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good evening this is woodblock printmaker david ball here in asakusa in tokyo whenever i'm getting ready to begin recording one of these videos i have to decide where to do it as you know sometimes i sit at my carving bench in one corner of the shop downstairs but this time around there was no question of where to set up the camera it had to be right here up on the second floor in the room where we store our mocha hong kong collection items that's because our theme today is the collection itself i'm going to chat a bit about just what it is what we have here and what we are trying to do with it but of course too much talk talk talk is not so interesting so we're also going to spend plenty of quality time looking closely at a selection of the prints themselves anybody with more than a passing interest in the old japanese prince the ukiyoe knows the rough outlines of the story the ukui flourished as a genre mainly during the long years of japan's isolation from the rest of the world once the country opened up and society began to change dramatically people here found the old prince of little interest but westerners were intensely fascinated by them and of course eagerly scooped up the things that the japanese themselves were quite happily getting rid of because of this museums all around the world now hold wonderful collections of edu era okiwe prince and the genre as a whole is globally recognized as one of the the highlights of human artistic achievement due to this history and the extremely high demand for these now quite rare items whenever old ukui prints come into the market these days they are quite naturally priced at at sotheby's levels and normal people like myself have no access to them i learned all these things in my early years in japan and although i myself was also intensely fascinated by the prince i of course understood from the beginning that i would never be able to own any such is life lusting after something you can never possess just brings unhappiness but there's an interesting twist to the story those western collectors back in the days when prince were still widely available focused primarily on the classic ukulele prints of the edo era for adding to their collections that was completely understandable but this did mean that a great many woodblock prints of other eras and other types ended up being ignored over the years now where we're going with this just relax so let's skip back a bit to the mid-1980s when i arrived here in japan i was trying to learn the traditional printmaking techniques but without a sensei or a teacher any kind of guide for at all it was up to me to simply try and figure it out for myself what did i do i turned to the actual prints themselves for guidance as i have said edo period prints were priced far beyond my reach but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise because during the late meiji and taisha periods craftsmen with supreme levels of skill were still producing excellent prints the uqe as a genre was dead by that but woodblock printing as a technology was still useful to society and in that window of time between the end of the uqe era and the time when the printing presses blew everything away a great number of very interesting and very beautiful wood block prints were produced this very interesting paradox at work here because the prints back in the edo period were not valued or considered important in any way there was a vast amount of hugely sloppy work done and truthfully most of the prints left over from those days even the ones in the major museums are either carelessly made or are in poor condition but those meiji and taisho craftsmen and the publishers by then knew that it was a different ballgame they knew that their work would be appreciated by discerning consumers so some of them and their publishers worked to an extremely high standard this is not reflected in the current prices of such prints though simply because they are not idle period originals even a hand-to-mouth woodblock printmaker like i was back in 1989 could actually afford some so that's the origin story for our moca hong kong collection it began with me simply picking up a print here and there so that i could study it so that i could inspect the carving the paper look at the printing try and figure out how it was all made comparing one against the other and bit by bit learn what made a good print that was 30 plus years ago and over the intervening years i've continued little by little to add to my collection in tight years i bought no prints at all in times when i was a bit more flush i was able to pick up some nice items here and there but always always on a very modest budget that print we saw in the cold open to this video it's a reproduction of a kunioshi design and was carved and printed in 1952 by the takamiso company dave here was one year old to real okiy collectors around the world to the major museums and institutions it is worth nothing for them it might as well be a color photocopy they wouldn't even bend over to pick it up it's a reproduction but the men who made it that final generation of competent shocking in this field and the people who purchased it perhaps the final generation of consumers who understood something about what they were looking at to those people it had value and it had meaning we have prints in the moca hong kong collection that have that have reduced visitors to this museum among them curators from world class museums prints that have reduced these visitors to tears now for the rest of this video we're going to switch back and forth i've explained a bit we'll now look at stuff i'll explain a bit more and we'll look at some more are you ready with many hundreds of prints now uploaded to the collection website i'm certainly not going to be able to show you everything what i'll try to do in this video is give you an overview of what sort of things we have and introduce you to a few of the highlights although honestly speaking i think everything here is a highlight the prints in the group you are looking at now were made in the 1890s and are known as akashi surimuno akashi is the town where they were made and surimono is a genre of edo era prints that were produced for private exchange among poetry aficionados each print carries a number of poems and these would have been created by members of the poetry circle who sponsored the production of the prince because akashi is near kobe