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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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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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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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A first look at last year's numbers ...

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It's the morning of the 1st here in Tokyo ... As always, we're pretty up-to-date with the figures, because we do all our bookkeeping on custom software. Not all of the expense data from last week has been included yet, but anyway, I have the revenue side of the equation all ready.

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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The YouTube video showing the new series for 2019 is now up!

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The YouTube video showing the new series for 2019 is now up!

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Doi-san brought in an English book about woodblock prints he co-authored!

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Cameron here with an update! Our veteran staff member Doi-san brought something very interesting into our shop on Monday: an English-language book he co-authored, all about woodblock prints! He just got back from an exhibition in the UK about the book, and is excited to share it.

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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Heads up! Dave will be joined on the live stream on Monday morning (Tokyo time) by a couple of guests from France who are currently here in Japan working on design projects.

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Heads up! Dave will be joined on the live stream on Monday morning (Tokyo time) by a couple of guests from France who are currently here in Japan working on design projects.

Cécile Brun & Olivier Pichard are a young couple who work together as The Atelier Sentô. What kind of work do they do? Here's an image from one of their websites:

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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