As the most prolific Japanese artist in decades, Takashi Murakami has been credited with single-handedly revitalizing his country’s contemporary art scene, merging modern anime and manga influences with traditional Japanese techniques, and blanketing Tokyo in his cartoonish “Superflat” style.

But the bulk of his work is pumped out of a place halfway across the world from his homeland: Queens.

No, Mr. Murakami has not abandoned the land of the rising sun for Queens Boulevard, though he will be in town to celebrate a retrospective of his work, “© MURAKAMI,” which opens at the Brooklyn Museum on April 5. Rather, while the artist still makes his home in Osaka, his 40-person production studio, housed in an aluminum-paneled, two-story building on a bleak stretch of Long Island City, is a virtual mill of bulbous smiley faces, caricatural imps, and multihued mushrooms.

The studio, called Kaikai Kiki, is a vehicle for Mr. Murakami’s astounding productivity, which has been seen not only in the volume of his personal output but also in his numerous collaborations, including those with fashion house Louis Vuitton and rapper Kanye West. And the studio is also the artist’s appropriation of a page from the book of, well, the master of appropriation, Andy Warhol. Mr. Murakami has frequently been called the Warhol of Japan, and has often cited the Pop art icon as one of his greatest influences. Kaikai Kiki provides ample evidence that Mr. Murakami is indeed following closely in his predecessor’s Factory footsteps.

Each day, Kaikai Kiki’s artists, mostly 20-somethings outfitted with skinny jeans and iPods, can be found in the first-floor studios carrying out instructions sent from Mr. Murakami’s office in Osaka every morning. Each painting begins with digital renderings made from Mr. Murakami’s sketches by a design team in Japan. The renderings are sent to artists in New York, who print them on acetate to make silk screens — as many as 40 a painting — which are then aligned by lasers and screened onto canvases.

But that is, literally and figuratively, just the big picture.

The artists must also mix paint according to color charts specific to each work, or, even, to a small portion of a work. “There could be a color chart for ‘left eye,'” a studio manager, Jeff Vreeland, said. A single painting can require as many as 3,000 colors. Each step of the process — every acetate printout, every silk screen, every color — must be checked for accuracy by a supervisor, and, finally, by Mr. Murakami, who receives scrupulous photographic documentation of the factory’s progress at the end of each day. And that’s before anyone picks up a paintbrush. As one artist put it, Mr. Murakami is “really, really not hands-off.”

“It’s a bit painful and it requires so much concentration, but everyone here has a sense of pride because it’s so hard to do,” Mr. Vreeland said of the process.

For the production of one of Mr. Murakami’s Daruma paintings, of a large brown head with a distended forehead, with several Japanese characters on the left-hand side, for example, an 8-by-10-inch color printout of the image was taped to a wall. On a desk to the right, the same image appeared in a larger, glossy Adobe Illustrator rendering. A stack of silk screens, eight deep, each bearing a portion of the image, was propped against the wall. And, finally, a canvas-in-progress, bearing disjointed sections of color, lay on a nearby table.

On a recent afternoon, half a dozen artists worked in silence on two paintings — one a backdrop of multicolored daisies overlaid with two smiley faces, the other a black canvas with candy-colored Louis Vuitton logos on it. The artists navigated around worktables with nary a stray word or even glance to acknowledge the presence of a visitor.

“It’s kind of meditative,” Mr. Vreeland said of the work. “You could be standing right up next to someone, say their name, and they have no idea; they’re in a trance.” The focus of the studio is clearly on technical achievement; the paintings are intended to be faithful replicas, not interpretations, and artists are hired for their technical prowess, not their creative capacity. Indeed, as the final step of the hiring process, each artist is required to complete a painting of a small mushroom, called a chibi kinoko, as a test of his or her skill. But the worker bees of Kaikai Kiki are, at heart, artists rather than technicians — most boast art school degrees and gallery shows on their résumés — so the consuming rigidity of the studio’s process can sometimes prove frustrating.

“Everybody seems to go through these stages where they like this job, but they want their own time,” an assistant supervisor, Miho Ogai, said.

A soft-spoken artist enjoying his lunch break with Ms. Ogai said his efforts to sustain his career outside the studio have often fallen short. “I try to do my own work on the side, but the hours here are really long,” Emet Sosna said. Mr. Sosna said he usually works 60 hours a week, but has worked as many as 85 hours a week during busy production periods. “It really takes away your life.”

The long hours are not the only indicator of Kaikai Kiki’s executive atmosphere. Other aspects of the workplace perpetuate the corporate vibe. The office maintains an in-house legal team to handle complex merchandising agreements, and has a staff of translators who convert every communication, including every e-mail, between Japanese and English. Computer terminals at entrances and exits allow employees to log their hours and lunch breaks.

The American studio — Kaikai Kiki also has an outpost in Tokyo — took root in the summer of 2001, when six employees worked out of a converted garage in Williamsburg. Since moving to Long Island City in 2006, the studio not only boasts temporary residences for visiting artists, including Mr. Murakami himself, but is also in the process of converting portions of its building to gallery space.

So despite the somewhat industrial nature of the studio, most of those who work there seem appreciative of, even selflessly dedicated to, Mr. Murakami’s phenomenally popular, and ever expanding, cause. Mr. Vreeland, in fact, is so committed to his work in New York that he declined an invitation to travel to the studio in Japan. “This is about learning to be a professional,” Mr. Vreeland said. “Being associated with him is something special,” he said of Mr. Murakami. “It’s art history, really, and you’re a part of it.”