My artist name is “mienaimonotachi.”

To be completely honest, I think it’s a strange name.

For people who don’t understand Japanese, they might simply hear the sound of it and feel whatever they feel. But as a Japanese person, I think it’s strange.

And by “strange,” I mean that it’s not really a word you would normally think of as a name.

It feels like I took a word that refers to something invisible—just an ordinary word—and made it into a name.

On top of that, “invisible things” is a phrase that has been used over and over again in Japan in recent years.

The idea that “the things you can’t see are what really matter” has been repeated so many times that, to me, it has become almost cliché. It’s not particularly interesting anymore.

There were other things about it that, personally, I thought were kind of uncool.

So I wanted to choose a different name.

And yet, I decided to make this word my name.

The reason was simply this:

I couldn’t shake the feeling that, somehow, this was something deeply important to me.

I decided to use this name in 2019.

At that point, expressing myself through art was hardly even on my mind.

I had only just begun to feel that I wanted to express myself in some way.

I was still working as an office employee at the time, and I felt uncomfortable expressing something under my real name. I wanted to start creating and expressing myself under a different name.

I thought of several possibilities.

And among them, there was this one word that felt strange as a name, but somehow I couldn’t leave it out because I had this feeling that it was something very important to me.

That word was:

“mienaimonotachi” (invisible things)

When you hear the phrase “invisible things,” many people might immediately think of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

And there is a line from the book that has stayed with me since I was a child:

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The message that runs throughout The Little Prince—that the things that truly matter can be found in what we cannot see—has always remained somewhere inside me.

To be honest, when I read it as a child, no matter how many times I thought about it, I remember thinking,

Huh? I don’t get it.

It felt like it was saying something important, but I just couldn’t understand what.

Maybe that was exactly why the message stayed with me, quietly sitting somewhere in the corner of my mind for years and years.

As I grew older, I felt like I understood it a little more.

And yet, it was still something I couldn’t quite grasp.

Something I couldn’t fully explain.

Something that always felt a little uncertain, somehow.

It had been stuck in my heart for a very long time.

I had a feeling that I still hadn’t truly understood what it meant.

When I decided to make this my artist name in 2019, I myself didn’t understand why I was so drawn to this idea of the “invisible.”

Of course, I knew that it had always existed somewhere inside me.

But I thought of it simply as one of the many mysteries I carried within myself.

At that point, I had simply followed my intuition. Something inside me strongly pulled me toward this name, and I decided:

This is it. I’m going with this name.

Of course, I did have a desire to take things that I couldn’t put into words—things that weren’t clearly visible or understandable—and somehow transform them into something visible through my art.

But there was still something else about this word that attracted me.

I just had a vague feeling that there was something more to it.

And then, after I began creating art and went through countless questions and conversations with myself, I finally understood.

I suddenly realized:

Ah. So this is why I felt that this word was so important to me. This is what it meant.

The “mienaimonotachi” (invisible things) that I most wanted to express—

was my true feelings.

I had lived for a very long time with the feeling that I could never completely understand myself.

And I realized that this was because I had never really been looking at my true self.

In other words, I had never really allowed myself to feel what was truly inside me.

And eventually, I came to understand why.

The self is always right there, attached to you—or rather, completely intertwined with you.

And because it is so close, because it is one with you, you cannot see it.

That’s why I came to understand something:

“The one person you can never meet in this world is yourself.”

And because you can never truly encounter yourself—because you cannot see yourself from the outside—you cannot fully know yourself.

You cannot see yourself, and therefore, you cannot easily understand yourself.

I realized that, among all the “invisible things” in this world, what I most wanted to express was my own true feelings.

Once I understood that, everything suddenly made sense.

From that moment on, I was finally able to embrace this strange name with confidence.

And I became ready to share my art with the world under this strange name:

mienaimonotachi.

September 29, 2026

mienaimonotachi

みえないものたち