Posted by Dave Bull at 7:35 AM, September 13, 2010 [Permalink]
It's been a while since the previous update, but the reason is always the same ... nothing going on but endless printing printing printing ...
The #5~6 pair is now completely finished - 115 copies for current subscribers, and another 85 or so for future orders. Ichikawa-san is coming tomorrow afternoon to pick up #6, along with its story, backboards, invoices, etc., and it will then be time for me to move on to the next pair.
In other news ... the producer from NHK was here again today, and we finalized plans for the 30 minute program. They will film here next Thursday and Friday, and I will later go down to their studio for the session with host Peter Barakan. The broadcast schedule has been established too; this will be the second program in a new series - Japanophiles - with the first one (on lacquer worker Suzanne Ross) airing on October 3, and mine following a week later on October 10th.
The scheduled time of first broadcast is (get this!): 2010:10:10:10:10 (ten past ten on the tenth of October, 2010) But that's Tokyo time, so for people in most places around the world, it will be happening on the 9th. The program will be repeated later that same day, at four hour intervals, at least three more times.
How to access NHK World (cable or satellite) information is here.
Schedule (including local times) is here. (Japanophiles is a new program, and appears on the schedules there for the first time on October 2~3rd. My episode will be one week later, on the 9~10th)
View NHK World live on the net here (click the 512K button in the viewer to pop up a larger viewing window).
Friend Doi Toshikazu and I spent the entire day Sunday on a visit to Urushibara-san. If you missed the earlier post, he's the son of Yoshijiro Urushibara, the printer who lived in England in the early years of the 20th century.
Sunday's mission was simple - inspect prints, shoot them, scan stuff, and generally collect as much information for the new website as we could. Urushibara-san and his wife were again very open to all our questions and demands, and we took advantage of their hospitality to totally 'destroy' their Sunday! :-)
But I came home with nearly 4Gb of material on a thumb drive, and will now try and find time here and there to get the information up onto the website. Give me a few more days, and I think I'll have a publicly-accessible skeleton open for inspection ...
In the meantime, here's a little advance item ... Urushibara-san and his family, snapped in about 1933:
The young boy at lower left is Ichiro-san, whom we visited on Sunday ...