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The Mystique of the Japanese Print series of woodblock prints was originally put together by Dave in order to demonstrate various techniques and unique qualities of Japanese printmaking, while also challenging himself as a carver and a printer. This means he made the prints difficult for future printers who would use his blocks. Suga-san did not let that deter her, and she has just wonderfully demonstrated her skills by printing a lovely batch of 'Classical Beauty' - print #15 in the series.

In the above picture, you can see the pearl powder reflected in a spider web design around the collar of the woman's kimono. Applying pearl was a new process for Suga-san, so it took some practice. Once she became accustomed to using it, though, the results were gorgeous!

Above is a full view in which the pearl is less obvious, but you can see the effect of the deeply embossed border, which had not yet been pressed into the paper when I took the previous photo.

You can truly see the mark of a great printer here in this close-up shot of some hair on the woman's forehead. By applying just the right amount of pigment and pressure, Suga-san made the hairs dark enough to be seen, without any 'tamari' - where the pigment pools in places where it's not supposed to be. Each line on the ruler marks 1 mm of distance, so she was working with some very fine details.

Wonderful work, Suga-san! Some of you reading this may be waiting for this print to be delivered since it was on back-order for a little while. It's on the way out to waiting subscribers now, and I believe it will have been well worth the wait.

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We are reaching Peak Party!

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Our Asakusa shop is now well into its fifth year of operation, having opened in the autumn of 2014. Over that time, we have enjoyed a nice steady growth in the number of people who come to the shop. There certainly weren't many visitors in the early months, but these days the story is very different ...

Here are a couple of screenshots from our Management System - the page that shows reservations made for our Print Parties. These are for March and April this spring (as of this afternoon). The red numbers are the reservations for each time slot:

Starting around the middle of March and extending right through next week or so, we are basically booked solid.

And even as I write this - on the 14th - we are booked almost totally solid for the next week, with more reservations coming in every day. It seems as though we have reached 'Peak Party'.

So what next? Where do we go from here? Well, this is the spring tourist season, so it should begin to taper off in a few weeks. But even so, the trend is clear - demand for our Print Parties has pretty much reached the limit of our abilities to provide the service.

The only way forward is to get more staff members into the rotation, and open up more slots (8:30am, 16:00pm, 18:00pm), but just where such people will come from is not so clear. Previously, I have always instantly refused work requests from foreigners living here in Japan (their husband is here working for a bank for a couple of years, etc. etc.) because it just didn't seem worthwhile to spend all the time training them, just to have them disappear after a relatively short time. In desperation though, a few weeks back, I relented on this policy, and we now have a couple of these people on board to help out. I think we can perhaps explore this a bit further, by taking the time to set up an actual training plan (perhaps to take place on our nominal closing day of Tuesdays), where some of our experienced staffers can train these people, who would then be available to fit into the rotation a couple of days each week. If we can build up a 'pool' of such new members, then it wouldn't be particularly crippling each time one of them left.

And I guess that means we have to create a training manual, set up a kind of curriculum, and organize regular practice sessions, all to teach people how to teach people how to make prints!

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Neighborhood observations from a visitor

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Everyone at Mokuhankan is busy now - there are lots of customers, lots of print parties, and lots of subscription prints being carved and printed - so it's Karen filling in again as a guest blogger. Today, I thought I'd write about the shop itself and its environs.

Here's a portrait of the building in the early hours, with its brand new blue sign that was put up last week:

Mokuhankan is close to a large temple district. Sensō-ji is one of Toyko's oldest and most important temples. When approaching the temple from the south, one enters through Kaminarimon, aka the "Thunder Gate":

Statues of the Shinto gods of wind and thunder, Fūjin and Raijin, are displayed in alcoves on left and right. Beyond the gate are a series of shops, currently closed in this picture because it's early in the morning. Later in the day, it's almost too crowded to walk past the shops! If you walk on down, turning left before entering the temple grounds proper, you'll be looking down Denpōin-dori:

As this street curves to the right, you'll find yourself on Rokku-dori, which is Mokuhankan's street. Here's a sign past the shop at the end of the street that makes it look much larger than it is, showing all the shops. If you zoom in and look carefully, you might see Mokuhankan - 木版館 - on the far side of the street to the left.

OK, imagine you are standing in the intersection at the map's green end of the street. Here you can sight along Rokku-dori to the left, and Hoppy-dori to the right. Mokuhankan is the 6th door on the left, on Rokku-dori.

