Mokuhankan Japanese Prints - 2020 Update

good evening this is woodblock pit maker dave ball here in our shop in asakusa tokyo with a quick year-end update on our activities when i stood here at this counter almost exactly a year ago bringing you the year-end update for 2019 i could never have imagined what was about to happen that our busy and bustling little shop welcoming visitors from around the world who came to see our prince would so soon fall so completely silent early in the year as we all learned that this new virus was spreading internationally it had become increasingly clear to us that our print party activity back there with people gathering in a small room huddling over the bench together working on printmaking was not going to be tenable and in late february we stopped holding them the situation of course continued to worsen we began to be increasingly concerned about the welfare of our staff members and in mid-march i pulled the plug and closed the shop a few weeks later that all became moot when international travel shut down and nobody could get here anyway here in december nine months later we are of course still closed just when or if i will be able to hang the flag outside again i cannot see at this point but more on that a little bit later for now i need to talk a little bit about how we have managed to survive even with that door tightly shut it's partly because i was prepared for this i don't mean to imply that i knew the virus was coming i'm not that president but i was certain that we would encounter a major disruption at some point probably sooner rather than later a disruption that would force our shop to seize operations for a certain period i was expecting an earthquake every organization in japan has to be always prepared for the possibility of a major earthquake our building here is reinforced concrete as is our shipping center over in ome that much is in place but in a major quake even if your structure survives business is severely disrupted and i was ready for this i prepared by making sure that our business model has never depended on a single source of revenue if you go back eight nine years ago the explosion of interest in our ukio heroes prints through the massive kickstarter campaign it brought a flood of support to our business but it left us in the position of being what they call a one-trick pony i was worried about that so over the next couple of years i used the revenue from the heroes to build out two more legs to our business forming a kind of tripod i began to publish subscription prints based on the hero's designs and of course i went ahead with the project to create this physical shop both of those projects flourished over the succeeding years giving our business a much more stable structure a few years after starting those subscriptions and then opening the shop we had arrived at this kind of revenue breakdown very well balanced between the different legs actually calling it a tripod is probably not such a great analogy because if you knock a leg off a tripod it falls over but i think you get the point having a diversity of revenue sources brings stability so long story short we were ready for an earthquake of whatever type having one of our legs kicked out from under us here has not meant the end of the world we have simply focused on the other two parts of our business the shop closed on march 17th and by march 23rd it was less than a week later we had made our pivot the first step was to finally for me to do the necessary programming to make our online catalog and shopping cart mobile friendly something i had been just postponing and putting off for years once that was ready we sent out a message to our mailing list the title if you can't come to japan then japan will come to you we prepared a kind of a goodie bag whatever walking maps and pamphlets of the places to which you could have gone on a trip to japan this year i included my own personal asakusa restaurant guide places you could have eaten at on your trip to japan our staff members printed up large batches of the print putty designs prints you could have made on your visit to mokohanka we got these goodie bags ready and offered them to people who placed orders through the online catalog okay perhaps at this point it would be easier just to skip to the punchline i have a couple of charts to show you i mentioned three legs to the tripod and here's our revenue data from 2019 the last full year before the world changed the purple is a saxa and you can clearly see the flow that matches the spring and autumn tourist season the green represents the online sales always showing a bit of a bump at the end of the year gift season and the yellowish brown color here is subscriptions the very stable non-seasonal part of our overall business the same graph for 2020 well of course it's very very different asakusa after a normal january and a quiet february toast there's nothing else to say but look at the others that japan will come to you project had an immediate impact and the online business just came alive over the course of the year we continued to keep in touch with our fans and collectors through email updates i try not to overdo this nobody wants to get constantly spammed with buy this and buy that messages but once every six to eight weeks or so we let people know what we were up to and what was coming off our printing blocks and there was so much to show this year our work and our carving and making traditional woodwork prints it doesn't actually need to be done in a centralized workshop our crafts people simply disbursed at their own homes and continued their work from there asaksa remained here as the the command and control center where i organized all the jobs sized paper for each of the printers shipped the blocks out and then checked over and inspected the prints when they were returned sending them out then to our oma shipping center where the ladies there they took turns coming in one at a time to do the packaging work it hasn't been as much fun for everybody you know missing all the camaraderie and the learning that comes with working together here but we're getting things done every month without fail we have published and distributed a new subscription design at the end of the update video last year i showed you the initial test prints of the sushi cat's design it's now out and around the world as is the next one in the series hanami cats and of course we also got the first two prints in the nekohake the eight views of cats published i'll show you those a bit later evening