This guy produces the most meticulously crafted modern homewares, deftly melding pop-art with 400 year old lacquer wood techniques — all set on careful display in his own hand-built boutique in a quiet backstreet straddling Harajuku and Aoyama. He tells me he covered the walls and ceiling himself with 1,500 pure white, prefabricated melamine, square-based pyramids and a lot of glue. I can’t wait to get home and do the same to everything!

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Irish artist Craig Smith has recently released a series of illustrations, which explore his fascination with Harajuku, an area of Tokyo that’s famous for its street fashion and counter-culture.

Russ Mills, known in urban art circles as Byroglyphics, is turning heads with his unique juxtaposing of loose, tagger-esque lashings of paint and traditional portraiture. The Brighton-based illustrator and animator studied and Leeds Met and has since been showing at galleries including Signal Gallery and Red Propeller Gallery. Inspired by the Harajuku phenomenon in popular culture, Mills says he loves ‘the way every piece of popular culture from the recent past is smashed together in a garish soup and regurgitated into real life with absolutely no boundaries’. Glimpses of realism in his work are obscured by loose abstraction, and his application of that inspiration is coming though loud and clear.

Thor Engelstad’s photo-media series, Just A Moment, Please, is a statement on Harajuku sub-culture. It portrays the fashion anarchy known as ‘cosplay’ or ‘costume play — total identity transformation through dress-ups. From the baby doll Lolita to dark Goths, these Sunday street sirens are waiting for their moment to be discovered. Englestad’s metallic prints capture this hyper-real style and composites them against Tokyo’s electric backdrop.