The trials and tribulations of a foreigner living in Japan set in motion a novel career in cartooning.

Standing an impressive 1.95m, illustrator, gaming artist and graphic designer Warren Popelier cuts an imposing figure.

This, coupled with his fair hair and skin, makes it easy to picture him as the main attraction in the busy streets of Osaka, Japan, where he spent eight years working as an English language teacher and illustrating comic strips for local magazines.

I laugh when imagining an unsuspecting local’s surprise at being greeted by this striking foreigner, not only in their regional dialect but with a refined Osaka accent.

“Japanese people are surprised you speak any Japanese at all, never mind a dialect,” Warren jokes. “And in a land where I was head and shoulders over 99 per cent of the population, I was a source of wonder, amusement and fright.”

Having to adapt is nothing new for the Australian-born, English-bred local.

Originally from Perth, Western Australia, Warren moved to the Isle of Man in England’s north at age five where he lived until heading east to Leeds for university, something that may not have transpired if not for the efforts of a perceptive school teacher who suggested Warren pursue his artistic talents.

“When I was 16 I thought I was going to work in a bank. My mother cleaned a house for a bank manager and his wife. He arranged for me to go into the bank and meet the assistant manager, so that’s what I thought I was going to do,” Warren remembers.

“Then one of the art teachers (at school) suggested art college.”

Without delay Warren applied to the college and fronted for an interview, unaware a wellorganised portfolio and prior learning were a must. Regardless of his lack of preparation, Warren breezed into the course. It wouldn’t be the first time his blasé approach to life would shock onlookers.

“When I was choosing what university to go to I didn’t know which one I wanted, so I found all the ones that were relevant to illustration and put them into a hat,” Warren laughs. Leeds was Warren’s first preference drawn from the mix and he made the cut.

It was while living and working in London after finishing his degree that Warren met his future wife, Yasue Hirayama.

“I was freelancing in London with friends,” he says. Some of us actually shared a house so we did arty things together.”

By “arty things” Warren means creative mischief.

“You’ve probably heard of a magazine in London called Time Out which has listings (of art exhibitions),” he explains. “It was free so we put our house in as an exhibition. We gave the address and tried to make out that some people had taken an empty house and filled it with everyday objects to make it look like somebody lived there. They actually printed it.”

It was this same house, which the roguish artist remembers with fondness, that brought Warren and Yasue together.

“We had a party with a couple of bands in the back garden. One of the guys I was playing with – I played bass but not very well – had a Japanese girlfriend and she invited lots of her Japanese friends who were living in London at the time. Yasue happened to be one of them,” Warren says.

Less than a year later Warren was on Yasue’s doorstep in her hometown of Osaka.

“That is very unusual in Japan,” he explains. “They never usually let anyone stay in their house that they don’t know.” A year later the pair were married, staying on in the city, where Warren taught English and freelanced in graphics for another three years. “It was hard to adjust, very hard,” he says. Apart from being one of only two people he knew who spoke English, Warren says there were many cultural eccentricities to master.

“Most cultural mistakes that foreigners in Japan make are just little things like wearing shoes in the house or not pouring a drink for someone else at dinner,” he explains. “The Japanese just giggle and think: ‘Silly foreigner doesn’t know how to do it’. It’s not meant in a nasty way.

“Japan can be amazingly interesting and different one moment, amazingly frustrating and illogical the next. I’ve talked about this with my wife many times. We agree that Japan can be so extreme.”

The challenges he faced as part of a minority group in a foreign land, though difficult, paid dividends to Warren in the end, giving him the chance and the material to live out many an illustrator’s dream.

“I had done a bit of cartooning in London but it was just for friends,” he explains.

“But in Japan I met this American guy. He was a very talented writer and we did a comic together called Bad English. It’s a satire about English language school in Japan. It went down pretty well. We did have dreams about publishing it as a book but I soon realised it wasn’t going to work. No one outside of Japan would understand it.”

Warren says he came up with a second comic series for another magazine but soon realised the public weren’t ready for his noholds-barred approach.

“I came up with the idea of a Japanese taxi driver who hated foreigners,” Warren explains. “When I spoke to the publisher he wanted to make a comic strip taking the mickey out of the Japanese and the way they do things. There’s a lot of material for that but I said: ‘Everyone does that so what’s the point? I want to take a different angle and take the mickey out of the foreigners who live in Japan’.

“He said OK but it didn’t go down too well. I think some people just didn’t want to see it. I was a bit scathing sometimes. I didn’t pull any punches.”

After four-and-a-half years in Osaka, Warren and Yasue moved to Sydney where Warren ventured into two new fields –designing badges for the Sydney Olympics and illustrating gaming concepts for poker machines. Although the badge gig didn’t last, his passion for gaming concepts did.

Warren, who returned to Osaka with Yasue after six years in Sydney before settling in Cairns a year ago, has spent much of the past decade working in the 3D world of poker games. However, local punters keen to check out his illustrative genius needn’t get too excited. All of Warren’s designs are for a Japanese market, so there’s little chance of playing his masterfully created games here.

With so much of his adult life and his career embedded in his adopted Japanese home, it makes sense to ask if Warren feels his work has been shaped by his Osaka experience.

“When I moved to Sydney in ’98, I took my portfolio around the traps and quite a few art directors said they could see a Japanese influence,” Warren says.

“I couldn’t see it myself but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. I’m sure anyone artistic can’t help picking up influences here and there, subconsciously or otherwise.

“What really bugs me though are the artists and illustrators who rip off Japanese styles and think that they are doing something different because the irony is Japanese creatives have been looking to the West for ideas for years.”

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