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I remember that well, because I had found out about it from one of our staff members who had passed by and noticed their new sign being hung. She came running, "Bad news! Competition opening up! ..."

After I learned the details, that yes indeed, we were going to have a strong 'competitor' next door, I reassured all our staff members. "People, please relax. There is enough room in this city for a dozen print shops! Imagine for a minute how it could be: Sakai-san has opened in the next block; perhaps Adachi would open right next door to us ... then Takamizawa on the other side .. What would you think about that?"

My point was clear - such a situation would be fantastic for us! Every single visitor to Tokyo who had even the slightest interest in ukiyo-e prints would be certain to come and visit this street. It would be heaven! We have enough confidence in the quality of our prints, and in the value we are bringing to society, that there is no need at all to worry about 'competition'. Honestly speaking, we simply don't have any.

But alas, that 'vision' of mine was not to be. And in fact, we are now moving even farther away from such a chance. At the end of last month, Sakai Kokodo closed that new shop, after just three years in that location. The sign has not yet been taken down, but a new tenant has begun work inside ...

I confess to mixed feelings. As I said, I have no problem with having 'competition', and am saddened by their failure. But there is undeniably a little voice inside me that is seeing this happen and thinking, "Heh heh ... We're OK ... We figured this out ..."

But I think I'll do what I can to suppress that sort of thing. We are still a very long way from the exit of this long tunnel. As readers of our Instagram must have noticed yesterday from a post Cameron made there, our own shop has now been shut exactly a year. Unlike Sakai-san though, we haven't given up on this. Because of our strong online presence, backed by excellent social media skills, we hope to be able to carry on until some kind of 'normality' returns.

Our own hard work and 'smarts', plus wonderfully strong support from our fans/friends/customers ... this should see us through!

'Shrink' back down ...

Supplementary video on the Tōkaidō prints ...

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I've just uploaded a new video to our YouTube channel: a 'supplement' to the previous one about Tōkaidō prints:

'Shrink' back down ...

Let’s take a trip down the Tōkaidō!

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Our next video is ready ... Let’s take a trip down the Tōkaidō!

'Shrink' back down ...

It has been a few weeks since I made the long post here about the decisions facing me on our Asakusa building. But here on the six-month 'anniversary' of closing our shop, it's long past time for an update!

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It has been a few weeks since I made the long post here about the decisions facing me on our Asakusa building. But tonight, on the six-month 'anniversary' of closing our shop, it's time for an update!

I wasn't able to post a quick followup at that time, because the scheduled meeting with the landlady that I mentioned didn't come about. It has become pretty clear that she is not interested in discussing issues such as the sale/re-construction of the building, and simply wants to maintain the status quo, with her monthly rent revenue coming in as stably as possible. So the past few weeks have been a bit more of a 'muddle' than a time of clear decisions.

But things have been happening, and it's time to bring you an update. Perhaps point by point might be an easy way to do this …

• I mentioned that the lease on the building was up for renewal. We actually have three separate leases here; because each floor came available at different times, we leased them one by one. The renewal that was facing me last month was for the 2nd floor - the place where we first started. The 3rd floor lease is not coming due until late next year, but the one for the 1st floor comes around next January, only four months from now. So instead of the binary decision I was projecting in that blog post (do we stay or do we leave), we do have the option for another way forward: keep the upper two floors, but let go of the ground level, reverting to the situation of three years ago, when another tenant was in that space.

• So that is what I have done; I signed on again for the 2nd floor, and will also (assuming we can stay alive) do so for the 3rd floor when it comes due next year. The rents for these two upper floors are very inexpensive, partly due to the fact that we ourselves were responsible for turning them into useable spaces, and partly because it is so difficult to run a business in an upstairs environment. This means that even if overseas visitors do not return in any foreseeable future, we still have a place where our workers can make prints together, and we still maintain our Asakusa 'brand'. There might not be a shop in our future, but 'Asakusa Mokuhankan' will still be a 'thing'.

• This though, still doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the shop space on the 1st floor. The rent for that floor is far higher than the other two (combined), and we can see no glimmer of any chance of visitors returning. I have punted the ball down the field a little bit, but by January will still have to make the same decision: stay or leave. And actually, according to the strict written terms, if we are planning to leave, we are supposed to give notice of that intent three months before the end of the lease (October 31 would technically be the last day for that).

• Over the past couple of weeks since I wrote the previous post, something else has changed here in Asakusa; there are now numerous empty shops in the district with 'For Lease' signs on the front (テナント募集, in Japanese). I have never seen this before in Asakusa. There has been such high demand for retail space that anytime a business decides to close, a successor is found long before the space actually becomes empty, and the 'handover' happens virtually overnight. The real estate office directly across the street from us is one such space, and - even closer to home! - the kimono rental shop next door suddenly moved out last night. (I picked up one of the cabinets they were throwing out, by 'buying it' from one of the workers who was smashing all the furniture into kindling, ready for taking to the dump …) So … it is suddenly very clear to our landlady, if it wasn't before, that we are very valuable to her; it might not be so easy after all for her to rent this out if we did decide to leave …

So let's 'add it all up' here, and see what we have:

• we want to stay, and she wants us to stay. OK, negotiate a bit, and stay.
• but there are no customers here (our six years of experience here has shown us that Japanese people do not buy our woodblock prints), so there is no point.
• but there will be customers 'one day', when the virus is controlled (I'm guessing/hoping/wishing on that, but what else can you do …).
• so … start some other kind of business in the space, one for which there is domestic demand.
• easy to say, but even though the shop is closed, I am actually extremely busy here these days keeping things running (print production, subscriptions and the online shop), and simply don't have the resources to initiate some dramatically new type of business venture. It's not totally from lack of trying; each time I need to do a batch of paper sizing upstairs, I have to clear away the pots, pans, and various ingredient packages from the experiments I have been making on trying to come up with some kind of interesting 'edible' product that would be of interest to our local market. (Viewers of our live streams have heard bits and pieces of news about this … the elusive 'Baren Cookies' … muffins, etc. and etc.). So far though, none of these experiments has resulted in anything even remotely appropriate or marketable ...

