What is RakugaKing?

Start with the name. Rakugaki is Japanese for a doodle or scribble. Terada welded it to 'king' to make Rakugakingu, and explains the joke himself as 'doodle plus ing': the king is not a rank, it is a rate. He draws constantly, on trains, in notebooks bought by the box, and treats the habit as a philosophy rather than a warm-up.

In February 2002, Aspect published the philosophy as an object: Terada Katsuya RakugaKing (ISBN 4-7572-0885-5), a sketch collection running past 1,000 pages. As a physical thing it is closer to a dictionary than an art book, about 8.7 by 5.9 inches and over two inches thick, softcover in a cardboard slipcase, black and white with select pages in color.

Nothing in it is curated into a portfolio. Readers of the book keep landing on the same observation: he shows everything, the finished-feeling pages and the barely-filled ones, which makes RakugaKing less a greatest-hits album than a lump of one man's thinking time. The line continued in 2022 with Terada Katsuya Sketch from PIE International, a 512-page successor.