one of the early places where foreigners were permitted to live in the early years after the opening up of the country it is thought that these prints were produced for that market and indeed very few of them are now found in japan but they do come up for sale now and again overseas a very interesting point is that these akashi prints are actually reproductions of designs originally produced about 50 or 60 years earlier but given that we now are more than 130 years still further into the future the term reproduction doesn't really have much meaning here they were made of a beautifully thick and luscious paper with the result that everything ends up being deeply embossed as you can clearly see i myself don't really think of these as prints so much as objects a kind of sculpture actually we have three or four dozen of these akashibot in the collection and they are always a favor to viewers they are just so breathtakingly beautiful originating in roughly the same era the 1890s another wonderfully interesting genre of mage era france are the kuchie given that e means picture and kuchi can be mouth or entrance you should be able to work it out these are frontis pieces for books and magazines illustrations inserted at the front of each volume this is why they are almost always found in folded form the prints were too large for the magazine so were folded twice in order to fit given that the prints were made to be inserted into cheap magazines in throwaway fashion it is astonishing to find that these are actually some of the most complex and carefully made prints of the entire japanese wood block genre the carving and printing is at the most refined level the number of color impressions is very high and the overall quality level of the work is sometimes beyond belief they were produced in huge quantities to match publishing demand but far and away most of them were ultimately tossed out with the outdated magazines fortunately for us though there were people back in the day who felt they were worth keeping and cut them out of the books before throwing those out i talked a bit about how this all got started but what actually do we now have in here the quick and easy answer to that is short i don't really know as i picked up items over the years i just put them into drawers or up onto a bookshelf somewhere along the line i got a few file folders to store things but never thought of making any serious attempt to keep track of anything once we opened our shop in asakusa and began to seriously participate in dealer auctions to obtain stock for our business opportunities to add items to my own collection increased the stuff then really started to stack up there were boxes on the floor all over the place i'd be talking to somebody about some kind of print or other and we'd say oh just a minute i've got an example of that i'd go running and i wouldn't be able to find it it was on a shelf or in a box summer a couple of years back it became clear to me that it was long past time to get organized easy to say but my god 2018 2019 they were such a whirlwind for me the shop organizing the staff the workflow for everybody the carving to the printing ordering paper the visitors the print parties so many print parties but then then came the virus and within a few weeks everything changed i talked about this in the previous video so i won't recap it all here but among the changes came an opportunity to put the collection in order we had shop staff needing work and we had patreon revenue available it added up so we set things up our amazon came in here and built this rack of shelves and i ordered a bunch of filing and storage materials i then coded a back-end database and created a website to display the results and the staff members got busy yamada masato he's getting prints basically sorted out and entered into the system he and watanabe aya then spend hours down in the now deserted shop where we have set up a couple of different stations for lighting and taking good photos more about that later watanabe sand then heads home to burn the midnight oil in photoshop rose council whose japanese is way way better than mine then gets busy researching to try and figure out just what we're looking at and who is being depicted in this particular kabuki print for example with currently somewhere just over a thousand items online we are now perhaps around a quarter of the way through but it's kind of a moving target because the collection is actually still growing our twitch viewers see this happening in real time because it's become a habit for me to use the final section of every twitch stream to give the viewers a little advanced peek at some item or other that has just come in now i casually said i don't know to the question exactly what's in here but of course i know what this is about and it is very much not a random collection of stuff it is quite carefully curated and the curation comes down to one single point fame of the designer i couldn't care less value in the marketplace hey we're on a budget here cheaper is better original as opposed to reproduction you know my ideas on that already so what is the one single something that drives my decision to add an item to our collection very simply stated is this a well made wood block print check that box and you've got me at its core that's what this collection represents guided by the the dna of its control freak curator these shelves now contain a wonderful collection of stunningly well made wood block prints actually i should qualify that statement it's a collection of objects created using the traditional japanese wood block printmaking technique not everything in here is a print per se anyway enough talk already time to look at a few more one of the groups i had in mind when i said not a print per se was of course the large number of books that we have in the collection wood block was the only way to produce books back in the edu era but among the western influences that flooded the country in the meiji time was of course the printing press we have a number of books in the collection that were made with a combination of the two technologies perhaps the most interesting of these are the chitty membo the crepe paper books viewers of our previous david's choice videos know what these are as i've introduced some of them before going by their physical texture they are paid to have been printed on fabric but this is not the case each page was produced as a normal wood block print and the creping