I was supposed to go to a small dinner party this evening, but the hostess phoned in the morning to let me know it was being postponed for a couple of weeks. There is a major flu thing happening here these days, and either one of the guests has already come down with it, or she is getting nervous about having a get-together in such circumstances. So instead of a pleasant evening of conversation with my friends in this geijutsu-ka guruupu ('gathering of people from the arts'), I suddenly find myself with a free evening.

'Free' being a relative term of course. I'm only part-way through the printing of the final batch of the final Mystique print, and the latest newsletter came back from the printer last night, so I now have to get the labels, etc. ready, so that the ladies can mail it out on Monday. Then the newsletter itself has to go onto the website, both English and Japanese versions, and also I have to get Tsushima-san's two new 'Debut Prints' into the Mokuhankan catalogue online, because once the newsletter starts arriving in people's mailboxes, the orders are going to start coming in ...

So those of you who are waiting for more news about the new knife set will have to wait just a bit longer, please. Today's news is on another front.

But as we have no direct access to that workshop, Sato-san and I have found it difficult to properly communicate our wishes. So while we wait for those samples, we're also exploring other avenues. This afternoon I started my own prototyping. To tell you about this, I'm going to have to take you back ... way back!

Long-time readers of my website may remember an item I posted back in 1999, about buying some cherry planks. The wood I bought that day has not yet been used for woodblocks. After Shimano-san (the block supplier) passed away, Matsumura-san stepped up his wood business, and I have been using his wood (for the most part) since then.

So the four long - very long - planks have been waiting peacefully since that time. At present, they stand in a dry and well-ventilated corner of my upper basement:

I myself have nothing to do with the actual making of the blades themselves. Beyond discussing the type of steel to be used, and the tempering, etc., I won't be touching that stuff. Of course.

But the 'accompaniments' - handles, storage box, shipping container, pamphlet, etc. - all fall within my purview. And as we are really starting completely from scratch, everything is wide open. I'm trying to get work done on all these things, bit by bit, and yesterday it was the turn of the storage box to get my full attention. I spent the entire day down at the worktable in the shop, surrounded by small hand tools and a pile of paulownia wood offcuts.

This was the starting point:

First was a stop at one of the shops selling/making paulownia boxes. Given that this new project involves so many things that all have to be up and running before we can get the product on the market, Sato-san and I thought that it might be a sensible idea to use a ready-made box, if we can find a place to supply them at a reasonable quality and price.

The people I spoke to in the box shop took down my description of what I want, and will get back to us next week with a quote. The stuff in their shop looks to be a good quality, and we'll see what kind of price they will give us.

Another option on the table is for me to make the boxes myself, and as I am going to be tooling up next month to make boxes for my upcoming print series, we may indeed end up going that way. We'll see ...

But a more important decision we made yesterday was on the fundamental design of the chisel handles. We met up at the restaurant where the craftsman's association was having a get-together, and during the dinner (we sat next to each other) we snatched bits of 'private' conversation where possible ...

Well, 'later' is here already!

The young craftsman I mentioned was the carver Sato-san, who did the work for the Senshafuda prints I published last year. He has been spending quite a lot of his free time doing research on the content of the steel used to make the blades in our carving knives. All the traditional carvers complain about the quality of the blades in recent years, but most of us have felt that there just wasn't much we could do about it. Making knives is a very specialized job of course, and our segment of the overall hardware market is extremely tiny. There are actually more people still making samurai swords than there are making knives like ours!

Sato-san's researches - and his tenacity at digging up information - led him late last month to a small workshop in one of the suburbs of western Tokyo. Here's a snapshot from the workshop:

Sato-san found that one of the men there shared his interest in investigating the various types of steel that could be used to make such tools, and some interesting discussions began, followed by some hammering of steel ...

For the past few weeks I have been testing out a blade from this workshop, one made and tempered to specifications set by Sato-san, and I have been mightily impressed. Not only impressed - worried. Worried that I might not be able to get a replacement, after this one is worn down!

Well, one thing led to another, and this little item may give you a hint about where we are going to take this:

Yasui-san spent the morning printing mats for the Mystique series prints. When I say 'printing' I mean with our Epson ink-jet printer. This is a monster of a printer, which I can barely carry myself. I know this, because that's what I did this morning - brought it down to the workshop from its usual location in the 'office' upstairs. Yasui-san agreed to do this printing job on the condition that she could do it down here ... and regular readers know why!