snow and night rain 2020 actually it's a year of the rat so i think i kind of got it all wrong but anyway this year cats it was we also i should mention we also continued our work reprinting 20th century shin hunger work both from our own blog sets and those from the doihanga company as well as continuing to make available many prints from the yoshida family and we have added a number of new designs to our catalog using blocks that i myself carved a number of years ago we have been busy and the green bars show the result now it wasn't all smooth sailing no sooner had the large stream of orders from the initial campaign messages started to come in when we received stunning news from the japanese post office this was in in april due to the lack of airline flights back and forth they were shutting down delivery to most overseas countries most notably the us now losing one leg of our tripod was manageable but no shipping losing all three that's the end of everything so we jumped into action again with plan b or plan plan f x our ome shipping center they packs everything up as normal but it sends the finished packages to me here in asakusa i get busy and i bundle everything into large boxes i call fedex and they haul them over to the us jed henry there has his own extensive shipping setup and he and his assistants take our big packages post all the little ones onwards from there his willingness to do this has pretty much saved our business as you might expect it costs us an absolute fortune but at the moment we're not worried about profits we're just trying to stay alive it's also been chaos for cameron he's working at home these days of course he's got a brand new baby on his lap and he sits there at the middle of this vortex this flood of orders and inquiries and emails back and forth and where's my package and why is it late and what scale would you he for one is certainly looking forward to the end of this chaos anyway to round off this part of our update message today here is the same data in the form of a pie chart 2019 versus 2020. you can see now asakusa dropped from 43 percent down to 8 online and subscriptions now make up the bulk this red part is ukio heroes it shrunk a bit because of the lack of cons you know anime and game conventions where they're always quite popular and it's now very clear to everybody look at this just how important patreon is it's now a full 11 of our revenue now the unfortunate part about these graphs is they kind of show the pies here is the same size they're not if i go back to the final chart i showed you last year it'll give a better overview i remember i think in that update video we got here and i was saying something like this kind of growth is not sustainable and boy i was right of course it wasn't we are down considerably from last year but nobody here is complaining about that at all we are alive we're alive thanks to a bit of nimbleness on our own part but of course mostly thanks to the overwhelming support and interest in our work from everybody out there if there's an order from you represented in one of these bar charts then i and the 20 plus other people working here thank you very very much for it now that part of the update got a bit long i'm sorry i hadn't planned on spending so much time talking about what is behind us let's look forward it's time to answer the number one question in my inbox these days what's the plan for subscriptions for 2021 it's the single biggest question i have to answer every year subscriptions it's been the heart of my printmaking activity since 1989. that's 31 years ago i guess i should make a video about that or something one day anyway anyway dave don't get sidetracked here is the set that we have now just completed it's the wood block pilgrimage series of course designed for us by jed henry it has been just as spectacularly successful as the set that preceded it the japan journey the pilgrimage sold out within days of opening for subscribers to join even though nobody knew what designs were coming up and we've been holding a waiting list all year long now most viewers realize i assume that there is a kind of a background theme in play here these are not random scenes of scenery but they're designs that represent locations from iconic anime but honestly speaking and i'm speaking to someone who has seen almost none of these movies i don't think it matters at all now here in japan one is not supposed to be too praiseworthy of things that you yourself have produced but i'm not japanese so i think it's okay if i say this i am so proud of the work that we have done on this set jetson fed us interesting designs to start with the carvers then got things into physical shape on wood blocks but it is what our printers then did with those this is where the magic comes in this set was for the most part proofed by ishkawasan andeichan working sometimes upstairs here and sometimes at home once all the decisions were made they went ahead and produced a batch of the prints each and the block sets were then passed to other members of our printmaking team for the production of more copies of the prints based on their initial proofs together with the set that preceded it these new prints represent there's a wonderful important contribution to the japanese tradition nobody and i mean nobody is doing things like this these days producing prints that are visually interesting that are staggeringly well made that carry forward the technical traditions and that are produced and priced for normal people to buy instead of trying to position them as as high art with all that limited edition blah blah blah blah correspondingly high prices we will never go that route nobody here is getting rich but we're making a living at the same level we hope as the people who are our fans the collectors and customers it's a wonderful wonderful achievement this set is now open again for subscriptions as are all our previous series but before you jump over there and sign up you might want to have a look at what is coming up next for 2012. it's big japan journey three no more shin hunger prints no not this time viewers of our twitch stream actually they know what is coming up because they watched me carve their first print over the past month or so and when they learned that the 2021 set was going to be an ukiyo a reproduction set many people were initially concerned what no jed henry what's going on don't panic and don't jump to conclusions jed and i are fine it's that a number of things converge this year to make it more practical for our workshop to do