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It has been another year of astonishing growth. 2017 was 150% up over 2016, and it turns out that we have done the same thing again - 2018 was 155% up over 2017.

It was Asakusa (the purple part) that accounted for the largest part of the increase. Subscriptions held about steady - mostly because last year's series was so inexpensive, keeping the revenue down even though the number of prints going out was high. Online was up somewhat, and Heroes was up a lot.

You can get an idea of the seasonal nature of our business by looking at the data for just the Asakusa shop month-by-month, since it first opened back in autumn of 2014

Here's a pie of the online revenue breakdown ('tanpin' refers to single prints from our catalogue, and 'Numabe' is for the Yoshida prints, which we obtain through our printer Numabe-san, who prints most of them):

You'll notice that there are no 'Heroes' in that pie; all online sales of the main Heroes prints are handled by Jed directly, from his own studio.

And here's a similar breakdown for the Asakusa shop (we do have the Heroes prints here):

I think that the Asakusa pie in particular is very well balanced - showing that we have a very good variety of items in the shop. It's not too 'top heavy' on anything in particular.

Now sales <> profit of course, but I'll save that part for a bit later in the week, after I have all the expenses entered ...

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It's called 'Rankafu' and tells the history of a banker named Shotaro Kaga who bred orchids in the first half of the 20th century. He wanted to share his orchids with the world, so he commissioned artist Zuigetsu Ikeda to paint watercolors of his orchids, which were then adapted and produced as beautiful woodblock prints. This all happened in the 1930s and 40s, and the prints finally were published in 1946.

Below are several photos from inside of the book, to get an idea of the kind of woodblock prints that were made.

Our friend Doi-san is the man in the middle photo below.

The three authors, Stephen Kirby, Toshikazu Doi, and Toru Otsuki have spent several years collecting prints and performing research to put together this volume. They even have used some photos taken at Mokuhankan and tools borrowed from Mokuhankan to research and demonstrate printmaking techniques for this book. For examples, Suga-san is working hard on this page.

Here are some photos of the authors doing research, including a picture of many of the original woodblocks they discovered in storage!

As of this moment, it is only available through the website of the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in the UK (http://shop.kew.org/rankafu-orchid-print-album) but they are looking into making it more widely available in the future. The ISBN is 978 1 84246 668 1, so you can search for it anywhere in the world.

This is a beautifully printed book packed with information about how and why these prints were produced, and the people who worked on them, and we offer our congratulations to Doi-san and the others who worked so hard to put it together.

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This is how they describe what they do: "Our projects are inspired by our travels in Japan. We mainly work with manual techniques: watercolors, printmaking, coloured pencils... Through our work we would like to show an unusual side of Japan, made up of small villages in the mountains, festivals, forgotten spirits."

They'll be here at Mokuhankan early in the morning, ready to join the Twitch stream for the day, and I'm looking forward to learning more about their activities.

In the meantime, please browse through their website and blog ... where you can find tons of hugely interesting work!

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I just received my copies of the latest guidebooks from Lonely Planet, and was very pleased to find that they are still featuring us prominently!

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Best of! Best of Tokyo … and Best of Japan … I just received my copies of the latest guidebooks from Lonely Planet, and was very pleased to find that they are still featuring us prominently!

More than pleased, actually … There are only a few thousand places listed in these books, and to think that our little shop - which has been open for just four years now - has cracked that level … ‘Best of Japan’, is very gratifying.

If you would like to pick one up, here are the ISBNs:

- 'Best of Japan': 9781786572363

- 'Best of Tokyo': 9781787011168

Thank you again to the staff at Lonely Planet for helping us this way!

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The next video showing how our prints are made has just been uploaded to YouTube.

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The next video showing how our prints are made has just been uploaded to YouTube. And big news … I didn’t make it! The 40-minute video was shot and produced in its entirety by staffer Cameron-san. He spent the past couple of weeks working with young printer Suga-san upstairs here, and I don’t think they missed any details of the process …

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An unusual combination of guests in one of our Print Parties!

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At one point in the course of a Print Party, we have to show the guests how to hold the paper, and then how to take the image with the baren, our rubbing tool.

