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When it Rains, it Pours (I) ...
Posted by Dave Bull on May 4, 2014 [Permalink]
... and it's raining so hard here the past couple of days, that we're scrambling to survive!
It's not uncommon at all for our work - especially the recent Ukiyoe Heroes prints - to be blogged about by other people. In truth, Jed and I have had to do very little in the way of promotion - game fans all over the world are so eager to do it for us! There's never a day goes by without somebody blogging about us, or posting images to Tumblr or Reddit,
These mentions of our work help to keep a steady stream of people visiting our websites and YouTube channel, and X% of such visitors (it varies widely) will decide to collect our work. Because of this, the number of subscribers to our current Portraits series has grown steadily, and has recently begun to approach the limits of what we are able to produce, given our current makeup of staff.
The five women working here as printers are now stretched to the limit, and the three outside professionals that we have been hiring are also pretty much doing all that they can for us (they also have to accept other jobs - it would be dangerous for them to take only work from us ...)
I have been casting around for other people who are capable of working to the level that we require, and a couple of weeks back, made a visit to Takumi Hanga, the workshop/classroom run by my friend, the carver Motoharu Asaka. He is a very capable carver, in truth the only other carver 'out there' who I would consider for our projects. In the past I have been able to send a bit of work his way, one example being this job:
That was a commission by US artist Moira Hahn, who had called me a few years ago to see if I would be able to make prints for her. I was too busy at the time with my own projects, so introduced her to Asaka-san, who - together with his partner, printer Hishimura-san - produced that edition for her.
When I knocked on the door to Asaka-san's place a few weeks ago (having made an appointment with him for a time when he wasn't going to be occupied with students, etc.) I had a few things in mind. The first was to get his advice on my hunt for capable printers. Perhaps his partner Hishimura-san might be willing to do some work for us, or failing that, could he recommend anybody? The second was to ask (yet again) if he himself might possibly have some time to do some carving for us. And the third was to plant a seed in his mind as to the possibility of sometime in the future perhaps combining forces (my publishing arm, and his classroom business) to open a facility together somewhere in Tokyo. (I'm still trying to creep slowly towards the Mokuhankan 201x vision ...).
I said that this visit to Asaka-san was a couple of weeks ago, and the reason that I haven't blogged about it until now, is that I have been too busy to even think about such a thing. Busy because ... I 'scored' on all three points!
Let's try to chew through the news ... as I said up top, when it rains, it pours, and I wasn't kidding!
The first of the three is easy to cover, as I don't yet have much to report. While I sat there in his room, he made a phone call to a workshop he knows well from his own days living and working in Kyoto, and which he feels is capable of doing my jobs. He described my work to them, emphasizing the kind of quality level and printing styles that I will be requiring, and the upshot is that I will be jumping on the bullet train to visit them next week, with a sample job in my backpack.
He is quite confident that they will come through, and I certainly hope he is right, because (as I mentioned above) I not only need more printers, I desperately (as we will see in another post soon) need more printers. I'll report more about how this turns out after my meeting with them ...
The second point is also easy to report. Yes, he finally agreed to take some of our work! Yippee!
What has happened to cause him to change his mind? Has he become desperately short of work? It doesn't seem so, as he appears to be steadily busy with a mix of carving jobs and his own classroom activities. What has changed is that - now with three/four months of 'history' at this end of having another carver on our payroll (young Kawasaki-san, who is doing much of the carving of the Portraits series) - I was finally able to put some numbers on the table, to show how my 'pay the carvers a royalty' system is working in practice. I was able to show him exactly month by month how it works: how her initial payment was somewhat lower than a traditional 'pay for the blocks' would have been, but how that has been supplemented month by month with recurring payments every time we have taken more impressions from the blocks. And how that will continue endlessly into the future as long as those prints continue to be popular.
He was impressed. And then when I took away the next barrier, by telling him that my 'deadline' for the next job in our Ukiyoe Heroes project was a good two months away, he signed on. I have now sent him a blank block and the hanshita for one of our upcoming designs, the one Jed calls 'Gift of the Dragon':
Now both of these things are very good news, and if these had been the only things resulting from that visit, it would have been well worth my train fare :-) but it was the third thing I tossed his way - the idea of a future collaboration between our two organizations - that has caused the biggest splash.
I didn't spend much time on it during my visit; simply I suggested that because rents and buildings in Tokyo were so expensive, a collaboration might be an interesting concept to explore; I - half jokingly - suggested that with me using space for a shop/workroom; with Asaka-san using space for a classroom; with our friend Ueda-san the used book/print dealer taking space for his own products; with 'somebody' taking space for a café ... etc. etc. ... it might just be possible to find a building somewhere ...
We batted this around a bit over our lunch, and I then left for home, being quite satisfied to have made progress on my two main reasons for the visit, and not really expecting anything to come out of the other suggestion.
But he called me back a couple of days later, and when I heard what he had to say, I jumped on a train and headed straight downtown for a quick meeting on a street corner in Asakusa.
The next part of the story is going to take some time to tell, and I have to get back to my bench tonight, so let's just leave it here for now, with this screenshot from Google maps:
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