The average height of the Japanese is 159 cm. [I am 180 cm., or just over 5’10” in old money]. So by invitation and feeling big with a height advantage of 21 cm., I recently visited and whizzed round Japan on a thousand mile, whirlwind, handshake, photo-shoot, publicity tour, visiting ten art galleries that were holding simultaneous exhibitions of my work. I was treated with the status of visiting royalty, which was flattering, exciting, profitable, and fun. I also learned something about the Japanese way of art-business.

The system is different over there. Art galleries are largely situated in huge department stores, which are often linked directly to train and tube stations by a warren of wide subterranean walkways. From train to gallery can be a mind numbing experience and it is easy to get disorientated and lost because the passages are jostling with people, shops, stalls, and restaurants, with complex lift and escalator connections The galleries open at department store times, usually 10 am to 8 pm seven days a week. The gallery proprietor depends on the department store to supply premises, heating, lighting and a steady flow of the right customers. In exchange the department store insist on a very high standard of service for the customer. Retail galleries pay for space in the department stores with a percentage of turnover.

The art gallery chain that sells my work has twelve retail outlets, and a sister company supplying many others with picture frames. Altogether they have a workforce of around 250 and even supply housing for key employees in company owned apartment blocks. Personnel are likely to stay with the same company for many years, with wages in Japan a little higher than UK.
My dealer buys my work unframed in the UK and frames to a very high standard in Japan. Everything is behind glass, even originals on canvas. Retail prices are a little more that UK prices, probably largely due to shipping and promotional costs. The customer is supplied with a finished and beautifully presented product by highly trained and uniformed sales teams.

In the UK a gallery might promote an artist with a private view occasion lubricated with wine and nibbles. In Japan the department store venue restricts the gallery dealer to a different sort of promotion, a favourite being the personal appearance by an artist rather akin to an authors book-signing event put on by literary publishing houses. My events were well publicised and many customers had booked appointments to meet me and ask questions about the work. Typically meetings started with bowing, shaking hands and a photo-shoot. Many collectors bought gifts. They always wanted their purchase to be signed on the back of the picture, often requiring a message and date linking the sale to an event such as birthdays or moving house. Thus I was able to find out what and why they liked about my pictures directly from the collector. I was able to present each customer with a photograph memento of our meeting in a presentation folder at the end of every interview.

Socialising after work is the norm. On my first evening I met with local staff for a welcome dinner. We knelt on the floor and ate with chopsticks in a room with paper walls and sliding doors. A woman wearing a kimono served our food. The laughing and friendly greeting from my hosts was infectious. I tried everything on the table even though much of the first meal was strange and unknown. I don’t think it is connected, but on that first night there was a local earthquake measuring 3.5 on the Richter scale. It wobbled the bed and shook the curtains. My hotel room was on the 19th floor and the building swayed a little. It put the wind up me, but these tremors are common enough with maybe one or two a month.
One evening we dined with the ‘master printer’ who has previously printed my, and many other artists, silk-screens and lithos in Japan. The Japanese giclee technology that has revolutionised the Western publishing scene was initially treated with great suspicion in their home country. Cultural habits and aesthetic idiosyncrasies were well entrenched and harder to overcome. I was introduced to the concept of, ‘aesthetic imperfection’, where craft and art conspire to make deliberately flawed artwork to accentuate the beauty of non-mechanical production. However, the ‘master printer’ is just taking delivery of his first giclee machine. Giclee resistance is crumbling.

On journeys within cities everybody seems to use the train or tube. These are crowded day and night and usually entailed standing for an hour or so to get from one venue to another. Electronic displays and voice messages are often in Japanese and English. Passengers queue between marked lines on the platform waiting for the next train.
Between major cities we travelled on ‘Shinkansen’ or bullet trains. These departed on the main line between Tokyo and Kyoto, Kobe, and Osaka every 15 mins, exactly on time. Journey duration in clean roomy comfort at 168 mph from the new capital Tokyo, to the ancient capital Kyoto, was 2hr 35mins. A gentle recorded voice greets passengers in English and asks that all mobile phones be set to silent mode. [Now that IS a GOOD IDEA]. There was a buffet and trolley service for refreshments. All train personnel entering the carriage bowed in the connecting doorway and bowed again before leaving. We whizzed through endless suburbs that stretched for hundreds of miles. About 80% of Japans 120 million people live on the coastal plain on the south side of the main island Honshu. The little bits of agriculture viewed from the speeding train showed small clean tidy arable fields with no livestock visible anywhere at all.

The market for Western art is not so huge as a population of 120 million affluent middle-class people would suppose. Small houses, small rooms and sliding doors limit wall space. Nevertheless my own London and New York scenes are doing well, as are Cornish harbour and Mediterranean scenes. Interestingly, advice given by dealers in Japan to erstwhile Japanese abstract artists is ‘go to Paris, London or America because you won’t succeed in Japan’.

The ‘come-away-with’ impression is of a safe, clean, punctual, busy, crowded, island country full of prosperous and hospitable people. They relish modern technological invention with the latest mobile camera/internet phones but the electricity supply cables are all in great tangles of wires up poles on every street. Eating establishments’ show their menus with realistic plastic replica meals to make choice easy, supply diners with warm flannels and cold water, yet do not have lap protecting napkins for the clumsy western chopstick user. They eat healthy nutritious food, work in modern and startling architectural conditions, yet have tiny homes, no gardens, and stand for an hour and a half to and from work every day. They enjoy eating while sitting cross-legged or kneeling in excruciating pain, yet have exquisitely warm heated toilet seats. The art collector is treated to fantastic personal attention and the art is beautifully presented, but there is less choice available than in the UK.

My hosts were very efficient and generous, and the collectors that I met were overwhelmingly complimentary. A remark that took me by surprise the first time, and thrilled me by the number of times it was repeated, was; “You so cute. You look like gentleman. You look like Sean Connery, he my most handsome man in the world.”

The secret fellahs is to have grey stubble, an old felt hat, and be average UK height!

Privacy statement