The Quiet Life (and Death) of Noriyoshi Ohrai
Noriyoshi Ohrai died of pneumonia on October 27, 2015 at the age of 79 . For all his fifty-three productive years as a master illustrator, I cannot find a single interview. From Wikipedia on down, the same half paragraph acts as the master’s epitaph and burial shroud.
No word comes down to us from Noriyoshi Ohrai as to what he thought about himself, his work, or the world, except perhaps what we can glean from his output as a commercial illustrator.
We know that he attended Tokyo University School of Art, but didn’t bother to graduate. We know that he is survived by his son, Ohrai Taro, also an artist.
In the absense of humanizing or intimate details about his life and work, I decided to cast his natal horoscope. Noriyoshi Ohrai, born on November 17, 1936 in the Hyogo prefecture of Akashi, Japan:
The concentration of planets near the cusp of Sagitarrius and Capricorn means that Noriyoshi Ohrai was born with Christmas in his soul. Indeed, his generous share of talent allowed him to bring many fine gifts into the world.
The North Node, or Dragons Head, in Sagitarrius means that his Christmas-filled soul glutted itself on Sagitarrian themes; if the commissions he accepted in the later stage of his career are any indication, he became obsessed with military history in the 90’s. With few exceptions, nearly all of the video games he illustrated covers for pertain to the subject:
During this phase of his career, Ohrai demonstrated a procilivity for franchises virtually unknown outside of the Japanese market. Was he catering to his own tastes? The tastes of a Japanese audience? or… had Ohrai-san become a hard-line Japanese Nationalist?
Nationalism as an ideology has come under fire in recent decades as a hot-bed of racial fantaticism, and fertile grounds for strong-man leaders to sew the seeds of autocracy. In the case of Noriyoshi Ohrai, who could blame him? Japan had once been a fiercely independent nation; but the Japanese warrior spirit had been relegated to a museum piece, a cultural artifact. How many blue-eyed, auburn-haired anime protagonists could a Japanese audience be expected to stomach before feeling like popular media was a front in an on-going propaganda war aimed by Western powers at Japanese sovereignty?
An under-discussed feature of the Sagitarrian energetic profile is its warlike nature.
As the only sign holding a man-made weapon, ideas of war and conquest are implicit in the standard depiction of the Sagittarius asterism:
In the ancient world, a sound metric for a nations military strength would have been it’s horses— while the bow and arrow is an innovation that allowed the military leadership of early city-states to forge the first empires.
The emblem of Sagittarius might recall the archers on horseback that dominated the battlefields of the late Bronze Age;
The chief divinities of early Indo-European cultures were often represented as mounted lords of lightning, the proverbial ‘riders of the storm’; gods like the Greek Zeus, who wound the long rope of War; or the Vedic Indra, another bolt-throwing warrior deity.
The bolts with which these High Gods dispensed lethal justice were the instruments of divine government, while sudden death raining down from a volley of arrows fired from horseback was the shape of earthly conquest.
In astrology, three or more celestial objects concentrated in one sign or house is called a stellium. With so many planets living in the same mansion, it is naturally assumed that the attributes of the sign or house they inhabit are strengthened.
Ohrai’s Capricorn/ Sagittarius stellium is set firmly in the sixth house, a house traditionally ruled by Virgo. Virgo, ruled by the fast-moving planetary God-form Mercury, is known for its fastidiousness and attention to detail.
Ohrai’s work speaks for itself in this regard:
Another outstanding feature of Ohrai-san’s life and work is it’s relative obscurity, at least in the West.
When you look at a natal horoscope, you are looking at a snapshot of the sky as it would have appeared in both the northern and southern hemispheres at the time of birth.
The horizontal line running from left to right — from the ascendant to the descendant ,or from the 12th/1st house to the 6th/7th house, defines the plane of the earth. The signs above this line represent the dome of the sky, while those beneath it are ‘occulted’— hidden beneath the horizon line.
Because the bottom half of the horoscope are hidden from view, these houses are said to represent that which is hidden; unconscious, vegetative or generative forces, and those things done in the dark.
A large share of Ohrai’s astrological makeup is beneath the horizon line, in the ‘subterranean’ part of the sky.
Furthermore, his ascendant (at least in our hypothetical chart) is in Cancer. Astrologers think of the ascendent as the ‘mask’ worn by the querent; it is the place where we show ourselves to the world. As an interpretive mechanism, it acts as a lens that colors and focuses the rest of the astrological makeup.
Cancer is the shyest of the signs, so a Cancer ascendant compounding a large concentration of subterranean planets would go a long way toward explaining why Ohrai conducted his life in apparent silence: maybe he just wanted to be left alone to chisel away at his wonderful paintings and study military history.
Another artist with a Cancer Ascendant and a stellium of planets concentrated in one house, whose famously detailed paintings are mind-boggling in their complexity is Salvador Dali:
Dali’s earth sign stellium is in Taurus in the 11th house, well above the horizon line— close to the zenith of the sky. Like the stars he was born under, Dali’s life and career were highly visible.
Dali’s North Node, or Dragon’s Head, is in Virgo— it takes no stretch of the imagination to see that the man gorged himself on obsessive, minute detail:
Norioshi Ohrai’s approach to visual copy— his work functioned as advertising copy, for the most part; that’s why I call it that, though I feel it approaches the status of High Art— seems to reference the style of mid-20th century state propaganda.
Earlier we speculated that Ohrai might have become a staunch Japanese Nationalist based on the commissions he accepted later in his career:
The inference is that if Ohrai wasn’t a fascist, or a nationalist, he was at least drawn to the aesthetics of fascism (or nationalism— the distinction between the two ideologies is rapidly fading). This is something something he, Frank Herbert (of Dune fame), and Salvador Dali had in common.
Delving into Dali’s fascism is an essay in itself, but briefly:
His support for Franscisco Franco’s dictatorship was unequivocal and public;
His painting titled The Enigma of Hitler (1939) is but one of several eyebrow-raising factors suggesting Dali met Adolf Hitler’s particular brand of hard-line Fascist-Government- galvanized-by-personality-cult with fascination rather than revulsion; and, finally:
Toward the end of his life, Dali not only converted to, but enthusiastically embraced Catholicism— with the Vatican being perhaps the most grievous perpetrator of iron-handed government mentioned yet, depending on what you believe about the Catholic Church:
We might look to the placement of Saturn to decrypt our subjects’ respective relationships to government, particularly fascist government. Ohrai’s Saturn is in Pisces in the 9th, while Dali’s is in Aquarius in the 8th— while it isn’t a perfect match, it’s pretty damn close.
You’ve come to a cross-roads…
Proceed to Noriyoshi Ohrai’s Greco-Roman Baddies in Space?
Or…
American Films Noriyoshi Ohrai Illustrated?
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