Akumu Ink aka Japanese Nightmare Tees!

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     Akuma T-Shirts, Blood, Edgar Allen Poe, Japanese horror, Japanese t-shirts, The Raven, gore, grudge, ju-on grudge, nevermore, the ring

I have left Dora from AkumuInk.com waiting in the wings for a few days whilst I took a brief but well deserved miniature t-shirt sabbatical -the truth is the best thing you can do when you’re hilt by the stultifying presence of mortality is to carry on doing what you did before, a little wiser, a little more focused than before, and so I want to give a mention to AkumuInk.com – a small but thriving independent Canadian t-shirt label offering something a little off the wall compared to most.

Akumu means Nightmare in Japanese. As Dora states – “We get our inspirations from Japanese horror movies and hardcore music. We translate these inspirations into large graphics that we screen print onto American Apparel t-shirts.” I’m a big fan of Japanese horror, in fact most Asian horror of the 1990’s and beyond have trashed anything on par from the States. Japanese horror dwells in places you wouldn’t want to dream, confronts ideas you’d rather not tackle, and delivers images that imprint on your subconscious far more deeply than any trash gore flick could manage. I was expecting to see some references to Original Japanese versions of The Ring or Ju-on: The Grudge, (not the awful American remakes), but copyright concerns mean t-shirt designers have to think “outside the box” when it comes to appropriated influences. read more