I said a moment ago that "Japanese people do not buy our woodblock prints" and this is true; domestic revenue has been a single digit percentage of our Asakusa business ever since it began, and a low digit at that, and mostly Print Parties, a product that is not profitable, and which we can no longer offer anyway. But - and this may seem quite paradoxical - there is huge interest among Japanese people in what we do. Speaking very generically here, 'they' come into the shop and chat with staff members for sometimes literally hours about our work, before then saying 'Thank you, that was so interesting', and leaving.

Aoyama-san and I were discussing this the other day (he's the member here who does most of our in-house construction, renovation, and block making, etc. these days) and it occurred to us … might we possibly be able to turn that 'interest' into a new model for the 1st floor space? They want to come and see the prints. They want to learn about traditional woodblock prints. They just don't want to buy any. Well … there is a standard and well-understood business model that actually matches those needs. It's called a 'museum'.

Before starting Mokuhankan, when I was still doing personal exhibitions every year, I always included a selection from the small collection of interesting prints I had acquired to help me in my training. I even held 'Gallery Talks' to help show the works, and these were very well received …

That collection has grown quite extensively in the past few years, and now encompasses some thousands of prints, most of which are the kind of works ignored by major institutions, who typically focus on famous (and expensive) items.

These days, in what has been a completely spontaneous development, the final 15 minutes of each of my live streams on Twitch, in which I pull out something from the collection for a short 'Show and Tell', has become the most popular part of the streams by far.

I think you can see where this is leading, and at this point, we here have pretty much convinced ourselves that we can give this a try. Aoyama-san and I are now busily sketching and planning how the physical layout would work, and how we might actually implement this in the available space on the 1st floor. I certainly don't want just a rectangular box with a few things hanging on the wall; that would be of no interest to anybody. The space - the environment itself - has to be interesting and appealing, and then within that space, I would select and curate interesting displays from the collection.

We would make it clear to potential attendees in all our materials (pamphlets, website, media promotion) that anybody coming would need to bring their phone … and their earbuds. Why? Because I want to talk to everybody … to tell them just why I chose each particular work, just what they can look at, and just where the beauty lies. And because I can't be there every day for every person I will have to prepare this material in advance, and make it accessible to the visitors through such means as QR codes next to each print on display.

And the displays! Those of you who have seen the early entries in our online version of this collection already know what I am planning for these! Because our collection is not made up of extremely rare ancient items that are on the verge of final collapse, we are free to display them in whatever way we can devise that shows off their beauty and appeal. And as we plan to rotate the items in curated and themed exhibitions every few months, the risk of fading is not a problem for us. That room is going to look stunning!

And the space at the rear of the 1st floor - the beautiful little room we built in which we formerly held the Print Parties - that space can of course become a small shop. Things will be packed a little bit more densely than they are in the current shop space, but that is perhaps not a bug, but a feature ...

We are under no illusions that we can suddenly and instantly make a go of this new approach. We are simply going to step back in time - back six years, to the time when we first opened the Asakusa shop in that tiny room up on the 2nd floor - and give this a try. There will be very few visitors at first, and we will be operating deep in the red, but as word gets around, and as we ourselves get better at actually running this new operation, that will hopefully change.

And then down the road - at the point when tourists are again allowed into Japan, and we begin to see foreign faces in Asakusa - we will be ready for them. A great many of our previous visitors asked the same question, "Where in Tokyo can I go to see interesting Japanese prints? There don't seem to be many places for that …"

Well if we can work this out over the next few months, we might then have a new answer!

Stay tuned ...

'Shrink' back down ...

I feel like I'm standing in a little clearing in the middle of a vast forest, with a bunch of different paths leading off in different directions, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out which way to go.

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It has been quite a while since I made a longish blog post here on the Conversations chatting about our 'situation'. Around a decade ago, I used to post here quite frequently when I was pondering possible futures for a publishing venture, and putting such posts together helped me sort out my own thoughts.

I think it's time to try another one … because to tell the truth, I feel like I’m standing in a little clearing in the middle of a vast forest, with a bunch of different paths leading off in different directions, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out which way to go. All my usual methods of making an important decision - spreadsheets, lists of + and - points, you name it - are failing me this time. There is just so much data on the table that I'm stymied.

So this is not so much to ask the 'reader' to make my decision for me, but just another method of trying to clarify my thoughts. By the time I get to the bottom of the page here, perhaps it will be more clear which path I should take …

(Another thing to mention: I'll be describing some 'problems' here, but none of this is to imply that we are asking for 'help', or that we need money, etc. etc. We're actually holding on quite well at the moment, so please don’t worry for us. This is just about … decisions.)

We should perhaps run-through a bit of background, for those who are 'new' here.

I came to live in Japan 34 years ago (in 1986), with a very tiny bit of knowledge about printmaking, and the vague idea that I would like to 'make prints' here. The first few years were a whirlwind of other work: teaching English, making toys, translating, family time, etc. etc., but after some practice (and a couple of months at the Yoshida Studio watching Komatsu-san the printer there), I managed to get some prints made that were accepted in the marketplace, and hung out my 'Printmaker' shingle at the beginning of 1989, with the introduction of the '100 Poets' series of prints.

That series provided my living for ten years, until its completion in 1998. Along the way I held annual exhibitions of the work, and sold the prints through subscription only. This was the end of the 'bubble era' in Japan, and - although I hadn't known it at the time - I was just squeaking by under the wire. Consumers were still consuming back in those days, and I found enough subscribers to make a small but comfortable living.

