Several months ago, I posted this photo on Flickr:

Before that, however, I’d posted these in January and May of 2008:

[January 2008]

[May 2008]

The shot of the double-face image on the one-way sign (the middle photo above) was tagged by the person who runs the “Street Art in Japan” pool as attributable to a prolific street artist in Tokyo who goes by the name QP. I’ve tagged any subsequent stickers as being QP’s as well.

Anyway, several days ago, I noticed that the first image above was suddenly getting a lot of hits (as in hundreds), and discovered that there’s been some buzz in the Japanese media about 力士シール (rikishi seal, which means sumo wrestler stickers) and someone had posted a comment with a link to the photo (although the comments seem to be gone now) as a response to this article: http://sankei.jp.msn.com/life/trend/090625/trd0906250111001-n1.htm There was also a direct link from this blog

It’s interesting how these things spread (but I won’t digress into a discussion on memes) because today, about 10 days after the original MSN article, I noticed that Japan Probe has an English report on the 力士シール and an embedded YouTube video of a TV news report – the news report is actually REALLY funny because it features a guy running around the streets of Ginza spotting the stickers and running up to them and pointing (clearly he doesn’t get out enough in an urban environment if the whole idea of graffiti tags or stickers is new to him – BNE is plastered all over the city, as are a number of other regular graffiti stickers):

A bit more searching and digging and it turns out that the stickers might not actually be done by QP, but by another street artist going by the name of ALMOND (阿満都”) (or, perhaps, there is the possibility that QP and ALMOND are one and the same; although this Flickr poster is emphatic that the stickers are attributable to ALMOND and that ALMOND is NOT QP).

In general, I am not enough of a graffiti follower to really care who’s posting the double-face stickers. I like them and if I see an interesting one or can get an interesting angle, I’ll take a shot. On that note, here’s one from this afternoon:

rainy season umbrellas as a backdrop for the mysterious 力士シール