We place the barens on the right-hand side of the block, because of course most of our guests find it easier to reach out with that hand ...

Not this group! Meet Patrick Loyer and family ... all sinistral!

You should have seen my face when I saw what was happening ... three people who could understand my left-handed demonstration!

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Our video views have reached a nice round milestone!

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We had a financial milestone the other day ... and here we are with another one coming up. Not financial this time ... it's just a 'round number' milestone.

Our YouTube views are about to roll over to a nice round number ... of 5 million!

Here's a closeup:

Just when will it click over? It might go tonight, but if not, then it will surely do so tomorrow, because we have a new video coming then!

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Here are a few graphs showing how we have been growing this year!

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Back when I was running this place as a purely personal business, I used to put the financial statements into the blog on a regular basis. Since the business has become wider in scope though - with other people's data (salaries, etc.) becoming part of it - I haven't had quite as much freedom to do that.

So although I can't totally share our expense data in detail, I have no problem at all with sharing the other side of the equations ... the income. And last Friday, we hit a little milestone that I think our fans might like to know about.

It's a simple statistic - on September 14th our gross income for this year passed the amount for last year ... for last year in total.

If you look at the numbers there, you will see that the figure for 2017 was just around 150% higher than 2016, and if things roll along for the rest of this year as they have for the past couple of months, we'll do the same thing again this year - up 150% or so.

That graph is for our business in total; this next one shows the figures for just the Asakusa portion (again, the final column is for year-to-date, as of September 14th):

What you can't see there is the seasonal nature of our Asakusa operation. If I graph it month-by-month, you can clearly see that there are peaks in the spring (sakura time) and autumn (best weather for travelling).

Up to now, things have tapered off a bit after the spring rush. This year, it started to taper off in June, but something else happened ... we opened up down on the ground floor. Just what is ahead of us for the next couple of months I have no idea ...

Update: If you read the comments below, you will see that regular contributor Jacques-san suggested he might be able to make a projection for this year, based on the data in the above graph. He just sent it over ...

Dave ... remember; don't count your chickens before they hatch! -)

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Building stronger defences against the invaders ...

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As outlined in the previous entry, I didn't dare leave the cabling as it was for even one more night. All it would need was one bite in the wrong place, and we would lose all our internet access, and would have to re-run all the cabling that I had so carefully prepared when we were doing the ground floor construction.

So I went to the Home Centre, picked up some strong plastic conduit, and once the shop had closed this evening, ripped up the tatami mats and some of the floor planks, and retrofitted all the cables to run through the conduit.

I had to cut into the floor in the same three places that I did when originally installing the cables a few months ago. Here's a photo from a few months back - during that construction - showing the place where the raw cables came up from the sub-floor:

And here they are now, safely sheathed!

Here's the location where they disappear downstairs:

Now strongly covered ...

But I had a problem with cable lengths. Because of the chewed out section, one of the original cables no longer has enough length to reach from the router down to the connection on the ground floor. And I can't replace it because the distant end of it is embedded under the flooring down there in the new shop! So although I really didn't want to do this, I had no choice but to splice a new connector onto the cable, and join it with a new short piece to bring the length up to what we need. That connection is safely hidden from the rodents, inside a metal connector box under the floor, where we can get to it if we need to.

After another hour or so of work to put the room all back together, I now have our internet all back up and running. And I was happy to see that speed testing on the spliced cable doesn't show any significant loss of bandwidth ...

Let's see what the invading army will come back with tonight!

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As frequent viewers of our Twitch channel well know, we have been having rodent trouble here at Mokuhankan recently.

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As frequent viewers of our Twitch channel well know, we have been having rodent trouble here at Mokuhankan recently.

We've known that they were in the building right from the time we began construction here in the summer of 2014, but we thought that we had 'arranged' a stand-off. They stayed in their part of the building (under the floors, over the ceilings, and inside some of the walls), and we stayed in our part (the shop itself).

With our move down to the ground floor, things became a bit unstable, because our construction work closed off some of their entrances, and we also destroyed a huge nest that they had created underneath the rear wall of the building, but overall, I felt that the status quo was basically undisturbed.