At the time the series finished, I felt that I had had a fairly decent 'apprenticeship', and then took on a five-year project to make a different sort of print. These were still to be completely traditional Japanese reproductions, but the series was designed not so much to be something that would appeal to a specific group of collectors (as with the previous poetry series), but instead, to be a series of 50 prints (10 per year) that would provide me with an extremely strict and rigorous training period - each print selected for the chance to provide me with a chance to learn some particular technique. I chose prints of a delicacy and complexity that had not been attempted in the post-war period. (It wasn't so much that there weren't any workers capable of making them, it was that publishers simply assumed that in those 'decaying' years of traditional woodblock printmaking, no market would exist for such things …) Anyway, long story short, I made the 50 prints, and by doing so, learned a staggering amount about the technical side of the old Japanese prints. For many of the images in the series, I had absolutely no idea how to do the work, and when I asked other workers in the field, they too were unable to help. But a combination of endless trial and error, and long and deep study of the older prints in my collection, got me through.

All these prints were created by myself alone. I traced from originals, carved the blocks, did all the printing (usually about 200 copies of each design), and then all the rest of the work associated with publishing: creating packaging, ancillary materials, all the shipping, and of course promoting and running the exhibitions. There was no thought in my mind at all to 'share' the work with others. Part way along, I did hire local ladies to do the final packaging and shipping to the Post Office.

This general pattern continued for a few more years, in the same vein - creating the concepts for a number of print series, and then building them from scratch. Part-way along, I had the chance - due to a 'fire sale' - to purchase my own home, a 4-story building in Ome, a suburb of Tokyo, with plenty of room to both live and work, and located in a very pleasant rural area. Life was good.

We arrive at 2010 I had become 59, and was thinking about what to do next. It had been during the 100 Poets series that my children had 'grown up' and left, and with my partner also leaving back then, I had been living alone - quite happily - for around 15 years. But being faced with becoming 60 made me stop and think about where to take things from here. I saw no problem at all with continuing along in the same vein, as I was thoroughly enjoying the print-making work, which gave me the best of both worlds: I received tremendous satisfaction from the very high-quality work I was doing, but yet had no end of challenges to work on, because the standards set back in 'the old days' were so stupendously high that I would never actually reach them. But how much longer would I be able to keep this up? And what would happen when I eventually became not-so-capable of doing high-quality work?

I remember this time period vividly; some evenings I would stroll back and forth on the quiet street in front of my home, going over the + and - of the various ways that I could go. Basically, I was thinking of two options:

• stay the course. Simply keep on making prints, enjoying life there in my home, getting 'out and about' to Tokyo on the occasion of the annual exhibition. A quiet, peaceful life … for as long as I would be able to manage it. After that, who knows?
• blow things open. While I still had the energy for it, hire some young people to train in the field. Build up their skills, and start publishing prints - carved and printed by others - instead of doing it all myself. It would be an insane, and insanely expensive, and probably hopeless endeavour, but try and establish a workshop/publishing company, to 'bring beautiful woodblock prints to the masses' :-) It would be the absolute opposite of a quite and peaceful life, but - assuming we could make it fly - the presence of such an organization could presumably provide the 'support' environment for my own declining years. As I got weaker, I could just work quietly in one corner of the workroom somewhere, while the normal work of the organization went on around me.

As I said, I paced and paced and paced. The little birdie on one shoulder yelled in my ear, "Are you crazy? You have the perfect life here! People everywhere would kill to have what you have! How can you even think of turning this thing upside down?" And of course from the opposite shoulder came the response, "Dave, you are dying on the vine here; you're forgetting how to talk to people, you are visibly losing energy, running down month by month. What you need is to get back in the swim! You've spent all these years learning how to make prints, now you have a responsibility to make sure that knowledge is passed on! Don't be like Ito-san and the other guys, only talking about their work when a TV company sticks a camera in their face … C'mon, let's get busy!"

Well, as we all know by now, the 'Devil' birdie won the battle. (Or was it actually the other one that was the 'devil'; I'll never know …) In the summer of 2011 I reached out to the community around me, spread the word that I was hiring, and collected a few people to get started. I had (and still have) the certainty that one does not need any kind of inherent special skill set to do this work - that any person with 'normal' general abilities can become a competent worker in this field. What kind of work were we planning? I had what I though was a genius idea; because it would take some months for these beginners to build up their skills to the point of being able to produce 'real' woodblock prints, I proposed that we would start by making kakegami - printed wrappers for packaging. I went to a local shop that sold snacks, small cakes, etc. and arranged with the owner that we would provide hand-printed wrapping paper for his products. His customers had a choice at the checkout - purchase the edibles with the normal printed wrapper, or pay 100 yen extra and get a wonderful hand-made woodblock print as the wrapper. I was convinced that this would be an option that many customers would select - it would make the gift they were giving seem a bit 'exclusive'. In addition to this basic work, our group of trainees used many of my older blocks to make practice runs, building their skills bit by bit.

We seemed to be up and running. Or at least up and walking. The ladies here for training (at this point all our trainees were female) were enthusiastic about the work, and there was a happy and friendly mood in our workshop. But we had a big problem, and it was one that I should perhaps have foreseen when I started the whole thing. I was the only instructor; the only person who could show these people what to do. For each and every job they started, I had to set them up, show them what to do, organize the paper, the blocks, etc. and etc. I was turning out to be a full-time workshop manager/instructor, and my own printmaking work - the current subscription series (The Arts of Japan) - began to fall farther and farther behind schedule. Instead of issuing a print per month, I was only getting one out the door every couple of months, and then even more slowly. And that was our entire income! The wrapping paper for the gift snack packages? We never even sold a single sheet. Other print sales? We did sell a few prints from our website, to overseas friends and customers, but very very few. The money ran out. It would have been sometime in May or June of 2012 that I let everybody know that we were done; I would be able to pay them one more month, but that was it. Our little experiment was over.