was done after that work was complete here are a few sample pages from one of the books and you can here see the mix of techniques the lettering of the text was printed with metal type in a press while all the illustrations were created with multi-color wood block printing the great books were aimed at foreigners and they were created in a number of different languages here are a couple of pages from the french language version of the old momotaro story a quite different type of book though also made with mixed methods is this beautiful guide to some of the flora of japan it was produced by the hasegawa company in the early 1900s and also combines press printed text with woodblock illustrations although this time without the subsequent stage of becoming crypt the cover illustration is treated with an embossed pattern but on the inner pages the beautiful horseshoe paper remains clean and smooth the book basically steps through the course of a year and the illustrations are a supreme example of the level of delicacy to which the meiji era carvers and printers could work many of these impressions are so delicate and subdued that it is sometimes difficult to tell if there is any color actually present on the paper surface of all the books in our collection it is this one more than any other that stuns people into silence as they hold it and slowly turn the pages it is truly hard to believe that such a thing could be a simple commercial production carve some blocks pass them to a printing team sell the finished book it just doesn't make any sense until you realize that this was simply all in a day's work for the craftsman of the day now this little book is something completely different there is no story but there is a plot as it were it's a little book showing the process of printing of an ukiyoe design by hiroshige at the beginning we see the impression of the key block the outlines of the design and from there on we see the individual colors being printed one by one as you can see the left hand side of each spread shows the color by itself the right side shows the accumulation let's watch as it all comes together and for a little bonus content here i'm going to include another copy of this same design that we have in our collection this one an actual full size version let's have a close-up look aren't those images to die for i've been planning this for years and i'm so happy to see it finally happening in my little library back at home in ole miss i have any number of books about japanese prints and 99 out of 100 of them are so frustrating they talk about this and talk about that that's all very well but when it comes to the images the most important part none of them get it right they show a picture of the print of course but it is very clear that none of the people none of them involved in the production of those books understood the reality of a woodblock print the vivid three-dimensional reality of the thing the palpable touchable tasteable reality of a print they call it the content some of it but they never understood that the container itself carries much of the message look at these two photos of a woodblock print we're going to compare here i've taken this first one from one of those books in my library we can see the designer's concept we see a picture something has been transmitted from the designer down through time to us that's okay now look at our version of the same print properly photographed as though you were sitting here at this window holding the print in your own hand now what do we see of course we still see the designer's concept but with so much more we can see the hand of the dozen or so people who were responsible for making this all visible right here on this sheet it starts with that sheet the paper of course the luscious japanese mulberry paper on which nearly all traditional japanese prints are made totally different from something like a western silkscreen print where the paper is just a blank flat white base on which an image is carried with our prints the paper is an integral part of the object to erase this with a bad photograph is to erase most of the beauty of the object the quality of the mulberry fibers how carefully the paper maker's family has picked out scraps of bark how smoothly the sheet was laid down these things are all visible and then of course the craftsmen who transformed those sheets into the finished product just how smoothly the carver cut the lines the quality of his blade was the cherry wood carefully selected dried properly leaving a finish that would result in smooth deep color the quality of the hair and the printer's brush and how carefully he had softened it on the shark's skin was the paste in the printer's workshop cooked properly that morning if not the resulting color would be erratic and blotchy had the finest newest young apprentice spent enough time grinding the rough pigments for making this impression you may think i'm overthinking this but i am not all these things and many more are visible in a woodblock print but only if you hold it properly and look at it properly held close in the hand under a nice raking light i'm not upset at those professional photographers who took the photos for all those books of course they simply didn't know about this but for us here at mocha hong kong where we live and breathe this stuff there is no other way madison and what nabisan they sometimes spend hours downstairs trying to get things just right for bringing out the beauty of some particular item once they're done up the photos then go to the website where i hope they will serve to entrance yet another generation of viewers to the gorgeous beauty of these prints speaking of which let's see some more i should be careful in my selection of prints to show you in today's overview there's only time to feature a couple of dozen items from the thousands in the collection and because of that i've been tending to pick out things that are a bit unusual or special in truth though the bulk of the collection is made up of quite normal ukiyo prints and in fact if someone were to visit and ask to see just for one example some utomoto beauties that we can do as we can with most of hiroshige's best-known landscapes or his nature prints and ask about hawk size bridges and waterfalls and the rare chienumi prints we are actually well on the way to becoming a one-stop reference library of classic uqe designs and speaking of that reminds me of another very interesting group