That 'truce' has now been broken. They have become much more aggressive, have made attempts to intrude into our part of the building, and two nights ago, staged an attack on our infrastructure - they took down one of the ethernet cables carrying signals down to our new shop. I was trying to get the morning stream started, and couldn't get a signal from the router. I traced things back through the system, and when I pulled away a cabinet in the old Print Party room on the second floor, found this:

A closer view ...

What's the food value in a plastic and metal cable? Why would they do this? Well ... OK ... they want war, they can have war.

Cameron has plenty of experience working in a very old wooden school building out in the country, where they had a real problem with rodents, and says that they were able to keep things basically under control by liberally spreading standard mousetraps around the premises. When I heard this, I had to mention that I think we are dealing with a different creature ... those were little country mice, these are massive - and hugely experienced - city rats.

But anyway, we have to start somewhere, so we got a bunch of good strong traps, baited them with peanut butter stolen from Cameron's lunch bucket, and spread them around the building, including one on each side of the hole in the floor where the chewed cable goes through.

Did we catch any the first night? Not only did we not catch anything, they made an attempt to chew through the second of the two cables! I heard them starting to do this during the night (I sleep in that room), and chased them away ...

In the morning light, I found this:

Now if that second cable goes down, we are in big trouble, because all our infrastructure (cash register, downstairs computers, etc.) runs through it.

I have just made an emergency trip to the Home Centre, and as soon as the shop is closed tonight, Kawai-san and I will move all the furniture out of that room, lift up the tatami mats, open up some of the floorboards, and will put those cables into conduit ...

Purely a defensive measure, I know ... but we have to keep that cable alive! (If there is no live stream tomorrow morning, you'll know what happened ... :~(

I'll keep you posted!

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It has taken way too long to get this organised, but we finally got our new shutter graphic image 'uploaded' today ...

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It has taken way too long to get this organised, but we finally got our new shutter graphic image 'uploaded' today ...

It was supposed to be done last week on our closing day (Tuesday) but the threat from an approaching typhoon forced it back a week.

Here's the installation just beginning (they are cleaning and preparing the metal surface):

Part-way done ...

Getting clearer now!

And here we have it!

It's interesting to note that our little shop has now been in business longer than both of our neighbours. We're 'old-timers' already after just four years!

The sad thing about this shutter of course is that very few of our customers will ever see it!

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Just a couple of weeks after Part One, the next part of the 'Beginnings' video is ready!

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I don't think anybody is expecting this already ... and I hope I'm not setting a bad example by getting it out so quickly! :-)

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Recent YouTube comments ...

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When I first considered putting things up on YouTube a number of years ago, I was 'warned' by friends ... "Dave, don't go there ... there's no benefit for you on YouTube, and anyway, if you do try it, make sure you shut off comments! YouTube comments are a cesspool!" and etc. etc.

I went ahead anyway, with a few short experiments, and then when Jed and I began our first Kickstarter campaign for the Ukiyo-e Heroes, putting video onto YouTube became an important way for us to reach people.

But what happened in the comment threads?

Simply put, my experience with YouTube comments has been incredibly positive. Each video has a 'Like/Dislike' button choice for the viewer to click, and mine are running at: 92,416 likes and 1,155 dislikes ... Can't please everybody!

As for the comments that have been left, these have been overwhelmingly positive - embarrassingly positive! And sometimes, they just seem over the top ...

Here are a few ... just from yesterday's batch!

• Wow! This has been one of the most incredible videos I have seen here in you tube. What an incredible story you have shared with us. I am speechless.
• As soon as you said you were going to do another story-ramble video, I actually started pumping my fist in celebration.
• You rock! I just found your channel 3 days ago and I can not stop watching!!!!!
• How the hell did I get here, and why don't I want to leave?
• This might be the finest youtube channel of them all. Such excellence.
• David Bull you crazy devil, you inspire me to get into the Japanese style wood block carving.
• Where have you been all my life?!?!?
• You sir, are an absolute gem of humanity. Thank you for sharing your story.
• Absolutely great story! Thanks a lot David, I hope that it makes you happy to see how many people are influenced by your work.
• Wow. Just masterful storytelling. Beautiful.

Some cesspool! :-)

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