Or was it? A few weeks before this, I had received an email out of the blue, entitled 'A crazy idea!', from a young illustrator over in the US … Jed Henry. He had an idea for some woodblock prints, and was searching for a workshop that he could commission to get them made. There really wasn't anything I could help him with; my staff certainly weren't at a skill level to even consider the creation of large-scale modern works of the sort he was proposing, we were broke, and on his side, he had no resources either. It looked like a non-starter for me, and I introduced him to another workshop here in Tokyo, who prepared some quotations for him. But part-way along during our email interchanges, he sent over an image of one of his new designs, a parody of video game characters racing across a bridge in wheeled carts … I showed it to our ladies, and they were all adamant, "That is so cool! Can we get to make that?" The little birdies went to work again: "Dave, just pack this up and go back to what you had; don't keep beating your head against this thing." And on the other shoulder: "Dave, this is the big chance! Your stupid little wrapping paper didn't go anywhere … time to think big!" Well, the rest … (in a picture-perfect example of this phrase!) … is history. Literally. Our Ukiyo-e Heroes prints are now not only spread all over this planet, but are in museum collections too. And in the future, when they come to write the history of the dramatic revival of traditional Japanese printmaking in the early years of the 21st century, a major part of the story will be … our prints.

(Thank you for your patience … we are now nearly at the point of today's exercise …)

The explosion of the initial Kickstarter campaign for the Ukiyo-e Heroes (running just over 1/3 of a million dollars) certainly put us on a more stable footing, at least for the short term. We hired more printers to help us with the flood of work, and all of our people were busy with all the increased business that now came our way (for all of our prints) due to the avalanche of publicity across many forms of social media. The Kickstarter campaign hadn't been over for even a month before we announced that Ukiyo-e Heroes was moving into another field - subscription sets. This hadn't come from Jed, but was something we initiated on our side. I was trying to look beyond the initial burst of popularity, to find a way to make or business stable in the long run, and realized that the model I had used personally for decades - issuing prints in subscription sets - was perfectly amenable to these new 'pop' designs as well. We began the Chibi Heroes series that fall, and have created another new series every year since then, moving out into designs of a more general interest in the past couple of years with our 'Japan Journey' prints. Popular prints come and go, but having a steady and generally stable base of subscribers has been a huge factor in our ability to keep this business going. When you include my personal printmaking years, this organization has been kept alive by subscriptions for over 30 years …

We move ahead two years, to the spring of 2014. Life is good. The ladies in our workshop (no longer being called 'trainees') are all busy working on a mix of prints: Ukiyo-e Heroes, the new subscription prints, subscription back numbers, and of course all manner of prints from our general catalogue. At this point we are still - even two years after the end of the Kickstarter campaign - slowly digging our way through the fulfilment of those orders, and Jed has been sending us a constant stream of new design ideas. And the bank account is looking good too. One thing that has become a problem is commuting - both time and expense. All of this activity is taking place way out in the suburbs of Tokyo in my Ome home/workshop. We have rented part of the building next door, and basically have enough room, but a two-hour commuting trip (each way!) is taking its toll on the ladies, not to mention our finances (here in Japan, employers pay all commuting expenses for their staff). I also have a situation where not all the ladies are quite as skilled as the others, and I'm struggling to think of alternative work that these members could do. I have a conversation with my friend the carver Asaka-san one day at his print-making school in Tokyo, and drop the idea that I'm considering the idea of looking for a place to rent in Tokyo where some of our people could work, saving huge amounts of commuting time. He calls me back a couple of days later, "Get down here; something I need to show you …" I get on the train, and he shows me a scruffy old grey building on a street in Asakusa. He knows the landlady; she's had trouble renting it because the upper floors are decrepit and rat-infested, and the tenant downstairs is a non-paying deadbeat. I'm looking for a workroom, Asaka-san is thinking of moving his print school, and another young lady he knows is scouting locations for a shop. Three people, three floors … Hmm …

Again with the birdies "Dave, did you hear what he said about rat-infested? And a business partnership with two other people? A dead-beat tenant? A two-hour train ride from your home; it'll be your turn to make that trip … Get serious; let's get out of here!" … and ... "Oh my god, Dave. It's the biggest brass ring you've ever seen in your life! Grab it! Grab it!" … Chirp Chirp … one ear and the other. I threw my hat in the ring, and the three of us sat down to work out some details. First to drop out was the other young lady; her group wasn't willing (or perhaps couldn't afford) to take the 'risk' on this place. OK, I can perhaps handle having two floors of the place … A couple of weeks later Asaka-san also dropped out; he had decided to stick with his current location near Shinjuku. For Dave, it was now 'all or nothing'. An entire three-story building in Asakusa, one floor of which was occupied by a tenant who wouldn't move, and the other two floors by rats … The negotiations went on for a few weeks, and I found myself sitting in a real estate office with my personal seal at hand … and lease papers in front of me. Crazy or not, I'll never really know, but - as you all know - I put my seal on the papers, and away we went.

