The Ukiyo-e Business: How Hanmoto Balanced Between Shogunate Censorship and the Art Market Trends in Edo
The Business of Four Masters
In the narrow alleyways of Edo, the air smelled of damp cherrywood and freshly ground pigments. Behind the modest façades of bookstores, ukiyo-e — “pictures of the floating world” — were being born, but their creation was more a matter of business than a romantic act of artistic inspiration. Four people powered this intricate mechanism: the eshi (絵師, artist), who sketched the initial design; the horishi (彫師, woodcarver), who spent weeks carving the lines into costly blocks of hard cherrywood; the surishi (摺師, printer), who layered the pigments one after another; and above them all, the hanmoto (版元, publisher), who risked his own fortune to buy the finest wood, import rare Prussian blue, and commission handmade washi paper.
The hanmoto was both strategist and trendsetter. He sensed — and often helped shape — the city’s desires: when Edo’s townspeople yearned for portraits of Yoshiwara courtesans, when they craved likenesses of kabuki actors, and when the time came to dream of Hiroshige’s landscapes. When the market whispered for erotica, he commissioned shunga — officially forbidden, yet sold secretly, wrapped in silk paper and sometimes given as wedding gifts by the very same people who publicly condemned their immorality. Publishers could even create demand from nothing, designing elaborate series that drew collectors into a game of restless anticipation: a single print tempted one to complete the entire cycle.
They were masters of marketing as well. In Edo’s bookstores, teasers for upcoming series were displayed — carefully crafted announcements designed to stir the imagination and build tension. For the most awaited releases, people queued in front of shops, and a feverish collector’s craze could sweep through the city — from humble street vendors and craftsmen to samurai households.
Balancing between market and law was an everyday struggle. Censors stamped their seals — kiwame (極め, “approved”) and aratame (改め, “inspected”) — yet hanmoto evaded restrictions with finesse, smuggling in subtle allusions and, at times, even veiled criticism of the shogunate itself. Tsutaya Jūzaburō II, one of Edo’s most famous publishers, once commissioned Hokusai to illustrate a collection titled Kyōka to Kanshi (“Playful Songs and Chinese Poetry”). The delicate portraits of women turned out to be too provocative, and his chief bookseller was arrested and publicly flogged. In the world of ukiyo-e, beauty carried its price, and the line between success and ruin was as thin as the mulberry fibers of washi paper.
Today, we step behind the scenes of the ukiyo-e workshops to uncover how these masterpieces were truly born — how four masters, the artist, carver, printer, and publisher, united their skills in a precise, almost ritualistic choreography of creation. We reveal how hanmoto could sense the city’s pulse, dictate trends, and ignite desires while constantly dancing on the edge of law, censorship, and scandal. It was thanks to their courage and calculated risk that we now have works fetching staggering prices at auctions — from hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hiroshige’s landscapes to over three million for Hokusai’s Great Wave.
“The Scent of Wet Wood and Pigments”
Before dawn, when Edo was still wrapped in the dampness of morning and thin trails of smoke rose above the tiled roofs of machiya townhouses, a boy hurried down a narrow alley leading to a publisher’s workshop. The air smelled of wet wood, aged washi paper, and the bittersweet aroma of ground pigments mixed with heated rice glue drifting from half-open windows. For him, this scent marked the beginning of the day — a fragrance that clung to his clothes, his hair, his skin, until it became part of his very being, part of his life.
He stepped inside and slipped off his sandals. The room was dim, lit only by oil lamps and the slender shafts of morning sunlight filtering through slatted shutters. At the center of the small space, filled with a sound somewhere between silence and the hushed murmur of focused work, sat the horishi — the woodcarver, the “master of engraving.” Bent over a block of cherrywood (sakura), he held the chisel as though cradling the breath of the image itself in his hands. Each motion was exact, his entire body tense with concentration, fully aware that a single misplaced stroke could destroy weeks of effort. The boy listened closely, attuning himself to the faint, damp “creaks” of the fibers — a sound he had learned to hear like the heartbeat of the workshop.