Hoppy-dori is full of bars. In the morning it is pretty deserted -

... but at night, the bars roll out their awnings and set up picnic tables. Revelers abound!

Right now there is a pear tree on Rokku-dori that just burst into bloom:

... and across from Mokuhankan, there is an alcove with a small statue of Jizo, the bodhisattva who looks after children and travelers.

Those of you who watch Dave's live stream on twitch.tv sometimes hear an interesting sound, and this is the source - it happens right outside, as ice is delivered to the restaurant next door a couple of times a week.

Many of these photos were shot in the morning when not many people are out, but it gets very busy during the day, and especially on the weekends. From the roof of Mokuhankan on a late Saturday afternoon, one can see the lively street, with people shopping, walking around in kimono, standing in line for dinner, and enjoying the weather.

It's really a very interesting neighborhood! I hope I've been able to give you a taste of that.

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Japan Journey #6 ready for test printing

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Guest blogger Karen, masquerading as Cameron again ;-)

I happened to be in the shop when a new set of carved blocks was dropped off!

These are the blocks for #6 in the Japan Journey subscription series, tentatively titled "Quiet Ripples."

Dave and crew are looking over the blocks, comparing them to the digital prototype print, and making sure that all the colors and layers are present.

They all look good, so they are ready for test printing!

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New blocks from old

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Hi, it's Karen again with another guest post! As it has been recently, today is a busy day with wall-to-wall print parties -- producing some very nice prints by the way -- and lots of visitors to the shop. Work continues behind the scenes, with the printers busy making prints, and carvers carving blocks. Luckily, the blocks keep coming!

Good cherry is hard to come by. One source is old blocks, so Dave keeps an eye out for those that go on sale. He was really happy to get a shipment of unexpectedly large, unexpectedly thick old blocks, and he and Aoyama san were able to re-saw them with a bandsaw, keeping the carved layer intact, and producing new layers of cherry to use. Here's Aoyama san with a batch of recently-unclamped blocks. He's laminated nice thick layers of cherry around a plywood core. The small ones are for the Japan Journey subscription series; the larger ones are for Ukiyo-e Heroes; and the long narrow blocks will be used to print two as-yet-undecided postcard-sized prints side by side:

The new blocks need to be trimmed to size. Aoyama san has an interesting setup for doing indoor circular saw cutting:

The jig gets a straight cut, the custom blade guard contains the sawdust, and the hose gets connected to a vacuum, so there's hardly any mess.

And here's a cut in action:

After having the surface planed smooth, these blocks will be ready to carve, keeping the wheels of Mokuhankan rolling!

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Street cleaning day, April 2019

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Greetings from a visitor to Mokuhankan! My name is Karen, and I'm visiting from Texas. It's a really busy time here in Asakusa, and especially busy for the shop. Cherries are blooming, the weather is fine, and there are lots of people seeing the sights, sampling local delicacies, and shopping. Dave and Cameron have lots to do, so they have asked me to write a few words about what's going on.

Today is street cleaning day! Every first Tuesday of the month, all the shops on Rokku Dori get together to clean the street. Here are Cameron and I out front of the shop, getting ready to scrape the sidewalk.

Dave is tall, so he gets conscripted to sign washing duty!

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A couple of nice milestones came by recently. The first was when our YouTube video count rolled over to another million views.

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A couple of nice milestones came by recently. The first was when our YouTube video count rolled over to another million views. Here's a screen shot just before the change:

But what was more fun, came a few days later, when a single one of the videos crossed the million mark. It was the 'Remembering a Carver' video, and as it happened, I noticed the event coming, and reloaded the page at exactly the right moment!

So I quickly took another screenshot of the video surrounded by others:

In real life, this doesn't actually mean that a million people watched the entire thing, of course. But looking at the analytics in the background, it does seem that a great many of the viewers did indeed stay right to the end, certainly enough to leave me kind of astonished at what is happening here - on that day a couple of years ago when I sat down and turned on the camera, I was actually 'chatting' with more people than I could possibly imagine ...

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Aoyama-san prepares woodblocks.

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Our carvers have been working their way quickly through wood blocks with so many projects going on, so we've run low on prepared blocks. Therefore, over the last few weeks, Aoyama-san has been preparing more woodblocks for us!

As many of you likely know, we have long struggled to find quality wood blocks for Dave and our other carvers to use. Because of this difficulty, a few years ago we started buying our own yamazakura (mountain cherry) wood to use in creating our own woodblocks.