The deadbeat tenant downstairs turned out to be a blessing in disguise. If we had gone for all three floors at the beginning, it would have bankrupted us. But the way it turned out, by opening our workroom (and a tiny adjunct shop) on the second floor first, then taking the third floor a year later, then down to the 1st floor two years later once the landlady was finally able to get him extracted, we were able to grow our reputation and expand our business perfectly in step with the growing rent burden. By the time we opened the downstairs shop, the Documentary video on our work was playing on airlines worldwide, and the wonderful publicity from this, combined with our growing YouTube presence, brought wonderful crowds through the door. I got into a period of severe time/work pressure in early 2017, but was able to bring that under control by going to Patreon to ask for help to hire a person to take the pyramid of paperwork off my desk (welcome, Cameron!), and since then, life has been good. 2019 was an astonishing year of production, of achievements, and of day after day of hilarious fun together with fans and friends in the Print Party room and the shop. I rarely ever got home out to Ome, and 'lived in a suitcase' here on the floor in one room of the Asakusa building, but who cares when you're having fun.

And then … 2020 ...

We shut down quite early, at least compared to other shops around us. It was clear that our Print Parties were exactly the kind of event not to be holding in the new environment: people from all over the world gathering in a small room, talking closely to each over the workbench … We were all getting kind of nervous about this, and I pulled the plug in early March. In 2019 the Asakusa shop had provided 43% of our overall income, and overnight that now dropped to 0. We shifted gears on our online presence; I quickly worked on the website to (finally!) make it mobile friendly, and with the help of some 'campaigns' that we cooked up ("If you can't come to Japan - Japan will come to you!") we began to increase internet sales to make up. But no sooner had we done this than the Post Office hit us hard, by shutting down acceptance of packages to most destinations (Europe, US, Australia) where our customers resided. A number of those shutdowns (including the US and Australia) are still in place, and we are re-routing packages around the globe with (very expensive) private carriers. Once we got the delivery issues basically sorted out, the subscription business recovered somewhat, and that's where we now stand. Our printers and carvers are all working at home - it's all very solitary work anyway - so the basic production end of our business is stable. We're running at around half of last year's revenue, but nobody here is complaining; we're just barely breaking even, but we are hanging on.

But. In a few days I have a meeting with the landlady. Our core lease on the Asakusa building is up at the end of this month, and I have two options: put my seal down for another three years, or cancel out …

I wanted to put that (long) history down, and get it all fresh in my mind again, because the decision I have to make this week is really just an extension of one major thread in that history - choosing between the two little birdies, who always seem to deliver the same messages:

"Dave, this is your chance to get back to the beautiful and peaceful quiet life in your workroom by the river! You're 70 next year, did you forget? Normal people are, you know, retired by now … I know you wouldn't just sit and vegetate - you would find any number of projects to get involved with (perhaps printmaking among them, perhaps not). Make more videos, maybe some music, there's the river … C'mon, this is your chance for an honourable 'withdrawal' from this frantic race you are running! You gave it your best shot; nobody could criticize you."

"Give up now? After coming this far? You just proudly posted to the staff members about the four new babies on the team this spring; are you forgetting about the nearly 30 employees here who are now (some more than others) depending on that paycheck? And the fans? The daily emails from people who are looking forward 'one day' to their chance to visit Mokuhankan? "

OK, hang on there, Mr. Birds … just like any number of people watching the live streams over the past couple of weeks, you've jumped a little bit ahead of things here. I'm not considering shutting the organisation down. We have people working, we're making products in demand by society, in our own little corner of the world, we're 'important'. My problem is more specific - what to do with the lease on the Asakusa building?

Let's look at it coldly:

• the 1st floor is now dead. There is no point in opening just for Japanese customers, we don't have any of those. We built our business model aimed at international visitors, and are now paying the price for that intense specialisation.
• the 2nd floor is also not being used. Cameron has taken his 'office' home; the central section is storage of boxes; the front tatami room is where Dave crashes at night.
• the 3rd floor: Dave is doing sizing in the rear area; the central area is dead storage; the front room - the printer's room - is used twice a week by Ishikawa-san, who prefers coming here to working at home. All the other printers are at home.
• our current business model - print manufacture targeted at online and subscription sales - doesn't need this building at all. We could do it all just as well by 'retreating' to Ome, and having everybody work from home, as they mostly are already.
• so just when are the visitors likely to return? Well, your analysis is as valid as mine, but I can't see even a dribble of people coming back here within a couple of years. In places like the US, where the virus is running rampant, this next winter is going to be crazy; they are just going to keep plowing on until they reach a basic social immunity through deaths and recoveries; that's going to take a couple of years. In most other societies - places where they had a lockdown, and are now in the whack-a-mole mode - an organic immunity will basically never arrive. Vaccine? I find it hard to be too optimistic about this. As much as I personally would love to be immunized against this thing, we don't have such a vaccine in place for most types of flu, nor for even such a thing as a 'cold', which is a very similar problem. It's beginning to look as though we are basically going to have to live with this thing, perhaps for ever.
• if that does indeed turn out to be the case, then the years of free-and-easy tourism are gone. And Japan - anyway kind of paranoid about foreigners at the best of times - is simply not going to allow tourists in for any foreseeable future.
• so if, if, I'm even partially correct on this, it makes no sense whatsoever to keep our lease. If I could feel even remotely confident that people would be returning in 'a while', we could hunker down, tighten our belts, and hang on here keeping things in storage, ready to come alive again once we got the chance.
• I've heard time and again over the past few weeks, "It would be such a shame to close that place! You built it up so wonderfully!" But all that effort and expenditure are 'sunk costs'. They are history, and irrelevant to the decision facing me, which is concerned with one thing only - the future prospects for this facility.
• It's a question really, of the timetable. If I thought it would take 'about a year or so' before people came back, I would clearly stay, endure a tight time, and then be ready. 'Two years or so …' is a bit of a tougher call, but yeah, I'm a patient guy; I could handle that. But 'indefinite' … No thanks; I'm out of here …

OK, that part was easy, but aren't there any factors opposing that viewpoint?

