How to Turn Ordinary Objects into Wild Ideas That 800,000 People Love | 100 People With Ideas

Tatsuya Tanaka says, "I've never had a day when I ran out of inspiration."

Some people online call him "Japan's king of wild ideas." He is Tatsuya Tanaka, a 36-year-old Japanese miniature artist.

You may not know his name, but you have probably seen his work: miniature scenes in which a brush becomes a rice paddy, broccoli becomes a forest, flower petals become a boat on a lake.

On April 20, 2011, Tanaka started a project called "Miniature Calendar." Every morning between seven and eight he uploads a new piece to social media, and these small feats of imagination have spread steadily across the internet.

Tanaka never tires of it. In an interview with QDaily, he laughed and said, "I've never had a day when I ran out of inspiration."

Look at how often he posts, and it is clear he is not exaggerating. From something as small as a matchstick to something as large as the universe, the range of what he makes keeps widening, and so does his commercial work. Recently he even made the animated opening titles for the NHK drama Hiyokko《雏鸟》.

Today Tanaka's official Instagram account has nearly 800,000 followers. In six years of working without a break, he has made more than 2,000 pieces.

His work often shows scenes from ordinary life: riding a train, repairing a building, playing the piano, plowing a field, rowing a boat.

Only these ordinary-looking scenes have something odd about them.

As if caught by Doraemon's shrink ray, each scene comes down to roughly the size of a book. The materials are things anyone can pick up at home, and every one of them takes on a new identity: chopsticks become a bridge, a spoon becomes a diving board, corn becomes a rocket, a slice of meat becomes ocean waves, bread becomes a train.

In 2015, Tanaka was still working at the advertising agency where he had spent more than a decade. He had already made plenty of miniature pieces, but it had never occurred to him that he might make a living from them.

It began as a simple idea. In his spare time he would photograph the miniature figurines he collected alongside small landscapes. Once he started putting a date on each photo, the concept and the work grew more complete than he had expected. Companies noticed, and came to him one after another with offers.

His side income eventually passed his salary, and Tanaka left the agency to give the work his full attention.

Speaking to the Japanese magazine townwork in an earlier interview, Tanaka said that his workload had exploded, and that he had just had a child; wanting to be near the baby, he simply quit and became a full-time miniature artist.

By one count, 600 million people around the world use Instagram, and more than 9 million photos go up every day. On a platform that crowded, posting regularly is not enough to make you popular.

Tanaka, whose finished work is a photograph, treats "creativity" as something to be worked at on purpose.

Endless ideas, built on a stubborn habit of observation

Tanaka has never suffered from a shortage of inspiration, yet when people ask how he keeps the ideas coming, he falls silent for a moment.

Faced with that question, he searches for the most fitting way to put it, and after some thought says: "Look carefully at the things in everyday life."

Japanese media have called Tanaka a "mitate" artist, meaning a creator who works by figure of speech, who can look at A and see B: an apple as a watermelon, a screw as a body in free fall.

Midway through the interview he suddenly pointed at a staff member's jeans. "Something like this could be made into summer waves, because it's all blue." He added, "I'm always thinking about the color and shape of whatever is in front of me, and whether anything else looks like it."

Imagination, Tanaka believes, does not appear out of nowhere. It comes from the traces left in the relationships between one object and another.

In his free time Tanaka likes to walk through Japan's 100-yen shops and supermarkets, looking for more ideas.

He carries miniature figurines with him. Whenever he sees an interesting product, he takes a figurine out of his pocket and holds it against the product to see what the pairing might turn into. Once an idea takes shape, he writes it down on his phone, which is why the list of ideas waiting to be built on Tanaka's phone never runs dry.

If you ever see someone in a Japanese supermarket holding a tiny figurine up against the goods, it is probably him.

Many people think Tanaka's work appeals because it keeps hold of the most innocent, childlike part of us. But that childlike quality is itself carefully cultivated.

Tanaka may trust children's inventiveness more than anyone.

To push his work further, in the years before he had children of his own he would show photographs of his miniature models to kids and ask them what they looked like. Their answers fed his next piece.

Now he watches his own children: what they do around the house, how they use ordinary objects, the things no adult would think of. "I once saw him crumple up some flyers together and say it was a crime scene," he says of his child.

These 1.5-centimeter people are the soul of the work

Anyone who follows Tanaka knows that his pieces always capture an inventive slice of daily life, but that without the tiny figurines standing in them, much of the realism would drain away.

Tanaka says he has collected more than 3,000 figurines.

"I've been a railway fan since I was a kid. The figurines are made in Germany, and I bought most of them from model-railway shops. That's how I first came across them," Tanaka says, unable to hide his excitement at the subject. There is a note of reflection too: without his obsession with railways, he says, he might never have met the figurines, let alone gone on to make the miniature work that followed.

One and a half centimeters is the size he uses most often.

"I don't ask much of the figurines, because their poses can be adjusted. If an idea starts from a figurine, there's no need to change it afterward," Tanaka says. Besides studying objects, he likes to look at what a figurine seems to be doing, and often builds the scene to match it.

How does he manage that many figurines?

Tanaka sorts them by occupation and pose and keeps them in cabinets at home. He buys two or three of the same figurine so he can modify them for different scenes, or show identical pieces in several places at once.

Plenty of people assume the hardest part of the process is planning and building each piece. For Tanaka it is not the real test. "Before I upload a piece, I actually spend two or three hours adjusting the angle," he says. "Photography may be the part I care about most."

He is particular about whether the final angle is inventive enough, because it decides the point from which viewers enter this tiny world.

In late June, Tanaka brought nearly 150 pieces to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei for a show called "Miniature Exhibition."

Along with selected photographs from the past six years, he brought the physical models he shoots. "Normally people see these works only from the angle I shot them at. I wanted to bring the models here so everyone can shoot their own angle," Tanaka says.

Worth noting: alongside the many miniature pieces, the hall also held a number of giant works. Tanaka deliberately rebuilt some of his classic pieces at giant scale, hoping visitors walking through would feel they had become one of the little people inside the work, and could look out at the world from there.

The pieces and figurines are now touring in exhibitions around the world, and this August Tanaka plans to publish his third photo book of miniature work.

Meanwhile, his Miniature Calendar goes on updating on Instagram.

Cover image and some photos in this article are from Tatsuya Tanaka's official Instagram