something different for a year the shin hunger prints that we have focused on for the past two years have taken staggering amounts of work to pull off it's it's layer after layer after layer to build up the interesting dense colors it's been plus minus an incredible learning experience for our carvers and printers yes but it has also been very difficult and tiring and i need to to switch out to put them on a different kind of work for a while at jed's end too there's a lot going on he has built up an extensive online business of his own which he runs with a couple of assistants and he now has four children all being home schooled and i've signed an nda in this one so i'm not at liberty to give details but i can tell you jed is in demand as an illustrator from some very well-placed clients he has produced beautiful and interesting designs for us monthly non-stop without a single gap since late 2013 and it's long past time that he got a break so is this the end for us no way my staff is going to be hearing this for the first time when they see this video but jed and i have pretty much nailed down the theme and general format for the 2022 subscription series more about that 365 days from now my god i talk too much let's get to the point i said next year's set will be a reproduction series and let's have a look here's the first print the designer is isoda kojiusai he's not among the top names of the ukue field that everybody would recognize you know the hiroshige hog site with tomorrow but that's just the role of the dice of history he was a hugely productive and influential designer in his day we're talking about the 1770s or so when the bulk of his work was done many of his print designs were in the beijing genre beautiful women and also a whole lot of them were erotic we're not going to touch those we're going to focus instead on his kacho e the term literally means flower bird pictures but the general meaning is scenes from nature we're going to produce a set of 12 prints adapted from his designs in that theme this first one as you can see it's a group of cranes at sunrise and both of those things are symbols of the new year so it was an obvious choice for the january design for february we will head indoors for another cat believe me i didn't actually plan it this way but uh but there we are as always we've got our own twist on this in cool you size day the craft of japanese color printmaking was still at a relatively early stage for example the gradation technique hadn't yet been invented and the color palette was still very limited now could usai and his publishers not knowing what was coming in the future they didn't see that as a problem of course but now that we have access to those more comprehensive techniques we thought it would be interesting to use some of them in moderation in the creation of this print set now some of you have noticed something else different from the designs we have produced over the past couple of years when compared to those landscape designs we are making these in a slightly larger dimension now kodu size originals were actually even somewhat larger than these but when you shrink things too much quite a lot of interesting detail is lost so we settled on this format as the best compromise but even with the larger dimensions we are going to hold subscription price at the same level as the past two years so that's the overall plan i'm not going to show you the entire set of designs here today we do of course have a general plan for the set ready in-house but i don't want to commit to all those at this point i want to keep and reserve the ability to switch things around as i see it as we move forward during the year the web page for sign ups is now open i'll of course put the address on the information page for this video i hope many of you will find this series of interest at this end we are ready for a solid year of challenging work okay those were the major themes i had to touch today the next few are much simpler and easier to check off long long long time fans of our work going back to before the uqa heroes might remember that back in 2010 i started a new venture i'd been having trouble getting good blades for my carving knife so i had hunted around for a new supplier i found one and found that the blades were so nice i thought it would be an interesting idea to pursue making them available to other people looking for good carving tools one thing led to another an over a period of a year or so i did most of the groundwork for producing a complete set of tools suitable for our traditional kind of printmaking i selected appropriate blades designed handles i worked out jigs for making these handles and i even designed a storage case for them all as i was working on the project i blogged about every step that's where these photos are coming from and quite a few people were eagerly awaiting the day when i would have the new line of tools available it didn't happen that year turned out to be a tough one for me financially making it difficult to proceed and then in a last-ditch hail mary kind of attempt to hold on to things i agreed to make some prints designed by a crazy young man over in the u.s you know video game characters as woodblock prince i mean give me a break whatever you know what happened next we um got kind of busy milky way heroes exploded and then came subscriptions you've heard the story then the shop on and on and on it went there was simply never any chance to get back to the tool project but then came the virus and down went the shop now i myself am still fiercely busy here keeping it all together but staff member away amazon has over the past months found himself with time available put these things together and yes we have resurrected the tool project now the identical blades to those i sourced decades ago are no longer available but we started again and found a blacksmith who would make some to our specifications and once we got those in hand and this is six months or so ago myself and carver johnson we've been testing them and we are very very happy with what we have our amazon has worked with a woodcraft outfit up in niigata to get handles made and we are gradually getting closer to having everything put together and having a nice new tool set ready for market i should mention right up front that these are not going to be the cheapest tools in town there are all kinds of low quality tools available everywhere student kits and just you name it what is not out there available anywhere it's a nice decent set of carves and knives and chisels for