Around him, smaller blocks were laid out on tatami mats, partially carved, each one dedicated to a single color. The carver had already completed the key contour block (omohan – 主版), and now he prepared the others so the surishi, the printer, could later apply successive layers of pigment. Some series required a dozen or more such blocks, one for every hue. Cherrywood was expensive; it had to be hard and springy, yet yielding enough to allow for microscopic detail. The cost of a single full set of blocks could consume half the project’s budget — a fact the boy overheard just the night before, when the publisher cursed rising timber prices behind the partition curtain.
To the left sat the surishi, the printer, gently kneading his baren (馬楝, “horsehair pad”) — a tightly coiled disc of bamboo fibers, wrapped in fine silk threads and sheathed in a thin leaf cover. The boy always admired the reverence with which the surishi handled his tool, as though he held something alive in his hands. Nearby, freshly dampened sheets of handmade washi rested on bamboo racks, their mulberry fibers shimmering faintly in the dim light. Thin as spider silk yet incredibly resilient, the paper could endure over a dozen pigment layers and withstand repeated burnishings under the baren’s pressure.
With utmost care, the surishi laid a sheet onto the carved block, aligning it perfectly with the tiny kento registration marks incised in the wood. Without these, even the slightest misalignment — thinner than a hair’s breadth — would render the print worthless. He then rubbed the back of the paper in smooth, circular motions with the baren, pressing the fibers deep into the pigment. When he lifted the sheet, the outline of the scene came alive before the boy’s eyes: for now, only the contour, yet already pulsating with the promise of colors to come.
Behind the curtain, muted voices murmured. The hanmoto (版元, “source of the blocks”), the publisher, was deep in discussion with the eshi (絵師, “master of images”), the artist. They bent over an unfurled scroll bearing the delicate lines of a new design — a series depicting Edo’s bridges. The hanmoto decided everything: how many impressions would be made, in what format, from how many blocks, and in how many colors. He staked his own fortune, knowing that a single miscalculation could spell losses, debt, or the end of the business altogether. For this series, he wanted “at least five colors,” he insisted, since Edo’s wealthier patrons increasingly demanded vivid nishiki-e over simple monochromes. The artist nodded, sometimes pushing back — suggesting a different angle, more dramatic clouds above the Sumida River — but in the end, the hanmoto always had the final word.
The boy, crouched quietly by the wall, clutched a waxed tablet in his hands. He noted down everything: the planned number of prints, the number of blocks, the estimated price per sheet, the name of the bookseller who would receive the first copies. He knew a single mistake could cost the master several ryō, and for the boy — perhaps his own hide.
Outside, Edo was slowly waking. From the clock tower near Nihonbashi came five tolls of the great bell — signaling the start of the tora no koku, the “hour of the tiger,” when merchants and craftsmen began their morning bustle (to learn more about Edo-period timekeeping, see here: The Hour of the Rat, the Koku of the Tiger – How Was Time Measured in Shogunate-Era Japan?). Soon, hay carts would rattle down the streets, and fishmongers would shout to lure their first customers. But inside the workshop, time flowed differently. The scent of wet wood, glue, and pigments filled the air, and each movement of the chisel, each sweep of the baren, each whispered word behind the curtain merged into a rhythm larger than any single person. A rhythm that created not just images, but an entire city captured in impressions.
It was then, for the first time, that the boy understood: ukiyo-e was never just an image on paper. It was an entire network of people, money, risks, dreams, visions, and emotions — all sealed within the lingering scent of wet wood.
The Mechanics of Ukiyo-e Creation
The making of ukiyo-e was never the work of a single artist — it was a precisely synchronized effort of four distinct roles, moving together like a finely oiled mechanism.
Eshi (絵師) — The Artist Who Began the Story
Upon thin paper, soft as silk, the artist’s vision was born — the hanshita-e (版下絵), a preparatory sketch executed in deep black sumi ink. It was the map of the entire woodblock print, containing the arrangement of lines, contours, future shadows, and empty spaces. The eshi decided where the viewer’s gaze would be led, where to leave the breath of emptiness, and where to gather the momentum of a bustling crowd. It was his signature that adorned the final print, and it was his name whispered by collectors in the flicker of oil lamps.
And yet, in Edo, the artist was far from the master of his own creation. It was the hanmoto — the publisher — who determined the format, number of colors, edition size, subject, and at times even the very title of the series. The eshi, though respected, was part of a larger machine — one driven not solely by artistic vision, but by the logic of the market and the desires of Edo’s townspeople.
