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 as to what he thought about himself or the world, except perhaps what we can glean from his work 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 chart.
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.
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?
An under-discussed feature of the Sagitarrian energetic profile is its warlike nature.
As the only sign holding a man-made weapon, war and conquest are implicit in the Sagittarian ideogram:
At one time, 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 recalls the archers on horseback that would have dominated the ancient world.
It might also recall the chief divinity of early Indo-European cultures, such as Zeus and Indra. These gods were often represented as lords of lightning, gods of the Storm; the thunderbolts with which the High God dispensed justice might well recall the impact of the bow and arrow on battlefields in the Age of Bronze.
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, the natural conclusion is that the attributes of the sign or house they inhabit are strengthened.
Ohrai’s stellium is in the sixth house, traditionally ruled by Virgo; a sign known for its fastidiousness and attention to detail.
The artist’s work speaks for itself in this regard:
Another outstanding feature of Ohrai-san’s life and work is his 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 concealed beneath the horizon line.
Because the objects in the bottom half of the horoscope are hidden from view, these houses are said to represent the hidden, unconscious, vegetative or generative forces, as well as those things done in the dark.
The better 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.
The Crab is considered the shyest of the signs, while the ascendent has been described as the ‘mask’ the querent wears. It’s the outward-facing portion of the chart, the place where we show ourselves to the world; to astrologers, the ascendent acts as a lens through which to view the rest of the astrological makeup.
A Cancer ascendant compounding a large concentration of subterranean planets might explain why Ohrai conducted his life in silence: maybe all he wanted was to stay behind the scenes chiseling away at his wonderful paintings and studying military history.
Another artist with a Cancer Ascendant 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 and toward the zenith of the sky.
Like the stars he was born under, Dali’s life and career were highly visible. His North Node, or Dragon’s Head, is in Virgo— and it takes no stretch of the imagination to see that the man gorged himself on minute detail:
Norioshi Ohrai’s approach to visual copy— is it ok if I call it that when his work largely functioned as advertising copy?— seems to reference the style of mid-20th century state propaganda.
Earlier in this article we speculated that he may 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, he was at least drawn to the aesthetics of fascism— 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 Fascist-Government- galvanized-by-personality-cult with fascination rather than revulsion; and toward the end of his life, Dali converted to Catholicism— 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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