Hello!

When I was a child, I grew up playing older Japanese games like koi-koi, go, and later on in life once I grew older and more capable, riichi mahjong and shogi. I had an interesting childhood, being a tiny little white kid in rural Japan, not far from an air force base, back in the late eighties and early nineties. One year in my thirties, my wife picked me up a little sake shop made of lego, and I was stunned and awed.

An idea started to take shape, and to be quite frank, this is the fourth time I tried to execute on this idea. I first started attempting to shoot this series back in '21, and it was badly lit, and my flat’s interior could be seen in the background of the shots. It didn’t really capture a vibe that I was looking for, but it was a good proof of concept. It had hanafuda cards lining the streets and alleyways, a signature part of all the future versions to come.

What you see now here in this post is a culmination of ideas and a reflection over four years about what I had hoped to achieve with this project. There’s people living their lives in this tiny little matsuri city, telling little stories as they go. It’s a little dusty here and there, partially cause I don’t have good ventilation, and also cause a city without a bit of grime has no good stories.

Of subtle little note here are plentiful small details: the alleyway behind the shaved ice stand has a riichi mahjong hand of thirteen orphans as fencework, with a few girls chatting on top of and next to it; a silver general and a gold general are checkmating the opposing king in an alleyway near a takoyaki shop, and there are kabufuda cards for 8-9-3, which sums to zero in a game called oicho-kabu, where the yakuza get their name from (even in this cozy fantasy village, there’s still back-alley violence!). Shogi pieces lurk across the town, using it as their own battlefield, to which the residents are blissfully unaware of. The go stones have been played in a reasonably-strategic way, if there was a giant tree and a sushi cart and some people on the board, but hey, Jon Bois once depicted a gridiron football game with a Bojangles and some apartments on the field, so this too is allowed. All the sakura cards from the two hanafuda decks are all centered around the tree in the back. There are a whole lot of other details that might catch your eye too!

This couldn’t have been executed so perfectly without a few of my trusted friends: Willow, on lighting and weather illumination; Marisa, on stage work, reconstruction, and clumsiness recovery; and Brenna with her excellent story-telling work–every time I’d pose a figure, she’d somehow make them even more expressive. The work of them together as a crew has pushed this project to heights I could have never thought were possible. It took three hours to build the set, another seven to shoot it over two days, and I did the editing not far away on the laptop I write this artists’ guide with.

It is my sincerest hope to that this work makes you feel wistful, longing for a cozy fantasy that can’t really exist. Even myself, when I look at my own work, I feel my heart get a little bit warmer at the bustling town I worked quite hard on. And thanks to you, for coming to see the heartfelt work of my crew and I!

–Tanis