Beyond Letting Go, There Is Now | Part 1: A Gaze That Begins With Others
Atau was born and raised in Japan, and now works as an art director and content creator based in France.
On social media, he plays an original character named Monique, delivering comedic, culture-driven content, but he doesn’t stop there. Sharp social commentary and unsettling truths slip in alongside the humor. Off-camera, though, he describes himself as a homebody who spends his days off lying around, scrolling his phone, and playing piano.
The self the world sees, and the self that stays home.
If he were to invite someone into his world for a single day —
his first thought wasn't what he wanted to show them. It was what they wanted to see.
Seeing the Other Before Himself
Atau studied design as an undergraduate and art direction in graduate school. “An artist makes what they want to make,” he explains, “but with a design thinking, you start from the client’s problem or need. You’re the one proposing a solution, not just expressing yourself.” True to those words, his thinking always begins with the other person, not himself.
Asked where he’d take someone if he could invite them into his world for a single day, his first instinct wasn’t to decide what he wanted to show them. It was to wonder what they wanted to see, and why they’d wanted to visit his world in the first place. Even with a stranger he happens to run into on the street, he’d rather listen than talk about himself first. That’s simply his natural way of approaching things.
What Surfaces in Motion
Atau describes himself as a homebody — not just because he’s busy, but because it’s something more fundamental than that, he says. “Getting out the door is such a hassle. Once I’m out, I actually like it. It’s just getting there that’s hard.” At home, he scrolls his phone, plays piano, sleeps when he’s tired, eats when he gets hungry. He doesn’t subscribe to Netflix or anything like it. Apple Music is the only subscription he keeps. He shares that staying focused on anything long-form isn’t easy for him, and he’s not much of a reader or a moviegoer, either.
Ideas rarely come to him while he’s still. They arrive in the shower, or out on a walk, in the moments his body is moving. He jots them down immediately in a note on his phone, then later stitches the fragments together into content. Rather than waiting in stillness, he picks ideas up in motion. That’s the creative rhythm he found naturally.
Seeing Himself Inside a Minority
Many Japanese people who move abroad may feel that becoming a minority, paradoxically, makes them feel freer. Atau’s experience has been the opposite. In France, he sometimes feels less free to act as he pleases than he does in Japan.
Here’s how he explains it: in France, simply being Asian already places him in a minority position. Standing out any further, on top of that, carries real pressure. In Japan, by contrast, he’s part of the majority, which makes it psychologically easier for him to step slightly outside the norm.
He grew up in Yokosuka, a city with the presence of a U.S. military base, and looking back, he wonders if that gave him a stronger sense than most of living in a “controlled” country. He points to a historical self-consciousness that still lingers in Japan today — one symbolized by the phrase “honorary white,” a legacy of an era when Japan aligned itself with the West and took part in colonizing other parts of Asia. He admits, candidly, that he has caught himself looking at his own reflection through a white gaze.
In nine years in France, he’d had almost no relationship with the local Japanese community. Then, two years ago, he went to a dinner gathering for the first time, and it “wasn’t as bad as I expected,” he admits. Underneath his desire to belong to a different culture, there was another realization: “There’s a mechanism where a minority discriminates against another minority, even without meaning to be prejudiced.” It can happen along lines of not only race, but also of sexual orientation. The years he spent deliberately keeping his distance from other Japanese people, he suspects, weren’t entirely unrelated — not identical, but touching something similar underneath. He has a way of finding a larger structure inside a small moment of unease. Even his private doubts, seen through his eyes, become a microcosm of society.