• the workroom upstairs is more than just a workroom. Over the past few years it has become a place where so much knowledge and experience has been passed around. People have worked there, learned there, and have become members of our 'team', and that's a real thing, not just business jargon. If we close this building, and all work at home, that would be the end of our future as an actual 'workshop', with an identity, and as a learning facility.
• the shop downstairs is (was) clearly more than just a shop. I saw this day after day after day during 2019. My own bench is near the front door, and I would hear it open and look up. When a 'normal' person walks into a 'normal' shop, they have a sort of neutral facial expression, as they look around to see what's there. I wouldn't see this. I would see wide-open eyes, a bright face, and a palpable sense of "Wow! I'm here! At last, I'm here!" Clearly - and with the huge help of YouTube - we have built something special in this funky old building in Asakusa.
• and that too - being in Asakusa, near Sensoji and Kaminari-mon - has become an important part of our organizational 'identity'. To remove this - and become a faceless online business - would rip a huge part out of the heart of this company.

The meeting with the landlady is this coming Thursday …

Birds … birds … one in each ear …

OK, the situation as described above is just as it is; the situation seems binary, stay or leave. But what if we climb 'out of the box'?

Some facts:

The money we pay to the landlady each month is of course 'rent'. It is a clear expense for the company, is deducted against income, and results in a loss of equity each and every month that has to be recouped with our business activities.

I should mention, by the way, that we are in no real position to ask her for any substantial reduction in the amount of the rent. I am not free to give you the exact amounts, but I can tell you that the monthly amounts we have been paying for the past six years have been substantially below market rates for this area. We were able to negotiate that originally because of two things:

• we took the building on an 'as is' basis, promising that we would handle most renovation/maintenance on our own nickel. Rats? Our problem. Squat toilets? Our problem. Over the years, we invested quite heavily in cleaning the place up and making it liveable. She's quite happy now, with all those renovations in place, but she did 'pay' for them, by not taking market rent for the building.
• she has a family history in the woodblock world. Her grandfather ran a minor print publishing house, and the family has a long tradition of being involved in this work. She was over the moon that we were able to step in six years ago and take on the challenge of getting this building into shape, and turning it into a major center of print publishing. She likes us.

Another point to mention is that she does not own the land. All the land in this entire area is owned by Sensoji (the major temple in the area). She owns two things: the concrete and steel structure, and the right to have a building here. She pays the temple rent/lease for the occupancy right, of course.

The building itself is now long past its 'sell by' date. It is decaying, was badly cracked (and subsequently patched) in the Fukushima earthquake, and leaks everywhere. One more relatively strong earthquake, and it would quite possibly be condemned by the authorities.

The common pattern for reconstructing such a building is for a major real estate develop to buy a group of them together, tear them all down, and put up something modern (like the hotel across the street from us, which used to be a row of small shops …). That is probably not possible here, because the owner on one side (who was born in his building) rebuilt it just a few years ago, and the owner on the other side has just done a major renovation, clearly intending to use it for quite some time.

What about reconstructing just this building? Very very difficult. New building codes require that all buildings in this part of town are set back from their properly lines by 50cm. On every side. Our building, which is currently built right to the properly line, in the old fashion, is only 3.5 meters wide. The new code would reduce that to 2.5 meters. In addition, all stairways must be of a modern wide (safe) construction, and of course modern accessibility regulations require an elevator, wide bathrooms, etc. etc.. All these things chew away at the floor area, leaving perhaps something just around 60% of our current floor space.

Alternative Realities

1) Suppose we asked her to sell it to us … and suppose … just for a 'thought experiment' … she agreed.

Let me wave a magic wand for a minute and assume that I could arrange some kind of financing:

• our payments from that point on (loans, etc.) would no longer be an 'expense', totally lost; they would simply be a transfer of one kind of asset (cash in the bank) to another (equity).
• maintenance issues? Just as they are now … on our nickel.
• land-use payment to the temple. I have no idea how much this is, but it must have been manageable for her to pay from out of our rent payments to her …
• taxes. Again, I don't yet know how much these are, but again, she has been paying this from our rent … it would seem manageable.

Benefits:

• our future would be in our own hands. All (without exception) of the older publishing companies in our field here in Japan own their own property. This is a huge advantage, especially in lean years ...
• as mentioned above, we would be building equity month by month. I did this with my home in Ome, moving from a rented apartment in the next town to my own home, long ago fully paid for after a ten year loan period (with payments that hadn't been much more than my previous rent).

Risks, negatives:

• we would still be faced with the fact of the age of the building, and of the need to reconstruct it. It's a double punch; pay once to buy the place, then once we have it, pay again to rebuild it …
• I'm 70 next year. Do I really want to go into this kind of debt situation, quite possibly for the rest of my life? To what end? "Finally, it's mine, all mine! … good-bye …" If I had a clear successor(s) here, it might make sense, but that's not the case …
• she almost certainly won't consider this. She is elderly, as am I. She is receiving a steady and stable revenue from the property. The heavy potential reconstruction costs for any purchaser constitute a huge 'discount' on the sale value of her asset; the structure itself has a negative value (due to the heavy costs required to tear it down). It has value to her only for as long as the rent stream can continue (fingers crossed about the timing of the next strong Tokyo/Tokai earthquake …).

2) Suppose I approached her with the idea of establishing a new company together; a 'holding company' for the property.

• as her share, she brings the building and the land lease
• as my share, I bring funding for reconstruction (hello, crowdfunding?)
• 1/2 1/2?
• once this is set up, the holding company immediately - while the pandemic is keeping people away - undertakes a reconstruction. We lose floor area - as mentioned above - but we partially counteract that by going higher. We have three floors; next door (newer construction) has four in the same height. The hotel across the street has six. Hmm ….
• a couple of years from now - just in time for people to come back????? - Mokuhankan re-opens, in its own custom-built facility.

