Whatever happened to Pink Tentacle?

Pink Tentacle is/was a fabulous website dedicated to things Japanese, viewed through a quirky lens. Its favourite recurring themes were traditional monsters and urban legends, 1960s and 70s graphic design, dystopian photoshopped images of a ruined Tokyo, artefacts from the 19th century and generally anything obscure yet amazing. I loved it – and I wasn’t the only one – until a few years ago it suddenly stopped being updated. I was so disappointed.

I was reminded of the site a few days ago while hunting down pictures of Kazumasa Nagai and Hajime Sorayama (above) and I was reminded how great it was. I also found this article which asked the same question I had asked: what happened? Why no more Pink Tentacle?

Although the article could not find an answer it did warn that after some investigation the authors had discovered that the “pinktentacle” domain name will expire on December 13th this year – will the whole rich Pink Tentacle archive then be lost? So for the next two months at least you are encouraged to scour back through old Pink Tentacle pieces on macabre childrens books (pictured above and below), urban legends such as the 1980s cursed Kleenex commercial, fabulous graphic design and general allround Pink Tentacle amazingness.