Piso Mojado
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The Ukiyo-e of Utamaro 2024 calendar, Todan Co., Ltd.
This is a commercial calendar. For a very reasonable fee, Todan will fill the blank space at the bottom of each page with the name, logo, address and business hours of your gift store, restaurant, sushi bar, or what have you. I'm guessing it was designed for Japanese-American businesses and that's why the days of the week are in English and the holidays in Japanese. Todan prints paper fans, a summer business, and in the 1950s they got into calendars to have a winter business.
When I became Utamaro-conscious, I bought these calendars at J. Toguri Mercantile Co. in Chicago. They ordered them every year, a dozen if they could get that many, and like all Japanese calendars they sold out fast. They were cheap, I remember paying $6 one year, but that was a long time ago. When Iva Toguri D'aquino died in 2006, Toguri Mercantile stopped importing calendars and her family closed the business two years later. Since then I've gone farther afield every year and I've paid more for each calendar. Todan has a U.S. subsidiary for its calendar business but for some weird reason they don't export this one. So this year I ordered from a Japanese export dealer on eBay for $60. That's a lot of money for a calendar but I don't want to quit now.
Ukiyo-e means "Pictures of The Floating World." Japanese call the Floating World what we call the Sporting Life. In 1613, the Tokugawa shogunate established a tenderloin district Yoshiwara just outside Edo (now Tokyo) on the road to the old capital Kyoto. It was like Southwark, just outside medieval and renaissance London, a place for all the dirty but necessary business kept outside the city proper by the powers that be: travelers' inns with their stinking stables, taverns, theaters, and brothels. Ne'er-do-well artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?—1806) lived in Yoshiwara, a low rent district, and many of his models were friends and neighbors who worked there, some of whom we know by name thanks to his art.
There are two movies about Utamaro. Utamaro and His Five Women (1946) was produced and directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, and like most of Mizoguchi's work it is a masterpiece and a film classic. Utamaro, Painter of Women (1960) is total schlock and soft-core porn. The screen play is low-end soap opera and the production was a vehicle for Daiei Film Company's stars and starlets to display the body parts they considered most attractive. Luckily for me, this junk film was my introduction to the great artist.
Those body parts were right where I was coming from at age 13, and they awakened a lifelong interest in the fine arts and the Ukiyo-e of Utamaro.
This is a commercial calendar. For a very reasonable fee, Todan will fill the blank space at the bottom of each page with the name, logo, address and business hours of your gift store, restaurant, sushi bar, or what have you. I'm guessing it was designed for Japanese-American businesses and that's why the days of the week are in English and the holidays in Japanese. Todan prints paper fans, a summer business, and in the 1950s they got into calendars to have a winter business.
When I became Utamaro-conscious, I bought these calendars at J. Toguri Mercantile Co. in Chicago. They ordered them every year, a dozen if they could get that many, and like all Japanese calendars they sold out fast. They were cheap, I remember paying $6 one year, but that was a long time ago. When Iva Toguri D'aquino died in 2006, Toguri Mercantile stopped importing calendars and her family closed the business two years later. Since then I've gone farther afield every year and I've paid more for each calendar. Todan has a U.S. subsidiary for its calendar business but for some weird reason they don't export this one. So this year I ordered from a Japanese export dealer on eBay for $60. That's a lot of money for a calendar but I don't want to quit now.
Ukiyo-e means "Pictures of The Floating World." Japanese call the Floating World what we call the Sporting Life. In 1613, the Tokugawa shogunate established a tenderloin district Yoshiwara just outside Edo (now Tokyo) on the road to the old capital Kyoto. It was like Southwark, just outside medieval and renaissance London, a place for all the dirty but necessary business kept outside the city proper by the powers that be: travelers' inns with their stinking stables, taverns, theaters, and brothels. Ne'er-do-well artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?—1806) lived in Yoshiwara, a low rent district, and many of his models were friends and neighbors who worked there, some of whom we know by name thanks to his art.
There are two movies about Utamaro. Utamaro and His Five Women (1946) was produced and directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, and like most of Mizoguchi's work it is a masterpiece and a film classic. Utamaro, Painter of Women (1960) is total schlock and soft-core porn. The screen play is low-end soap opera and the production was a vehicle for Daiei Film Company's stars and starlets to display the body parts they considered most attractive. Luckily for me, this junk film was my introduction to the great artist.
Those body parts were right where I was coming from at age 13, and they awakened a lifelong interest in the fine arts and the Ukiyo-e of Utamaro.
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