The highlight among the TV programs that followed the 100 Poets project was this one-hour documentary on TV Tokyo, in their 'Human Drama' series. The video crew had been following me for the final few years of the project, with an eye to putting out this program, and it aired just after they got their final footage - at the closing exhibition of the Hyakunin Isshu print series. I've cut the commercials, so the total running time is just about 46 minutes.

The program is of course all in Japanese, but we have prepared a (rough) transcription in English of what is going on in a .pdf file that you can find here. (Maybe one day I will have time to put timecodes in to help match it up with the video ...)

I should also mention that - although it wasn't clear to me during the process of making the program - the producer had it in mind to emphasize the 'drama' aspect of the whole thing. A lot of things happened during that ten years, including a divorce and my girls 'growing up' and moving to Canada, and she really poured on the 'violins' here and there.

In the issue of my 'Hyakunin Issho' newsletter that was published at the end of the series, I included comments from people who had been associated with the project, and that producer - Ms. Reiko Furuichi - sent me these comments for inclusion:

Hello to the readers of 'Hyakunin Issho'! I am Reiko Furuichi, a television producer, and I've been very interested in David and his collectors. The 'Hyakunin Issho' has been a really important theme for me since I met him while doing an interview some 6 years ago. May I tell you why?

I visited the carver Susumu Ito with David in 1992. Mr. Matsuzaki the printer had arranged the visit for us. (David has already written about this visit in this newsletter, but we TV people have another side to the story!)

Mr. Ito was an elderly shokunin with sullen looks. I didn't even know how to talk to him, but began the interview with my heart in my mouth. It was a strange scene that David and Mr. Ito made, sitting side by side. Their body sizes were completely different and we were not able to shoot the scene in the usual way (Mr. Ito was small and worked with his body hunched over). David felt small sitting beside the 'master', but when we looked at them through the camera lens, it seemed just the reverse; it looked like as though David was bullying Mr. Ito.

So it was quite a difficult situation for our crew. The cameraman was struggling to take pictures of them as they sat on the tatami with tools scattered here and there. He had to work very unnaturally, shooting between their heads and shoulders, and he looked at me quite reproachfully. And what was worse, was that David's ability to listen to Japanese language was far from perfect at that time, and the way Mr. Ito spoke was not easy to understand even for us Japanese. Would this interview work out? We were quite concerned ...

And what happened? Well, Mr. Ito didn't care about the camera at all and eagerly started to tell a lot of things to David. We felt his extraordinary desire to pass on his knowledge to David. Two people have the subject in common. One is eager to tell what he knows, and the other is eager to learn it. It seems that nothing can disturb them. As time went by, the things that Mr. Ito said to David became more and more specific, and at last he was teaching David the 'secrets of carving' with 90% gestures and 10% Japanese that consisted of just isolated words. It seemed as though he was trying to teach David everything he knew in this few hours. It would take a few years to teach them at school. David listened to him with all his heart and mind and strength. Gradually Mr. Ito became to look big for us, too.

One knife came to David's hand and then back to Mr. Ito's hand. This was repeated again and again. It was a happy encounter beyond every difference - age, language, or nationality. Mr. Kenichiro Nakaba, the cameraman, kept taking shots of their hands as much as he could.

After we returned to our office, we talked about how beautiful the hands of the two men were. Why did Mr. Ito try to teach his techniques to David so eagerly? What was David trying to do? Do we really understand Japanese woodblock prints? What is happening in the traditional culture of Japan? ...

As the result of these discussions, we came to realize that we wanted to make a program of this ten year project that David and the people around him are involved in, even though it was not any important event for society and there would not be any dramatic scenes. I'm very interested in this "Hyakunin Issho" circle. I feel like this ring will change in its quality and be a very big power in the near future.

The program will be completed when David's Hyakunin Isshu series is completed. I'm looking forward to seeing you all at the completion party!