of items in our collection the taisho era uqe subscription prints mokohangan is well known for our own subscription prints but we certainly didn't invent the concept back in the thai show era a number of publishers marketed uqa prints this way the idea was that by subscribing to these sets the customer would develop a knowledge of the history of okioe by collecting representative prints from each designer and period typically a package of prints would be delivered to subscribers each month two at a time was the most common pattern but three and sometimes four was also possible one of the old packages i have here includes a little numbered card and it seems that after accumulating a certain quantity of these cards the customer could exchange them for a storage case in which to keep the prints some of these productions were spectacular they have a fairly unique style somewhat different from classical uqe they were printed on a soft deep washi quite a bit thicker than many other prints and had extremely rich and deep printing with the outlines being blacker than most common and the colors being extremely saturated the registration is nearly always pinpoint perfect and the overall effect is quite luxurious the reverse side of the sheets shows deep striations from the printer's barrens indicative of very very heavy pressure being applied it must have been hard work to make these our printers here at mocha hong kong these days sometimes study these prints and just shake their heads in amazement how was this done it is a source of much quiet pleasure for me to be able to provide this material for them to study and learn from as i mentioned earlier the images that i've been showing you during the course of this video are all taken from our website the section devoted to the mocha hong kong collection but in recent years the way that many people use the internet has become a source of no small frustration for me more than a decade or so ago i spent a few months designing a website with a wonderful new way to browse our prints taking advantage of the fact that computer monitors had become quite large the prints looked great on the large screen no sooner had i finished it then steve jobs got up on a stage somewhere waved around that little piece of glass in his hand and changed the world destroyed civilization depending on your point of view you know the rest of the story the net result is that according to our youtube statistics most people who watch this video i am now making are going to watch it on the screen of some kind of phone about yay big and so it is with the website we have created to display the prints in our collection most people are browsing it from phones so honestly speaking sometimes i think why bother nobody is seeing any of the detail anyway why am i wasting my time like this the internet was indeed a cool place once upon a time had a great start but now it's just a time waster it's just people getting thumb exercise but then i see the financial statistics coming from apple and i read that more imac computers were sold in the last quarter than ever before and i cling onto that data point there are indeed people out there with real monitors somewhere out there are people who can see these prints properly it's for that kind of viewing that i have created a website for our collection do you have a nice wide screen the images we have included are at such strong resolution you can pretty much fill your screen with them browse in the evening turn out your room lights use full screen you won't believe what you see we have taken such good photographs that honestly speaking you will see the prints even more clearly than if you were sitting right here beside me looking at the real things the collection website is still at an early stage of development i'm still trying to work out good ways of arranging the prints so people can search and find things in there now to explain a bit about the website let's switch here to a screen capture i'm going to browse a bit and show you some of the ways to use the website when you first arrive at the collection site it will open with a randomly selected image displayed in a standard way for the site but the image at the top of the page and a few other tabs below it unlike most websites that display a collection of prints which start with thumbnails that you click to see a larger version i'm doing it the other way around bang there it is coming right at you depending on your screen and device it may be too large to see in its entirety if so then simply click it or tap of course it will then scale properly into your screen the resizing also works the other way these images have a lot of resolution and you can zoom in quite a lot i have a trackpad attached to my computer here so i can use my fingers to spread a bit pulling the image even larger and my finger or mouse can then slide the image around so that i can have a look at any part of it incredible incredible resolution on most of these images in here pinching my fingers of course will then pull it back to the start size the tabs below the image will vary from print to print but will always include these first two inside the data tab is of course some basic information on the print as you see here one thing i specifically built into our site is in response to something that really frustrates me on many museum and collection websites they have no way to link directly inside to some particular item in our case here it is a direct link that you can use to return straight to this item at any time these tabs of course open and close by clicking or tapping on their title bar the next tab down is description and it is here that you find whatever data that we have managed to gather for this item sometimes we have a lot sometimes much less because the print we are inspecting here is part of a set we see a tab showing the other items in the set and there is something important to mention about the display here this is in common with many other pages of the site displays of search results book pages or related items anywhere that a group of items are displayed together like this you have two ways to proceed if you click or tap one of the images itself it will pop up for display you can then move next previous forward back by clicking or tapping at the right or left side of the image you can thus move through the entire set without closing and reopening this pop-up display what's even best is if your device has a keyboard the left right