Horishi (彫師) — Master of the Chisel and Patience
Once the sketch was complete, the horishi, the woodcarver, glued it face-down onto a block of cherrywood. Cherry was chosen for its density, elasticity, and even grain, qualities that allowed the carving of microscopic details — individual strands of hair, raindrops, the delicate spiderweb patterns on a kimono’s sleeve.
Work on the omohan, the key contour block, could take weeks, sometimes months, if the design demanded extraordinary precision. After finishing the main block, the horishi created additional color blocks, called irohan (色版), each dedicated to a single pigment. For richer designs, there could be a dozen of these, sometimes more than twenty.
Despite their immense skill, horishi usually remained anonymous, though it was their hand that determined whether the artist’s lines would survive on wood with all their intended subtlety. A single slip could ruin a precious cherry block — and with it, weeks of painstaking labor.
Surishi (摺師) — Master of Color and Light
When the blocks were ready, they passed to the surishi, the printer. It was he who breathed life into the images. Before him lay sheets of handmade washi, drawn from mulberry fibers, as light as feathers yet astonishingly durable.
The surishi brushed pigments onto the carved blocks using special tools, then carefully placed the washi sheet atop the inked surface, aligning it precisely with the kento (見当), the carved registration marks. He then reached for the baren (馬楝) — a tightly wound disc of bamboo fibers wrapped in leaves — and rubbed the back of the paper, pressing it firmly into the block. His movements were rhythmic and deliberate: too much pressure would damage the pigments, too little would produce pale, lifeless impressions.
The surishi’s highest art was the technique of bokashi (暈し) — hand-shading the pigments directly on the block. Thanks to bokashi, Hiroshige’s sunsets seem to tremble at the edge of light and darkness, and Hokusai’s waves roll from the pure white of foam into the fathomless depth of Prussian blue.
Hanmoto (版元) — The Director in the Shadows
Yet of all the roles, it was the hanmoto, the publisher, who wielded the greatest power. He financed the production, chose the artist, hired the horishi and surishi, bought cherrywood blocks, commissioned washi, and sourced pigments. He risked his own capital, and so every project was a calculated venture.
The hanmoto followed the pulse of the market and knew what would sell: sometimes portraits of kabuki actors, at other times courtesans of Yoshiwara, and, increasingly, landscapes — especially after Edo’s obsession with travel along the Tōkaidō road and pilgrimages to Mount Fuji took hold. It was he who commissioned the great series that defined ukiyo-e itself: Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
Materials — The Foundation of Beauty
Creating ukiyo-e demanded the highest quality materials:
- Cherrywood (sakura) — the most expensive, prized for its durability and ability to hold the finest details.
- Washi paper — handmade, thin, and light, yet resilient enough to endure repeated rubbings with the baren without tearing.
- Pigments — from natural colors like cinnabar, indigo, saffron, and sumi ink, to imported dyes that revolutionized the aesthetics of ukiyo-e. The most famous was Prussian blue (bero-ai ベロ藍), brought from Holland through Nagasaki in the 1820s (a curious fact: in Europe, it was once called “Hiroshige blue”). Thanks to it, Hokusai’s waves and Hiroshige’s blue-toned landscapes acquired a depth of color previously unknown in Japan.
The creation of ukiyo-e was thus a collective effort where artistry, technique, financial risk, and market awareness intertwined. Edo’s workshops pulsed like living organisms — filled with the scent of wet wood, the rhythm of chisels, the rustle of washi, and the hushed negotiations behind sliding screens. Each print was the product of four masters, each with different skills, responsibilities, and visions — yet together they gave birth to Japan’s first form of mass visual culture.
The Hanmoto — The Heart and Mind of the Business
Behind every ukiyo-e masterpiece stood someone whose name rarely appeared on paper, yet who was the true architect of the entire enterprise. The hanmoto, the publisher, embodied the roles of strategist, producer, investor, and marketer all at once. Without him, there would be no Great Wave off Kanagawa, no Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and no One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. He had the final word on themes, formats, colors, and prices.
In Edo, ukiyo-e was never just about talent — it was a matter of profit and loss (as, indeed, it often still is today) — and the hanmoto served as both its accountant and its director.
