and preposterous did its job of capturing my attention, the lukewarm ambivalence of the warm, simple illustrations floated through my consciousness like a lazy river at a late-spring discount water park.
It wasn’t until the pandemic hit that illustrations reached the front of my mind, as I too found a need for simple and effective visual communication.
The nationwide cancellation of classes had severely reduced my job responsibilities as an English teacher at a public junior high school, and I spent most of the day thinking of something I could do instead of pacing the halls for the tenth time or picking up smoking with the vice principal behind the tool shed just to feel something.
One day in the spring, as the restart of classes was quickly approaching, a moment of inspiration struck. While the Japanese teachers were debating the best way to keep the germ-swappers (e.g. adolescents) from swapping germs, I would create educational hygiene posters in English to place near handwashing stations and around the school. As self-appointed marketing manager of hygienic excellence, it was now my grave responsibility to reforge awareness and instill belief in things like hand-washing, one good hygiene habit that the students were still learning and the fleeting occupants of the staff men’s bathroom had long forgotten. I could not fail.
But this raised an issue. How could I possibly transmit a message of such dire importance to my students?
The common attention-grabbing strategy for foreign assistant English teachers is to illegally plaster as much Japanese-kid-oriented intellectual property as one could find all over classrooms, Powerpoints, and worksheets. Pikachu, Luffy, Tanjiro, Doraemon. These anime heroes become ubiquitous with English class in elementary school as magnets on the blackboard and reward stickers for good behavior, and their use by well-meaning Gary-sensei and Mary-sensei extends into junior high far past the point that jaded tweens are interested in them. Japanese teachers must have a good deal of caution with these strategies, as they are aware of the fact that Japanese copyright law is extremely stringent, even in educational contexts. The Japanese teacher observes Gary-sensei's antics with a steady sense of unease, before deciding it's not worth the hassle and leaving the room for the entirety of the class period to smoke behind the tool shed.
Gary-sensei, however, is not Japanese, which means that he spends his days failing to sort his trash properly and drinking Strong Zero at a nearby park. In his mind, Japanese law does not exist. Copyright in this country is as real to him as a well-deserved pay raise. He continues searching for borderless PNGs on Google Images and printing reams of Spy Family activity sheets, and the students rejoice.
In a brief visit to city hall earlier that week, I had walked through the building spraying unlabeled clear goop on my hands in every doorway in a performance of my commitment to societal peace and comfort. As I sat in the lobby trying not to breathe, I took notice of the uniquely uniform illustrations on signs around the lobby. Though I couldn’t read all of the Japanese, they stood as universally comprehensible reminders of ways to avoid corona: wear your mask, wash your hands, don’t gather in large groups unless you’re a prominent politician. Those warm, rosy cheeks on the characters and the fuzzy borders on the pictures stood out to me for the first time. I knew instantly that if the illustrations on these signs could communicate with me, a braindead American whose nihongo was not even jyouzu, it would reach my sleepy students as well.
I believe my first Google search was “fuzzy Japanese illustrations,” which offered portals into unspeakable worlds I had hoped to never know even existed. After an eyeful of bleach, a bit of Boolean wizardry, and a twirl of a Google Translate wand, I found it: Irasutoya.
What is Irasutoya?
Irasutoya is an award-winning digital archive of thousands of cute, clip-art style illustrations which are generally free to use for personal and commercial use. All of the illustrations were created by one artist, Takashi Mifune, who contributed daily additions to the site from 2012 to early 2021. The illustrations span almost every facet of daily life, as well as reaching into pop culture, satire, and current events.
Mifune’s quick response to the coronavirus pandemic is one example of this; his illustration of the unmistakable spiked virus was posted on January 19th, 2020. For government agencies, small businesses, and doctor’s offices seeking to adapt quickly, Irasutoya provided a one-stop shop for communicating rules and new measures through signs and notices.
The use of Mifune’s illustrations has grown dramatically in recent years, to the point that by the time I arrived in Japan in 2018, their use was already widespread in both public and private life. New illustrations occasionally follow viral Twitter trends, such as the water-spewing puffer fish of March 2019.
Irasutoya also recently announced a collaboration with the popular design software Canva in March 2024, so you can use the designs there as well. (As if we all weren’t already copying and pasting them in before this announcement…)
How to Use Irasutoya
You can access Irasutoya's home page here - keep reading below for an explanation of how to use it!
If you click on a picture, it will take you to the image page, where you can right-click to save or copy the image. Be mindful that some illustrations, especially ones with many different color options, may be split into multiple images (the transparent background makes it a bit hard to tell).
The good news is Irasutoya’s images really are free to use, assuming you’re not a terrorist organization or otherwise anti-socially motivated individual. For both personal and commercial use, you can use up to 20 images in one design without attribution (unlimited on Canva). Search is available in both Japanese and English, though the English search function is significantly less effective in my experience.
There is also a random button with a little “shuffle” icon on the image page, so please try it out to discover the wide and wonderful world of Irasutoya images.
What Irasutoya Teaches about Japan
One of my favorite things about Irasutoya is that the target audience for the majority of its life cycle has been, to a certain degree, entirely Japanese. That means that there are a number of illustrations which express small idiosyncrasies of life in Japan or memorialize bits of the culture which might be hard to understand without having lived here. Holidays, food, sports, school life, Irasutoya has it all, and it is uniquely Japanese.
For this reason, I am doing a series on some of the more unique Irasutoya illustrations over on the Tokyo Alleyways Instagram. I hope to use this as a way to discuss interesting cultural and historical tidbits which can be expressed through these illustrations.
Check out Irasutoya from this link, and use these free Japanese illustrations for your own work! And just before you do that, give us a follow on Instagram (@tokyoalleyways) and leave a comment to let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!
Read More from Your Friend in Tokyo
Hi! I'm a Tokyo local, and I started this blog to share helpful tips that only a local would know and tell some stories of the city's authentic culture. I'd hope you'll take a look around the site and find something that makes your Tokyo experience even more memorable!
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