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Year-end wrapup ...
Posted by Dave Bull on December 31, 2011 [Permalink]
With the final batch of new year prints being dropped off at the post office this evening, the year's work can finally be said to be finished! As it is still 2011 here in Tokyo, I don't want to post an image of the print just yet, but it will be online tomorrow morning over on the New Year card page of the site.
And in what is a 'first' for me, the print this time wasn't hand-carved and printed all by me. It seemed to make no sense to make two prints - one for the collectors of my personal print work, and one for the Mokuhankan business - so we wrapped all the mailing lists together, and sent everybody the same print.
I carved it late in November and then gave Tsushima-san the job of printing. Or should say, almost all the printing. We did it the traditional way: the 'master' printer here did the key block, and she did all the colour blocks. And as we needed 300 copies, this was quite a substantial job for her, far and away the most copies of anything that she has printed.
We split the batch in half, and did 150 at a time, mostly so that she could get any particular colour done in one session, something that would be very difficult for her if there had been 300 in the batch.
While she was working on this, I spent a couple of days this past week getting the bookkeeping done for the year. As part of that job, I had to go over the past months' time sheets for the printer trainees, and was a bit surprised by some of the data that turned up.
Because Tsushima-san has a family (including a baby girl) she is limited in the time she is able to spend here: she comes on three days each week (at most), and usually only about four (sometimes five) hours each time. The time sheets show that she started coming here on the last day of June, almost exactly six months ago. Adding up the hours, I see that by the end of November, at the time that she was about to begin this new year card printing job, she had accumulated exactly 160 hours here.
Based on a 40-hour work week, that means she has put in about one month, if calculated like a 'normal' employee. The day she came, she had never held a baren before. After 'one month', she was ready to take on the assignment of doing the colour printing for my new year card - in an edition of 300 copies. The reject rate? I guess there are about a dozen or so copies that I would rather not send out. No worse really, than I would probably have done myself.
So I think we're 'ready'. She's off for the year-end break now, and won't be back again until the 10th of January (when her kids are finally back in school). I've got the next couple of months work now planned out for her - she'll be doing re-prints of some of the images I originally published in my Surimono Albums and the original Treasure Chest. And her output is going to go straight into our catalogue.
She has been earning 1,000 per hour (just about $13 US), so my investment in her training to this point runs to something just over $2,000. It'll take a bit of time before that all comes back, but we're in no hurry ... and the 'payoff' will continue for a very long time to come, I think!
In other year-end 'news' I can mention that on the Saturday before Xmas, we had our first Mokuhankan staff get-together, with everybody bringing the kids over for an afternoon of food and games.
The ladies outdid themselves with the food, and we all had a good time playing with a bunch of the wooden games and puzzles that I still have here from those days a quarter of a century ago when we first arrived in Japan empty-handed, and I had to quickly, and on a very tight budget, create some stuff for my kids to play with ...
I wrote a bit about our party over on the Story A Week site too ...
A nice way to end off our year! (I wonder how many of us there will be working here come next December?) A dozen?
Or just one again? :-)
Added by: Dave on January 1, 2012, 12:09 am
Hah! Speaking of 'year end wrapup' ... during this evening (the 31st), I was doing my customary email cleanup, emptying out my Inbox, and getting the empty folders ready for the coming year. I got that done with a bit of time to spare, and was thinking of firing up a spreadsheet and starting on the 'closing' of the books for the year, thinking that there wouldn't be anything else coming in at this point.
Good thing I didn't actually start that, because at 11:54 my email gave me the little 'fanfare' that signals an order coming in.
Yes! Just six minutes before the end of the year, an order (for the Summer Senshafuda prints) cleared Paypal processing and dropped into the box.
Quickly, before the clock could cross the midnight line, I fired back a reply: "Sorry, but I can't send this to you until next year!" (Followed - of course - by a 'smiley')
But now that I think about it, perhaps it would have been better if he had waited ten minutes or so. Wouldn't it be better for me to have had the order as a nice start to the year?
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