He read the rhythm of the city like a physician feeling for a pulse. He knew the cravings of Edo’s townsfolk and how to satisfy their hunger for novelty. He decided whether a design would be a standalone print or part of a larger series meant to entice collectors into returning for each installment. In an age when the fashion for owning complete cycles was growing, hanmoto mastered the art of anticipation: the first sheets would appear in bookstores, and townspeople lined up for the next as soon as new scenes were released.
It was the publishers who introduced into ukiyo-e the very logic of events, turning each new series into a sensation. Buying a print became something greater than ownership — it was participation in a collective moment, the feeling of being part of Edo’s living, breathing culture.
The most gifted among them could sense moods and trends better than the artists themselves. Tsutaya Jūzaburō, a brilliant entrepreneur and visionary, kept his bookstores right on the edge of Yoshiwara, the pleasure quarter where wealthy patrons were always hungry for images of courtesans and kabuki actors. He discovered and promoted masters such as Utamaro and Sharaku, and he also supported the young Hokusai. His name did not appear on the woodblock prints, yet it was thanks to his strategies that illustrations sold by the thousands. A few decades later, Nishimura Yohachi III risked something entirely new. In an era when the market was flooded with images of beautiful women and theatrical scenes, he commissioned Hokusai to create a landscape series — “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.” It was a bold experiment, but Yohachi recognized the growing popularity of Fuji-kō pilgrimages and won his bet with the market. The series proved triumphant and led ukiyo-e down a new path. Showing similar intuition, Uoya Eikichi, together with Hiroshige, created the monumental “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” — a visual guide to the shogunate’s capital that fused tourism with fashion and urban pride.
The distribution system managed by the hanmoto was astonishingly modern for the 18th and 19th centuries. Prints went to elegant bookstores where, alongside books, entire ukiyo-e series were sold, but they could also be purchased at street stalls — cheaper, one by one. In Yoshiwara there were stands devoted primarily to portraits of famous courtesans, which wealthy patrons took with them as trophies from their nocturnal visits. In late Edo, mail-order sales even appeared: prints were ordered from catalogs, and the hanmoto sent them by couriers to other cities, such as Osaka or Kyoto. Ukiyo-e truly became Japan’s first form of mass visual culture — images reached wherever there was demand.
The hanmoto understood that the market was capricious and knew how to play to its moods. When Edo succumbed to a fascination with kabuki theater, portraits of actors appeared in the stalls. When the city fell into a frenzy for Yoshiwara, subtly erotic portraits of courtesans were sold to its residents. And when censorship struck at shunga (erotic) prints, the hanmoto walked the edge of the law, selling them on the sly to the very same clients who publicly condemned such images (sound familiar). In the 19th century, as Japan discovered the beauty of travel, publishers turned to landscape. Hiroshige and Hokusai then created masterpieces, but very often these were the result of precise guidelines from the publisher, not solely the artist’s vision.
We know the artists’ names by heart today, but behind each of their successes stood someone else — a person who held neither chisel nor brush, but who planned, calculated, and risked his own fortune. The hanmoto was the heart and mind of the ukiyo-e business. He created fashions, steered the market, and decided what would become iconic and what would sink into oblivion. Artists might have been masters of their craft, but without the publisher their works would never have reached the hands of thousands of townspeople who fell in love with the images of the “floating world.”
The Economics of Woodblock Printing
Behind every ukiyo-e impression lay a world of money, calculation, and risk — a world we rarely consider when admiring the works of Hiroshige or Hokusai. In Edo’s workshops, art and commerce were woven together so tightly that neither could exist without the other. The making of woodblock prints was not the romantic act of a solitary artist, but a complex financial operation in which any mistake could mean the loss of one’s fortune.
The greatest expense was cherrywood blocks, especially those used for the omohan, the principal matrices. Wood with exceptionally dense, even grain was chosen, felled in winter when the trees were at their hardest. A single solid block could cost as much as a good craftsman’s monthly wage, but its durability justified the expense — from the best wood, several thousand impressions could be pulled before the lines began to wear. Workshops smelled of freshly planed wood, and any mistake by the horishi, the carver, could mean starting over from scratch.
Pigments were no less costly. For a long time, natural dyes were used. Everything changed in the 1820s, when Prussian blue imported from Holland reached Japan through Nagasaki. This intense, deep hue became an aesthetic revolution — it gave Hokusai’s waves an unprecedented depth and infused Hiroshige’s landscapes with that extraordinary, softly blurred melancholy of backgrounds achieved through bokashi shading. Prussian blue, however, was expensive and difficult to obtain. Publishers invested in it with wealthier clients in mind, counting on the color’s uniqueness to boost sales.
