Endo Mizuki always enjoyed seeing his drawings come to life. As a child growing up in a working-class family in suburban Kanagawa, a prefecture outside Tokyo, he made flip books for fun, drawing cartoon dinosaurs, “Toy Story” characters and stick figures chasing each other. By the time he reached secondary school, he dreamed of becoming an animator. But he knew that breaking into the industry was extremely difficult, and he needed a back-up plan. So when he was 16 years old, he enrolled in a vocational high school to study computer programming. There he largely kept his artistic aspirations to himself. “Even if I told my classmates about it, I didn’t think I could get them to understand it,” he recalled when we met in Tokyo in autumn 2024.

Endo nevertheless continued honing his skills. After graduating in 2021 he picked up shifts as a cashier at a grocery store, which left him time to daydream and draw. At home he watched tutorials on YouTube and studied the styles of artists he admired, including Saito Atsushi, who designed characters for his favourite anime series, “Love Live! Superstar!!”, about a girlband. 

A cheerful young man with floppy bottle-blond hair, Endo showed me some of his work from those days. In one drawing a teenage girl in school uniform with green hair leans backwards to look at the sky; in another, a sweaty young woman with purple eyes opens a freezer door to cool herself down. “I drew as I liked and once I was satisfied with one picture, I moved on to the next,” he told me. The joy he felt made any doubts about his uncertain career prospects melt away.