Mokuhankan (the publisher) would of course still need to pay rent (to the holding company), which would make monthly disbursement to her as her share of the profit, and to me as the other half investor.

Why would she do this? Instead of owning the whole thing outright, as now, with all the revenue and all the risk (earthquake), she would be half owner of a business 'worth' double(?) the value. The earthquake risk would disappear, and the property would be set for another generation of use (for her inheritors, and mine …)

3) She says 'no' to 1), and 'no' to 2) … so any more bright ideas?

Thinking again, it seems to me that the main barrier to us being able to keep this facility, is that it is sitting silent. So far, I'm simply thinking of it as a woodblock print shop for foreigners, which is what it looks like right now (although pretty dusty …)

Our current situation does not allow us to use the space for anything other than the description in the lease, "… the manufacture and sale of woodblock prints, along with ancillary activities, etc. etc." But why stick to that? I'm sure that as part of the upcoming lease renegotiation, she would agree to anything reasonable. Maybe we should think about going back to this neighbourhood's roots and set up something else … Hell, a couple of doors down is a strip club. This very building has previously been a jewellery shop, a ramen restaurant, an upscale boar-meat restaurant, and (pre-war in a different structure) the famous 野口食堂 … Anything goes!

But, you know, there's a pandemic … and even though our shop is closed and we have no Print Parties, I'm actually run off my feet these days with coordinating everybody's work. Start a new business from scratch, and make it profitable? Like, how on earth am I going to do that?

So there we have it ... basically a 'brain dump' of many of the things/thoughts buzzing through my mind over the past few days. One bird against the other; head against heart; responsibilities vs self-centredness ...

I welcome any thoughts/suggestions/commiserations/etc. in the comments below ... Thanks for reading this far! :~)

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A major new section of the website has come online!

'Stretch' to read the full entry | Separate page

Although we are still tossing and turning, trying to decide how exactly to move our activities forward in this new era, one thing has become clear - the online part of our affairs will become ever more important to us (and of course, to the fans and supporters, as that’s the only way that they will be able to ‘see’ us for quite a long time).

So with that in mind, I am very happy to announce that we have finally - after years of ‘talking’ about it - created a new section of our website devoted to ‘Show and Tell’ … displaying and explaining many of the old prints and books in our personal collection. The website is now live here.

• this is the start; the framework is now in place. There are only a few dozen prints in there so far, but many many more will follow over the next couple of months.
• please note that these items are not for sale; these prints will stay in the Mokuhankan collection.
• the main thrust of the site will be the images. This is not a ‘research’ site where you will learn details of which kabuki play was performed on what date, etc. etc. It’s all about the beautiful prints!
• none of the images are scanned; everything is photographed, at very high resolution.
• some items have video links, some (one to start) will have audio (sit down together with me, and I’ll tell you why this print is so special! :-)
• the entire thing is completely 'responsive', and should work on any device from small phone up to super wide-screen desktop.

Although our printers and carvers have kept busy, some of the staff members who took care of the shop have had their work hours greatly reduced recently. Two of these members have now been ‘re-hired’ and have begun to work through the collection, adding items to the database and preparing images. This kind of expense doesn’t generate any direct sales revenue for us, so how can we afford to do this? Simple! These are Patreon funds directly at work ... thank you again to everybody who is supporting us through that platform!

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Almost 'silver' time!

'Stretch' to read the full entry | Separate page

Here's a screenshot I took a few minutes ago - it's a panel in the Dashboard on our YouTube channel:

As you can see, the number of people who have subscribed to our YouTube channel is going to 'roll over' to a milestone number sometime in the next few days ... 100,000! Wøøt!

I was quite late coming to YouTube, putting the first video up in January of 2011. Six years later - by mid 2017 - we had slowly climbed to about 14,000 subscribers. But on the evening of June 24, 2017 something changed inside the YouTube algorithm, and instead of 20~30 people a day watching our videos, the figure suddenly jumped to more than 10,000 per day, and it has stayed consistently high since then. I haven't looked back since, and YouTube has become a very important part of our work here at Mokuhankan.

Some of the numbers are difficult to comprehend - more than a million and a half people have now watched the 'Remembering a Carver' video:

… and when I sit down to make a new one these days, I try not to think too much about that when pressing the red 'record' button. Talk about stage fright!

Thank you very much to all of you who have watched some of them, and I'll keep working hard to try and keep good ones coming!

(And I can't wait to get my silver Play Button! Maybe we’ll make an Unboxing Video for it! :-)

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New video this evening!

'Stretch' to read the full entry | Separate page

Our next video is ready ... Dave tries to explain how art can change the world ...

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The basic process of printing one colour ...

'Stretch' to read the full entry | Separate page

(This is a ‘Safe for Work’ series of blog posts about the production process, not the image itself …)

Continued from Octopus and Diver Printing (3) | Starting point of the thread is here

A typical printing impression in the traditional Japanese method begins with the application of a dab of pigment to the block:

... followed by a dab of paste:

... and then brushing them out together over the surface of the wood.

But that's not always how it works. For the key block for this print - as with many of our key block impressions - we do it a different way ...

I'm starting by spreading some pigment onto a white tile, instead of directly onto the wood surface:

And I then pick it up from there with the brush:

There are a few reasons for doing it this way:

• the white surface clearly lets me see the density of my pigment mix, something difficult to ascertain on the wood
• I can easily control just how much of the mix to 'dab' up with the brush. I carefully study each completed impression as it comes off the block, and can add more or less pigment on the next sheet, based on what I see ...
• this avoids having pigment build up on any particular part of the wood surface, something that can cause 'balance' problems in the impression. (That can also be avoided by varying the location of the place you dab the pigment when you are placing it directly on the block ...)
• by taking a few swirls over the tile before moving to the wood, the pigment gets well mixed in the brush, allowing me to do less rubbing on the wood itself, thus helping - in a small way - to reduce wear and tear on the carved lines ...

