rockm
Spuds Moyogi
Uh, you want me to do your research, spoonfeed you images from culling through 200 or 300 bonsai books in my collection, sorry ain't gonna happen The best I can do is point you to photos of the original hinoki cypresses at the Arnold Arboretum's Larz Anderson collection. Those cypress were imported in the early years of the 20th century. They were 150-250 years old at the time. They were pretty close to the Takozukuri style. They have been redesigned and rehabilitated over the years, but the original design is still part of them.This... doesn't really give any good results at all. In @cishepard's thread on Cosmic Bonsai, you called it repackaged octopus style and then linked to Tony Tickle's review which didn't discuss octopus style or takozukuri at all
Google also doesn't really have good results. This BCI page isn't descriptive of the style, and links to this tree profile, which doesn't discuss styling. Bonsaigers describes it as "when long thick branches starts from a short main trunk", i.e. oak style. Bonsai Society of Greater Cincinatti gets the closest to what you describe. The other search results of "octopus style bonsai" I saw are using octopus as description instead of nomenclature. Look through older books that have illustrations of Meiji-era bonsai is not helpful to understanding more about this. Got any better links or images that you can show us?
look, it is (or was) an established style back 150-100 years ago, likely Chinese in origins. It was abandon as bonsai turned more naturalistic in style around the early 1900's when bonsai was being criticized by westerners (and some Japanese) as 'unnatural' and that trees looked tortured. That conclusion is understandable as Kozomiku or takokazuri style trees. Don't believe me, then don't believe me. Believe some guy developed his own style after 500 years of bonsai history. There's nothing really new under the sun. The Cosmic bonsai stuff is not really original, as much as it is re-purposed, either consciously or subconsciously. There's nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with saying it is your idea.