somebody who really wants to do this properly and that's our target eta for the new set is sometime in the new year of course and perhaps march or april we'll share photos and more details as we get closer and this time around it's going to happen okay what's next oh yes yes yes yes yes eight views of cats i mentioned a little bit about it earlier and i've got to bring you an update even a little one the project is still alive you know although i think a lot of people think we've kind of given up on it because the updates have been so few and so far between as i mentioned a few minutes ago we have the first two prints now finished and in our catalog they've turned out to be stunningly popular the two designers randall hall for the evening snow print and jonathan huff for the night rain they give us deeply interesting drawings and our team here just ran like crazy turning them into beautiful wood block prints the project has been very slow moving though and that is simply due to the overwhelming volume of work that our team has been faced with this year the priority has always had to be on getting the subscription prints out the door and as a result work on the cats project which is it's open-ended with no particular deadline it always had to take a back seat the third design has been finalized and it's now carving our car for kawasaki santa and kobe she's already busy on it it will be for the theme evening bell and it features it features a cat whatever you'll learn more later i will surely be asking a few more people to move forward to stage two so that we will be ready to move with the next designs thank you very much for your patience on this i'm convinced that once they are all done we will have an absolutely spectacular series of prints no matter how long it takes to get them out i have a bit of bonus content for you here when we started this project last year we thought we were trailblazers taking the old eight views idea and applying it to cats it turns out as you might have guessed that we were beaten to the punch by a hundred and eighty years by kuni yoshi of course the ukiy artist most enamored of cats have a look at this it's entitled meow me it's a parody on the old omi the eight views of omi both in the title and in what's going on he or his team whatever somebody they've made puns on the theme names twisting them into scenes of feline activity for example the hiroshige design originally here this is ishiyama no akitsuki ishiyama is the mountain aki is autumn and tsuki is moon in kunyoshi's version this cat here is the focus this comes out as it today let me try and get this right buchinamano ajinosuki aji is horse mackerel nama is raw buchi is a kind of a description for a tabby cat it's all puns in japanese but you get the idea it's all very very clever although i think slightly spoiled by the fact that only six of the eight scenes are represented anyway it's great fun and nice to know we are following in such famous footsteps okay let's wrap this up there are actually more items that i could include but that's enough for now i was going to talk about the mocha hong kong collection that is growing wonderfully online but i think that deserves its own full video so i'll save it for then and the plans for the future of the asakusa shop here it's a bit premature to discuss those in any detail as the situation is still too unsettled there's no rush on that there's really just one more through this one more thing to address it has been an absolutely incredible year no this is not news to anybody you've all got your own stories everybody has been affected many people tragically so the optimists among us are hearing news of the various vaccines and are talking about the delight at the end of the tunnel but for others you know healthcare workers of course that light may seem to be a very long way away still we here at moko hong kong have no stories of personal loss to my knowledge none of our staff families have been affected in any severe way quite the contrary actually four four of the moca hong kong families welcomed a new baby this year and there's at least one more on the way i mentioned earlier in this presentation that throughout the year we have seen strong demand for the prints we make but something else we produce has been in even more demand perhaps because of the lockdowns i guess our youtube channel has exploded view counts are up dramatically and there is one video in particular currently driving this not the remembering a carver video although that does continue to draw steady attention it's a video that i made just about three years ago when i prepared a little piece of wood got some paper and printing tools ready and created a small wood block print from start to finish in one long take the video is more than three hours long here are the current stats for that video alone 20 000 views a day 10 views per minute day in day out week after week month after month not all those viewers make it right to the end of course quite a number drop out part way along but a very large percentage do watch the whole thing three hours of traditional japanese wood block print making and then they write to us where can i learn more how can i get interested in making friends can i come and work at moca hong kong can i be your apprentice interest in what we do in these old fashioned woodblock prints is growing by leaps and bounds a global pandemic is a horrible thing of course but it seems that no matter how dark the cloud there might always be some kind of silver lining and for us that lining has been an ever greater audience for our work not just an audience but a wide group of new participants the new year print that we will shortly begin sending out to many of our fans and collectors was not carved by me this year it was not carved by any of our regular staff members it was carved for us by a young man from britain who watched some videos somewhere on the internet a while back who found this interesting and who just got dug in and started and who is now here in tokyo studying the craft well on the way to making a living at this raising a family with his carving knife it was the worst of times it was the best of times that's enough i think see you soon with the next real video bye for now you

Channel: David Bull

Views: 83,462

Rating: 4.9673986 out of 5

Keywords: woodblock prints, woodblock printmaking, Japanese prints, Japanese printmaking, Koryusai, Jed Henry, ukiyo-e, ukiyoe, kacho-e

Id: 37yQGVCoIN0

Length: 28min 50sec (1730 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020