arrows on the keyboard should also activate this movement this is a great way to browse the collection pop something up and then just tap through the series if you see a print that you want more information on click away to close the pop-up and then click the name of that item this will take you directly to the collection page for that item just like the one we started with it has of course its own data and description tabs now that example was for a set of prints but the same browsing system is in place for such things as books let's go down and use the search tab to find one that's at the bottom of every display i've decided we're going to look for a book to read so let's select book list or book set in the genre list a set of books then appears and let's look at the sword and blossom poems because this is a book set we are shown a display of all the books in the set in this case three of them let's look at volume one remember clicking the image here would just pop it up we click the name to move to the display space itself and once we arrive we find a tab entitled book pages you know what we will find inside and it's the same interface click one to pop it up for reading and just as before move previous to next with the mouse or the keys on the arrow keys on the keyboard i forgot to mention earlier even these popped up images can also be enlarged and scrolled with your fingers on the screen a track pad or with the mouse roller what else is there to show yes yes general searching back in the search tab you can see three search fields title designer and tags you can mix and match these but with one current limit of a single term in each box let's see what comes up for say hiroshige and snow make the search and lots to browse now of course i knew in advance that we would find plenty of hiroshige snow scenes in here but for those of you who have no idea what is in the collection i can suggest you try this go back to that genre search and this time select entire collection and what you get is a vast dump of of course the entire collection not all in one screen of course it is paged as you can see by the numbers at the bottom i'm not quite sure how we will handle this in the future but anyway for now this lets you go window shopping as with all similar displays in the system click an image to pop it up or click a title to move forward to a deal detail page for that item so i think that should be enough to keep everybody busy for a while there's actually much more in there i don't want to make a big deal about it yet because there are only a couple done so far but for some of the items i have recorded a personal talk about the print which you can of course listen to these talks are identified by a little headphone mark on the description tab clicking it will of course activate the audio and whenever one of the collection items gets featured in a youtube video of course we embed that into the content on the site as well i tell you it's such a fun website the other evening i started browsing it and i wasted so much time okay we're almost done here tell you what let's look at one more group of prints and then we'll close this off for this last batch i'm just going to dip in there not exactly at random but i'll pick up just a few of my favorites the prints you see here are part of a larger set depicting stations along the old tokaido road they are in what is known as senchafuda format and were created in the thai show era began as simple name labels that were pasted on the walls or up in the rafters of a shrine or temple but over the years grew in sophistication until by the early 20th century they were being made at the quality we see here groups of collectors would band together to sponsor their production and it is these sponsors nicknames that you see in the heavy black lettering here another wood block collector mania common in the early 20th century were the match labeled prints these had their origin and labels printed for actual boxes of matches but during this period gradually became divorced from that function and evolved into pure collector's items as with the senchafidda groups were formed to sponsor their production and collection the first ones we see here are from a large set depicting events in the famous 47 ronin story as you can see the themes chosen for these match level prints varied widely given the scale of these prints they are just about six centimeters in the long dimension some of the work is astonishing in its level of detail and high quality this little set of yokai are of particular interest to me and if you like them too and would maybe like to have a set of these then i can advise you to keep an eye on our instagram over the coming couple of months okay three more items to finish this off for today back at the beginning of this presentation i showed some meiji prints and we returned to that era with this image taken from an album of 12 seasonal images by toshikata and which represents perhaps the height of the woodblock craftsman's accomplishments carving delicate beyond belief and printing to match anybody whose impression of japanese classical culture has been formed from such things as this print or maybe the tea ceremony or flower ranging has to understand that there is quite a different side to things here and to see it you need to head to the theater quite a different approach this is one of the designs in the famous kabuki ju hachiban the most famous 18 kabuki plays the stories were specifically selected by members of the danjuro clan for the way that they showed off the aragoto the rough stuff a style in which they excelled it's in your face gaudy and over the top just like this print for our final print of the session we are going to leave japan we're still in the 20th century this is still a print made with the japanese materials and techniques but we are now on the other side of the world the english seaside this is the great stride a print by john platt a british artist who decided to have a go at making prince after the japanese fashion he was able to learn a few basics from a japanese printer who lived in britain at the time but overall was basically self-taught this is absolutely stunning work and a fitting way to end today's little presentation reminding everybody that this thing we call the japanese print may indeed have been born and bred in japan but has now grown wings and flown i spoke earlier about the genesis of this collection about how it kind of came about as a