The brushing then proceeds as usual:

Always remembering to finish off with light 'sweeping' in the most delicate areas (hairlines, etc. etc.). This helps 'pull' pigment away from between fine lines. If you can hear the sound of the brush on the wood at this point, you are rubbing too heavily!

And you have to move quickly - if you take too long at this stage, things will be drying out over the rest of the wood, and you'll end up with an uneven impression.

Your paper should of course be ready in exactly the proper position for instant retrieval; again, every second counts.

In place, and down she goes. The particular act you are seeing in this photo - getting the paper exactly in the corner, is the single most critical act in the entire process of making a traditional Japanese print.

If you get it even the slightest bit out of the corner here on the key block, nothing can save you during the rest of the process. If each of your key block impressions is different in this respect - and on a print like this we are talking about extreme sub-millimetre accuracy - all subsequent colours will be mis-registered, but you will have no way to know where the error is.

In our workshop - and in any serious Japanese printing workshop - a printer who is working on a key block is never to be disturbed. No chatting; no phone calls; no nothing. Leave them alone!

The impression is then taken in the usual way - start with a few very light touches to get the paper 'down', then make the initial strokes in such a direction as to make the sure the paper is not being pulled 'out' of the registration marks. This is why it is more difficult for lefties to do this job - and why in the professional field here, there are no left-handed printers.

Right-handed printers mostly 'pull' their baren strokes, which helps lodge the paper into the marks while also applying good pressure; lefties have to 'push' their strokes to achieve the same effect, which is much more difficult to control. (Of course a left-handed - independent - printmaker could cut the marks on the opposite side of the block, but such a block could not then be printed by others ...)

I'm taking a peek here at the result - before lifting the paper off (holding it in place firmly with the baren). This lets me do her face carefully ... keeping the impression very light, taking a peek to see if the hair is OK, and if not yet quite 'ready', letting the paper back down and making a few more light passes ...

If it is OK, then off it comes ...

... and it then goes quickly into the out-stack (you saw the location of this in the previous post). It is sometimes common for the paper to dry out somewhat while doing the key block impressions - they tend to take a bit more time than many colour impressions, and they definitely do not add much moisture to the paper (unlike the background colour printing, for example).

So once I was finished the stack, I got my water brush out and went through the stack again, lightly re-touching the water level. The paper was then wrapped up, to wait until the next day before beginning any colour printing.

'Shrink' back down ...

Tons of prints are leaving here today!

'Stretch' to read the full entry | Separate page

Here is our shop space this morning ...

But wait ... haven't I already posted that photo?

It's similar ... but not the same one. For one thing, it's a lot warmer here now, and I don't need that little 'puffy' anymore!

But if you look at the floor, you will see that things are very different. Instead of prints sitting in the shop racks, waiting for customers to come and browse ...

... we're packing!

Our Ome shipping center is still up and running, and those ladies are doing all the processing/packing/shipping of the subscription prints. But because the Japanese Post Office has stopped accepting all shipments bound for the US, we are using the Asakusa shop as a 'staging post', getting everything assembled there, and sending the prints in 'bulk' over to the US side via FedEx boxes. (Hi Jed-san! ... and thank you for helping like this!)

From there, they are dropped into the US Postal system for final delivery to the collectors. It is all a lot more expensive for us, but given the current situation, it seems to be the only way to get things to where they need to go.

We are in the process of trying to setup something similar for the EU, but it's a bit more complex because of import issues over there. (And post for quite a few countries - Germany, France, Netherlands, U.K., Canada ... is still being accepted by the Post Office here.)

Thank you to everybody who has been patiently waiting for their prints to arrive ... We are doing what we can to find a way through all these barriers!

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A very interesting old photo ...

'Stretch' to read the full entry | Separate page

Look at this astonishing photo!

The photo came to me from Wikipedia, and purports to have been taken in 1910, in the woodblock printing workroom for the company that published the art magazine Kokka.

I learned about the existence of this photo today from one of the commenters on the newest YouTube video. For those who aren't familiar with it, the magazine Kokka has been published off and on since the Meiji era, and in its early days included woodblock prints in each issue. This was in the time before easy colour printing by offset presses, so in order to illustrate the old art that was the topic of the magazine articles, woodblock print reproductions were used to show the readers what the original items looked like. Because it was a popular magazine, they thus needed a lot of woodblock prints!

I have quite a few of the prints from old Kokka issues here in my collection, and the quality is sometimes nothing short of unbelievable. How on earth did they actually work to such fine tolerances? ... how did they carve so finely? ... It has all just seemed a bit unreal. But as you can see from this photo, it was basically pretty simple - just teams and teams of very highly skilled craftsmen, beavering away at their work day after day ...

We can glean so much from this photo ...

• None of the printers are using the maru-bake brushes (the ones similar to shoe-brushes in shape) that every printer uses these days. Every single brush visible in this photo is of the hanga-bake type (with the 'vertical' handle, and the hair in a single clump).
• There is no artificial light at all; in winter, work in this room must have ended pretty early every afternoon ...
• How on earth did these guys get in and out of their workstations?
• The strings across the roof show that this room must also have been used for drying paper after the sizing process. Perhaps they all did such work together? It seems impossible that sizing and hanging could co-exist with printing ...
• The stacks of prints being made are not protected in any way from drying out; is this really moistened paper?
• Every single piece of wood visible is perfectly flat and straight - presumably freshly carved for the current month's magazine. Once printing was done ... what happened to them? Tossed out, I suppose ... Some of them do seem a tad thinner; perhaps they were planed down for a second use ...

'Shrink' back down ...