MUSHIO: THE UNLIKELY HERO BUILT FROM A STINK BUG
Photographer llunafalgas Lluna Falgàs and writer Miranda Remington trace an ongoing search for myth and narrative documenting their encounter with Tokyo-based costume designer Kameyama Mushio at his home-studio in Japan.
Somewhere in Tokyo, an anonymous costume designer builds a hero out of a stink bug.
Kameyama Mushio is a handmade, humanoid kamemushi, or stink bug, part urban legend, part wearable sculpture. Behind Mushio is a craftsman who prefers to remain unseen, concealed behind his own craftsmanship.
The creator of Mushio is a master of tokusatsu costuming, a genre of Japanese live-action television and film defined by elaborate practical effects and deeply shaped by Showa and Heisei-era nostalgia.
At its center stands Kamen Rider, the long-running franchise whose insect-eyed heroes transform their bodies into weapons. For over fifty years, beetles, moths, dragonflies, and other creatures have been reimagined through rubber suits, sculpted prosthetics, and segmented armor, turning the human body into a living special effect.
Though synonymous with children’s television, tokusatsu has always carried themes of mutation, identity, and transformation, occasionally drifting into territory that recalls the body horror of David Cronenberg or Shinya Tsukamoto.
In Japan, insects occupy a rich symbolic landscape. Cicadas carry the melancholy of summer, fireflies glow with longing, dragonflies evoke speed and resilience.
The kamemushi, by contrast, belongs to no such poetic hierarchy. It is an insect more often avoided than admired. And yet it is this humble stink bug that is painstakingly transformed into a hero through craftsmanship, performance, and storytelling.
Here we step away from the fiction to meet the hands that built the suit, exploring how an unloved insect became an unlikely hero, and how metamorphosis can emerge through layers of latex and resin.
Somewhere between costume-making, nostalgia, and urban folklore, Mushio is more than just a character.