Today I will walk you through the process of turning those planks of wood into usable wood blocks.

First Aoyama-san checked much of the wood we have stored in our workshop to find pieces that suited our upcoming needs. We keep wood stored in decks of thinly-sliced wood, bound tightly together. We leave some space between each slice so that air can flow freely around the wood and dry it more quickly, but we also tie several pieces together to help keep them flat and prevent warping during the drying process.

We have a moisture sensing device to could check if the wood is dry enough. We have plenty of wood drying in our workshop, so it's important to confirm the pieces he is using are not still moist. You can also get a good sense of how dry it is simply by holding it in your hand or thumping it with your knuckle.

Aoyama-san chose some long slices of wood that appeared to be the correct width for our upcoming projects. He laid them out on the ground in our workshop and used plywood pieces (which were already cut to specifications) to check that they would fit the size we need for upcoming prints, and choose locations to avoid knots or other problem areas on the individual pieces of wood.

David visited the top-floor workspace to see what Aoyama-san was up to.

After finding the most efficient layout for the blocks to avoid as much wasted material as possible, Aoyama-san then sawed the long planks into sizes closer to what was needed, leaving a little extra wood on all sides, since you can always cut more off, but you can't put it back on!

He then showed me the kind of cut we are looking for when choosing cherry wood. We want wood from the outer edges of the rings, instead of straight across the tree. In the picture below, you can see how the rings of the wood curve through these blocks instead of looking like many parallel lines, which is what would happen for a slice through the middle of the tree.

The next step is to check that every piece of wood was cut properly and the plywood parts will fit within the freshly-cut cherry blocks.

These looked good, so Aoyama-san then lined up 4 pieces of cherry wood...

...then applied glue in large globs...

...and finally spread it thinly around the full surface of each piece of wood.

Then Aoyama-san made wood block sandwiches.

He then held them in place for a minute or so, and taped up the edges to prevent glue from leaking out the sides.

Once several blocks were taped up and ready to dry, he then bound them tightly, and used wedges to reinforce the cords holding the blocks together, to ensure the blocks would not come apart as the glue dried.

Once the glue finished drying, it was back to the saw to chop off the uneven edges.

After removing the extra wood from the sides of the plank, he checked that the corners were all square and sent it off to the planer!

I don't have pictures of the planing since it is performed off-site by another company.

But once the planing is done, we then have a nice smooth new piece of wood, ready to get carved!

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The key block for Japan Journey print #4 is ready ...

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It wasn't part of our original plan for me to carve this one, but we're kind of struggling to keep up with all the work here these days, so I had to step in to do some carving work on this year's subscription series.

Here's the freshly completed key block, on the bench under the carving light:

A few minutes before that photo, the block looked like this - you can still see the remnants of the design tracing on the surface of the wood:

But a few seconds under running water at the sink takes care of that ...

... and it comes clean:

The next step will be to make colour transfer sheets, and get started on the (7) colour blocks. Here's the Photoshop mockup that I received from Jed-san, to guide that part of the work:

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We're caught up!

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We're caught up! For the moment, at least ... The stunning response to this year's 'A Japan Journey' subscription series caught us a bit by surprise, but we have now basically caught up. A few days ago, the final batch of prints (to bring us to the current level of 200 monthly) was completed by Chiharu Kanai, who has been working for us for nearly five years. (She is currently working at home, as she is simultaneously caring for her infant son ...)

Here are a couple of quick photos taken the other day when her batch of prints arrived for checking:

I have to go through the batch for checking, but this is almost a formality; she is very good and makes very few mistakes, and in any case, she herself has already culled the ones that she feels are not acceptable.

All of our subscription prints this year are being embossed with the names of the carver and printer. I carved this one, so for this particular batch the embossing is: 彫・ブル　摺・金井千春 (Carved: Bull Printed: Kanai Chiharu)

The only down-side (for me, anyway) in putting that embossing on the prints is the sound of the Japanese when you read it aloud. The verb for 'carving' is 'hori', so it says ...'Hori Buru Suri Kanai Chiharu'

Every print is 'horiburu' ... Sigh ...

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The next in the David’s Choice series has just been uploaded to YouTube!

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The next in the David’s Choice series has just been uploaded to YouTube! This episode shows and discusses a selection of small 'match label' woodblock prints from my collection, and we get to see some being made!

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