matter of course over the years without too much planning but i have to qualify that somewhat because to be honest there is a kind of a master plan involved here to explain we have to go back exactly 10 years i had become 59. and that meant that next up would be of course 60. now here in japan the age of 60 is traditionally considered one of the major milestone years it's five times around the 12-year zodiac cycle and if you've made it that far it marks the arrival of your end game as it were you pass your baton to the younger generation weigh up your achievements in life against the failures and you sort of decide how to spend whatever time it is left to you so i sat there with this magic number approaching and thought about stuff i was doing very nicely as a printmaker making a living making decent prints but knowing that eyes muscles stamina knowing that from here on out my abilities were going to of course start declining but my knowledge my experience these things were flourishing still growing so an idea presented itself that with at that time a quarter century of printmaking under my belt and a wonderful catalogue of achievements that it might make sense from the age 60 to redirect my energies for the next act rather than spend my time isolated at my bench making prints that would be owned and seen by only some few hundreds of people i would i would blow it wide open hire some young people start training them contact some designers see what could be done to spread knowledge of this wonderful traditional craft far and wide but such a thing would be chaotic absolutely it would be chaotic it was clear to me right up front that to do such a thing would be the end of my wonderfully peaceful life in that beautiful workshop by the river there would be people problems money problems i mean i had been in business before back in canada i had been the general manager of an operation with more than 20 people i knew exactly what this would entail i tell you some evenings after the day's work was done actually i i paced up and down on the quiet street in front of my home it's it's like the two birdies on the shoulders this one is dave are you crazy you have the perfect life here how can you even consider breaking it up are you nuts and the birdie on this shoulder would just say like and so you're just going to keep this all to yourself all the things you've learned everything that people passed on to you it will all just fade away with you birds and birds i needed something to help me make the decision so i wrote not a book per se but i wrote a long long long piece describing a possible future that idea of opening things up exactly what would it involve if i did actually take that step what would my life be like day by day would it be a life that i would enjoy really so to try and get a handle on this i sat down and described a day in my life 10 years or so in the future i put down a vision for what i had begun to call moko hong kong once it was done i posted the whole massive thing on my blog for comments and discussion with the fans there were lots of interesting prints raised points raised but among the resulting discussion was one particular email that i received and which i will never forget i don't need to mention the sender's name here he's a good friend but what he said hit me right between the eyes dave what's with this fake indecision it's totally clear to all of us who are watching that you've already decided what to do you are obviously going to move forward with opening up your workshop now quit procrastinating and get busy this stunned me here i was thinking that i was being careful calculating plus and minus for all the paths forward preparing to make a life-changing decision and people out there they were just laughing at me anyway you know the rest of the story in january of 2011 10 years ago exactly i signed up for youtube and prepared my first video a couple of months later i hired our first employees two ladies from the nearby community who began to train as printers they're both still with us actually and from then on step by very slow step the things that i had described in that book began to come to life publishing prints a shop in tokyo the large barren sign outside the printer's workroom live streaming it's all in here written 10 years ago but also there's something in here if i can find it just a second here i should have marked the page more carefully here we are dave and his guests are now in the lobby area of the moko hong kong gallery museum the room they now move into is quite different from the bright and airy shop and workroom they saw earlier this area is more dimly lit as one would expect in a museum displaying beautiful old prints yes the moko hong kong collection and a place to display it has been part of the master plan right from the beginning intended to be one of the most important parts of our organization over the years though i've had no chance to devote any attention to it i've just been so busy with our publishing the shop itself and the print parties it was always maybe later a bit later well as i mentioned a few minutes ago thanks to the virus later has arrived with a bang and the moko collection is coming to life stage one has been to start to get things organized catalog photographed and moved online as i've been showing you stage two in real life is about to begin sometime in the coming few months staff member away amazon and i the two of us built the shop downstairs together a couple of years ago he and i will begin another round of renovations down there tokyo has a real dearth of good museum gallery type places especially ones that are user friendly to overseas visitors with the breadth of our collection our depth of knowledge and the experience we have at communicating i am convinced that we will be able to offer a world-class experience to visitors to show you things that you have no chance to see anywhere else and to bring them to life vividly at the time i'm making this video our saksa shop has been closed for 10 months the vaccination campaigns are now getting underway in various countries around the world but it's going to take time of course and it is clearly going to be quite a while before japan will be ready to again welcome foreign visitors but when that day comes as it will moku hong kong the redesigned and rebuilt moko hong kong will be ready i can't wait for opening day and i hope i can welcome you there as soon as you're able to make it see you then you