Equally important was washi paper, handmade from mulberry fibers. It enabled the printer to render delicate tonal transitions and withstand hundreds of rubbings with the baren without tearing or fading. Its price was high, but cheap substitutes were out of the question — inferior paper could not endure repeated printing and would ruin an entire series. Workshops therefore ordered washi in large quantities, often from the same suppliers for generations, and its quality was a point of pride for the hanmoto.
Although the technology was costly, ukiyo-e was produced for a mass audience. We sometimes call ukiyo-e the “pop art of the Edo era” — it was affordable, though never shoddy. A simple impression might cost the equivalent of a decent meal at a city tavern, while richer, full-color series could be priced many times higher. This made ukiyo-e accessible to townspeople, craftsmen, and even lower-ranking officials, while still preserving prestige and the status of collectible objects.
It was the collecting mechanism that drove the market. Publishers quickly realized that single prints sold well, but the real profit lay in series. Thus they commissioned cycles of a dozen, dozens, or even more than a hundred plates. “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” and “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” were designed not only to satisfy demand, but to create it — whoever bought one sheet wanted the whole set. Edo succumbed to collecting mania. Bookstores set up special display cases with announcements of forthcoming prints, and customers placed orders in advance. In this way the hanmoto transformed woodblock prints into the earliest products of visual culture that sold much like today’s limited-edition albums or collectible cards.
Where large sums circulate, copies and piracy inevitably follow. Prints by Hokusai or Hiroshige were already being counterfeited in their lifetimes. Inferior reproductions appeared, often printed on poor paper with simplified colors. It also happened that hanmoto — eager for quick profit — sold old matrices to other print shops, which produced cheap reissues, often bearing forged artist signatures. The practice was so widespread that some publishers deliberately destroyed blocks once an edition sold out to protect the uniqueness of the series.
The economics of ukiyo-e were thus full of tensions and paradoxes. The prints were made for a broad public, yet their production required enormous investment. They were at once accessible and luxurious, mass-produced and collectible. In Edo, the image was not only art — it was a commodity, a vehicle of fashion, a marketing tool, and a medium of information. Ukiyo-e was born at the junction where aesthetics met commerce, where beauty emerged from the cold calculus and hot rivalry of publishers.
Censorship and Seals
In the Edo period, the art of ukiyo-e developed under the constant supervision of the authorities. The Tokugawa, who controlled Japan for more than two and a half centuries, knew perfectly well that images were more powerful than words. Woodblock prints reached hundreds of thousands of hands: they could shape tastes, stir desire, and at times even undermine the shōgun’s authority. Thus a dense web of censorship was cast over the world of ukiyo-e to curb what was “immoral” and “politically dangerous.” In practice, this meant a subtle dance among power, publishers, and the market, where everything depended on the hanmoto’s cunning and his sense of how far one could go.
The most visible sign of control was the censor’s seals, which appeared in the mid-18th century. At first, the kiwame (極め) seal was used, literally meaning “approved” or “examined.” It was stamped in the margin of each impression to confirm that the work had passed official review and was permitted for circulation. Kiwame remained in force until 1842, when, after the Tenpō reforms, a new system of aratame (改め) seals — “examined and corrected” — was introduced. It was a symbolic shift: oversight became stricter, and each block had to be registered, described, and approved. On the versos of many woodblock prints from this period one can still find tiny seals with the inspector’s name and date — a valuable clue for collectors, though for creators it meant constant surveillance at the time (see how the censors were circumvented here: Japanese Artists vs. Edo Shogunate Censorship: How Kuniyoshi Criticized Power in the Painting “Takiyasha the Witch”).
The paradox of the era was that while the authorities officially banned erotic imagery, shunga (春画) — “spring pictures” — were produced on a massive scale. Officially, they were treated as immoral material, a threat to public virtue, but in practice, everyone knew the demand was far too great to ignore. Courtesans, kabuki actors, samurai, and even shogunate officials bought shunga, sometimes gifting them at weddings as talismans believed to bring fertility and happiness in marriage. They were treated as luxury items — often packaged in ornate folders and sold discreetly in the very same bookstores that, on the surface, dealt only in landscapes and actor portraits.
