"Tokyo Rising" Bonus: Chim�'Pom | Super Rat

by Awl Sponsors

Palladium Boots recently filmed Tokyo Rising, a documentary featuring Pharrell Williams exploring the way some artists in Japan are handling and helping Japan recover from the earthquake and tsunami that struck in March.

While Palladium Boots was filming Tokyo Rising, we met up with Chim↑Pom in Shinjuku, a seedy district of Tokyo. Chim↑Pom? Chim↑Pom is a six person art collective founded in 2005. Based in Tokyo, Japan, they are at the forefront of a movement that has emerged in the wake of the devastation caused by the earthquake and Tsunami.

Since Chim↑Pom’s inception, the group has created video art that fuses a progressive agenda with the antics of MTV’s Jackass. Their past work has been themed around poverty, inequality and society’s influence on the natural world. Chim↑Pom’s projects include auctioning off detonated luxury items to channel funds to Cambodian landmine victims, a variety of pieces that address the meltdown of Fukushima, and turning real-life poison-resistant “super rats” into the Pokémon character known as Pickachu.

So while in Tokyo to meet up with Chim↑Pom we visited a hidden, postage stamp-sized bar frequented by the members where they shared the story behind the 2006 piece entitled “Super Rats.” In the video clip we captured, the group relates how they transformed the mutated, rat poison-immune rodents of Center-gai in Shibuya into taxidermied versions of the popular anime character Pikachu from Pokémon.

Click here to watch the clip at the Palladium Boots website.