[soothing music] [birds chirping]
[gentle piano music]
- I grew up very much like typical Japanese children,
studying a lot.
And I actually grew up in downtown Tokyo.
Came over here when I was about 20 years old.
Look at that, Hannah.
Look how pretty that is.
You want to draw it? - Yeah.
- In Japan, there was this wonderful school program
where we had to do something every day.
So I decided to draw animals.
I ended up drawing like maybe 600 different animals,
and that has been the best training that I can use
for today's work I do.
Making block prints and little personal cards.
[gentle music]
One summer, we went to Olympic National Park
and there were these trees.
The way they were arranged was just so beautiful.
So I had made some sketch, and I was able to use that
for this new Christmas card.
It's called "Winter Cardinals."
Winter holidays in Japan is very different
actually from America.
We do celebrate Christmas.
It's something that, you know,
Japanese people really adore anything from the West,
but I think New Year's is actually a bigger deal.
The children are waiting to play with a kite
and spin the top.
And then you see the pine tree decorations
that are put in front of each house.
So that's what I grew up with.
[bright music]
After the pencil sketch, I start making watercolor.
I need to do this stage in order
to know where the colors are going to go.
[upbeat music]
- We started working together when we were still in Tokyo.
I was managing a French restaurant
in Shibuya at that time.
And her parents were my landlords, and she came down
and helped me with some of the advertising artwork
I needed for the restaurant.
And we came back to America, where we got married.
And then we got very interested in the Arts and Crafts movement.
We started to print our own little magazine.
- The Arts and Crafts movement was really born
against the industrialization of the late 19th century,
early 20th century.
So they were really trying to discover their own roots.
So in order to do that,
they looked as inspiration to the surroundings.
And it really talked about the importance of having art
as something functional.
You know, William Morris,
who is the father of Arts and Crafts movement,
said it really very well, that "Everything we make
should be born from our daily life."
It suddenly made sense to me about
what I needed to do as an artist.
I just wanted to make something that made me happy,
made other people happy.
And then also something that has really good craftsmanship.
[bright string music]
After I do the watercolor,
I have to be able to reverse the image.
To do that, I actually use a light box
to trace the lines exactly as they are going to appear.
And then I put a carbon paper onto the linoleum block.
Then on top of that is the reversed image
that I just created.
I'll start tracing that.
[relaxing piano music]
I was not much interested in Japanese art
when I was in Japan,
but when I started living here, it's interesting
when you are away from your own home country,
you start realizing the things that you didn't discover before,
especially woodblock printing from Edo period,
which is about 200 years ago.
[gentle piano and violin music]
Originally, these prints were made in hundreds.
And they were really cheap, like postcards.
So it was something that all the common people could enjoy.
The really amazing technique.
That's the kind of thing I started rediscovering,
and I felt, okay.
This is something I really wanted to incorporate
into my work.
Even though I do use machinery to produce my note cards,
I'm hoping that my note cards are something
like the old traditional Japanese block prints
that everybody can buy and that everybody can enjoy.
The snowman card is my homage to Hiroshige,
my favorite artist from Edo period.
He usually has the dominant figure in a foreground.
So you see some kind of a dialogue between the object
that's in the front and the landscape behind.
[serene music]
Using the transferred image as a guide,
then I start cutting out the areas I don't need.
The area that's higher is going to receive the ink
when I start printing.
I actually use linoleum blocks.
Linoleum's much softer than wood.
So it's a really great material for carving.
That block is what we call key block.
It's most important block that binds everything together,
and it's called honeban in Japanese.
And that honeban,
I'm going to print in our printing press.
I need to now scan the printed honeban
into a computer,
and then I can do the color separation.
So if I'm wanting to have blue background,
I need to make a photo negative like this,
and that's going to be used to make very hard polymer plates
that is really durable
for printing thousands of note cards.
We printed already the key block,
which is the dark outline color, and then also brown and green.
Now we need to print blue on top of that.
That's going to be the background,
and then the red for all the cardinals.
[bright flute music]
[machine cranking]
My work is really hybrid in some way
of woodblock printing of Japan
where everything was done by hand.
As I came over here,
I discovered these old letterpress printing presses.
So, I started merging both the Western method
and the Japanese handcraft method.
[machine whirring]
It's actually really good.
So I will do adjustment a little bit
and we'll start printing.
[bright music]
William Morris said that
"Everything we make should be born from our daily life."
And as I look back on my life, that's what I seem to be doing.
[bright string music]
And my hope is that my own personal moments
can be something that become universal
and something that other people can enjoy
as note cards or block prints.
That is definitely my hope.
[gentle string music]