Vice Style

Ryoichi “Keroppy” Maeda is a photographer and journalist who’s been obsessively documenting the underground rise in popularity of Japanese extreme body modification for the last twenty years. He also happens to be the man responsible for bringing the bubbly saline injection-based forehead look to Japan. Obviously, it’s now huge there. Saying that, even though it’s exactly what you’d expect from the country of loo-roll dispenser hats, apparently body modification is still somewhat of a taboo out there, with journalists who choose to cover it usually doing so at the risk of their own careers. I had a chat with Ryoichi to try to help me understand why people are choosing to inject themselves with fluids in order to temporarily change their appearance.