The hanmoto walked a fine line, fully aware that what was forbidden often sold best. Many publishers relied on semi-legal distribution channels — shunga prints were sold “under the counter” or delivered directly to clients in sealed envelopes. Sometimes clever tricks were used: the same blocks officially used for neutral landscapes were repurposed into “extended editions,” where a few additional strokes of the chisel transformed an innocent scene of a riverside stroll into an erotic tableau.
The risk, however, was real. Edo authorities occasionally used certain cases to make examples of publishers and maintain an appearance of strict control. The most famous anecdote concerns Tsutaya Jūzaburō II, one of Hokusai’s most important publishers. In 1830, he commissioned the master to create illustrations for a book titled Kyōka to Kanshi (狂歌と漢詩, “Playful Songs and Chinese Poetry”), a collection of lighthearted poems. Hokusai produced portraits of beautiful women for it, which — though not explicitly erotic — proved too daring for the authorities. The publisher himself was spared, but his chief bookseller was arrested and punished with a fine and a public flogging known as tataki. It was a lesson for the entire industry: the hanmoto could balance on the edge of the law, but a single misstep could send them plunging into ruin.
Ukiyo-e censorship was thus a game of appearances. The Tokugawa shogunate sought to maintain control over morality and politics but could not ignore the desires of Edo’s populace. The hanmoto, meanwhile, understood that prohibition could be the best form of advertising. Paradoxically, it was thanks to this tense equilibrium that some of the era’s most fascinating works were created — from subtly provocative portraits of courtesans to illustrations that danced along the blurred boundary between the permitted and the forbidden.
Ukiyo-e was the art of the “floating world,” but its creators understood one thing perfectly: the strongest spark for the imagination often comes from what one is officially forbidden to see.
The Ukiyo-e Business Today
When we wander through the streets of Tokyo today, it is hard to imagine that in the backrooms of tiny, unassuming shops in Asakusa, one can still hear the rhythmic creaking of chisels, the soft rustle of washi paper, and the measured strokes of the baren. More than two centuries have passed since the days when Edo’s townsfolk queued eagerly for the next Hiroshige print, and yet the world of ukiyo-e has not died. It has changed — transformed in ways as profound as Japan itself.
On one hand, ukiyo-e has become a symbol of Japanese tradition, carefully preserved by workshops that consciously remain faithful to Edo-period methods. Studios such as Adachi Hanga and Takumi Hanga still carve blocks into hard cherrywood, prepare pigments by hand, and print illustrations on handmade washi — exactly as it was done in the time of Hokusai and Hiroshige. For many of their clients, these prints are more than works of art; they are tangible links to history — fragments of the fleeting world saved from oblivion.
On the other hand, ukiyo-e has entered the global collectors’ market, where values have reached astronomical heights. Original impressions of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa can fetch over three million dollars at Sotheby’s or Christie’s, while Hiroshige’s famous Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake has sold for hundreds of thousands. It is a paradox: prints that once cost no more than a hearty tavern meal in Edo are now treated as priceless treasures of world culture. The art market has transformed ukiyo-e into an icon of Japan — a visual code, a symbol connecting the nation’s past and present.
Yet ukiyo-e lives not only in museums and auction houses. New artists and craftsmen are boldly experimenting with form, using traditional techniques to create entirely contemporary works. In workshops across Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, series inspired by pop culture, anime, and modern design are emerging. Characters from Miyazaki’s films appear alongside the courtesans of old Yoshiwara, futuristic Tokyo cityscapes are rendered in the style of Hiroshige, and Hokusai’s waves merge with the cyberpunk aesthetic of Akihabara. This is no longer mere reconstruction of past art but an active dialogue — between eras, technologies, and sensibilities.
Seen in this light, it becomes clear that the spirit of ukiyo-e — the art of the “floating world” — has never vanished. It still lives in the hands of modern craftsmen, in museum halls and auction catalogs, but also in spaces the masters of Edo could never have imagined: the pop culture of the 21st century. Where Edo meets Tokyo, where old pigments blend with digital light, ukiyo-e finds its new life.
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未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
Write us...
Ciechanów, Polska
dr.imyon@gmail.com
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