{"id":5876,"date":"2016-05-25T10:11:25","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T14:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=5876"},"modified":"2016-05-25T11:42:19","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T15:42:19","slug":"the-stunning-japanese-star-trek-art-of-toru-kanamori","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=5876","title":{"rendered":"The Stunning Japanese Star Trek Art of Toru Kanamori"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday in a far corner of the Star Trek interwebs I stumbled on two really beautiful cover illustrations from Japanese Star Trek<\/em> books.<\/p>\n

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There’s a lot to love about these images. I particularly like\u00a0how loose and expressionistic (for lack of a better word) they are. I don’t know exactly when these came out in Japan, but they’re apparently translations of the James Blish episode adaptations that came out in the US between 1967 and 1977. Obviously book covers vary widely style-wise even in the same era, but just by way of comparison, here’s what I’d consider a pretty typical example of North American\u00a0SF book cover illustration from the same era–a Chris Foss cover for James Blish’s Midsummer Century<\/em> from 1975:<\/p>\n

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(I adore Chris Foss’s work as well, by the way!)<\/p>\n

After a bit of digging, I discovered that those Trek<\/em> covers are the work of\u00a0Toru Kanamori, a now semi-retired illustrator living in Ome, a suburb of Tokyo. The only English-language information I could find about Kanamori is here<\/a>, a website set up by David Bull, a woodblock printer who’s a neighbor of Kanamori.<\/p>\n

According to Bull, Kanamori was once a very popular illustrator in Japan, but his name at least is\u00a0now largely forgotten there. \u00a0When Star Trek<\/em> first made inroads in Japan, Kanamori was selected to do the artwork for the translated novelizations. For each book he would supply a cover image, a color spread frontispiece, and a number of black and white interior illustrations. Bull’s site<\/a> has scans of a handful\u00a0of interior illustrations… and they’re amazing.<\/p>\n\n\t\t