She's catching up with back-number prints, and will shortly begin preparation for the shipping of print #18, the one I am currently carving. So this part of our news today should technically be over on the Woodblock RoundTable, where my own work is featured ...

While she worked on that, Tsushima-san was busy with 'real' work (meaning actual print production ...). She is going to make an edition of the Plum Blossom print, which is currently out of stock, and which I have back orders for.

And in what is a 'first' for me, the print this time wasn't hand-carved and printed all by me. It seemed to make no sense to make two prints - one for the collectors of my personal print work, and one for the Mokuhankan business - so we wrapped all the mailing lists together, and sent everybody the same print.

I carved it late in November and then gave Tsushima-san the job of printing. Or should say, almost all the printing. We did it the traditional way: the 'master' printer here did the key block, and she did all the colour blocks. And as we needed 300 copies, this was quite a substantial job for her, far and away the most copies of anything that she has printed.

We split the batch in half, and did 150 at a time, mostly so that she could get any particular colour done in one session, something that would be very difficult for her if there had been 300 in the batch.

The first was 'someone' who came by yesterday afternoon for a very quick visit - too quickly for me to grab my camera. But he came again this morning while I had the webcam running, so I quickly turned the camera to point out the window as he strolled by ...

Here's a very unusual scene at the entranceway - four of us here today!

Anyway, long story short, given that the single biggest 'problem' facing me at the moment for getting Mokuhankan onto its next level is the challenge of finding some more 'good' people, today's post on the Japan Real Time blog is extremely interesting:

Japanese Women Quit Unrewarding Careers

"It’s no secret that Japanese women are a woefully underutilized talent pool in the domestic labor market. But in a departure from the conventional wisdom that women tend to drop out of the workforce for family obligations or because a baby has arrived, a new study shows that the overwhelming reason for the female labor exodus is because their careers are unsatisfying."

So why mention this just now? Well, I was talking to a 'little birdie' the other day, and heard ('peep peep') that printer-trainee Tsushima-san - who has now been coming here for just over four months - looks forward to coming to work here each day because this place is 楽しい.

Translation? The dictionary gives us: "pleasant, enjoyable, delightful, happy, pleasurable, merry, cheerful, delectable ..."

Back in May I showed you this photo of 'helper' lady Yasui-san, as she prepared the folders for our first Senshafuda print set:

She did an excellent job with those, so I co-opted her to do the wrapping of all this year's Gift Prints. Here's the batch of them she finished up a few days ago:

We passed a small (and un-noticed) milestone yesterday afternoon - the first work done by one of the new printers has made its way into the Mokuhankan catalogue. A couple of weeks back, when Tsushima-san was working on the Koryusai Peony print, we thought this might happen with that one, but her final prints still weren't quite good enough to sell. We're going to come back to that one a bit later, but the oncoming Gift Print season has made us put it aside for now.

And yes, it is with the Gift Prints that Tsushima-san has joined the 'productive' team here. She and I did a run of the Hokusai 'Floating Carp' print yesterday and today, and out of the 52 sheets we had in the batch ... we have 52 that are good enough to go out, a ratio I can live with!

Summer officially arrived at the Mokuhankan workshop yesterday afternoon, with the delivery of a small package from printer Tetsui-san.

Relax in the cool breeze of evening, sitting behind your sudare (bamboo screen) ... take a visit to one of the fireworks festivals on the river ... or join the crowds of kids on vacation down at the aquarium, where you can have an 'encounter' with a species from another world!    :-)

Yes, better late than never (is it?), the Summer Senshafuda set has finally arrived, and is now being prepared for shipping (our wrapping lady Yasui-san has been waiting patiently for over two months for this!).

In the (unlikely) event that there is still anybody out there waiting for these to arrive, you can find them on this page of the Mokuhankan website.

(And when I get a minute, I'll post something in the comments below about what has happened to put us in this ridiculous situation ... and where we are going from here.)

A number of collectors have written asking about the progress of the Summer Senshafuda set ... is it still on the rails?

Partly this has been because she is basically doing the same sort of training work, simply a few 'rungs' further back on the ladder ... and how many images of the kagegami prints do you want to see?!

But over the past few sessions, it has become apparent that her built-in 'skill set' is different from the one that Tsushima-san has shown. For example, on Monday morning, I set her to work on making some copies of the famous Cat Bus image from the My Neighbour Totoro film:

(Before you ask, I have to say that no, I'm sorry we can't let you have any of these ... we have no rights to use this image commercially, and this is just for our own internal training ...)