In search of a display

We took the smallest available booth, and even then we did not have so many products to show. The wazao itself does not lend itself to easy display. Since we were exhibiting, we wanted to use the chance not just to lay rods out vaguely, but to make it an experiment — to bring back some learning, some realization for ourselves, in search of what a "right answer" for displaying wazao might look like. We decided to build a forest. … What kind of forest?

What we are doing is not a straight inheritance of tradition; it is the building of a contemporary alternative on top of a tradition that has, by now, become a kind of rarity. Thinking about it that way, we wanted to keep a kind of mixture-style thinking at the base. If so, the forest could not be a "fishing-like" mountain stream — the original landscape of Japan. It would be better as an imagined forest that does not exist anywhere, threading together plants from around the world.

FlowerNoritake of Nagoya

We asked FlowerNoritake of Nagoya to build that forest — someone we happened to meet around that time when we were looking for a wedding bouquet. Their style is street, taking not only flowers but every kind of "plant" as material. The sense for building a space full of life, as if you had stepped into a Ghibli film. I had never been particularly interested in flowers myself, but Noritake-san — the charismatic, mature florist — handed me a complete shock. By the time I finally thought of asking them, the show was less than a week away. I called them on the off chance and pleaded. I really wanted them to do it. The reply, with no hesitation at all — "leave it to us" — gave me another shock, and I handed everything over.

Even so, intimidated by their easy confidence, I sent a follow-up confirmation email — the contents of which still survive 👇 (looking at it now, I'm not sure what I was even saying. I'm grateful they took it on at all.)
=========
The mood we want to express around WAZAO is below.
× fresh, natural, healthy, vivid green
○ wild, mature, death, brown

In terms of the world we want to express:
• fleeting moment
　• life (and death), instant (and eternity), the life-force (and ferocity)
• fusion
• mixing, danger (poison), psychedelic
• intelligence
• elegance, calm, maturity

The mountains and streams where we fish day to day are spaces of vivid green nature, but
rather than reproducing that lively nature, we want to express the more uncanny sensation we feel there — a kind of trip, the awe of nature, scooped up from the real and exaggerated.
=========

The completed booth

In response to our message a week before the show, the Noritake-san team really did come from Nagoya to Yokohama, and built the booth with a swift, easy energy. The result is the booth in the photo. Compared to the booths of the other tackle makers, ours stood out — small, but clearly out of place. A strange space. The best. From this, perhaps because they thought we were the strange ones, all sorts of new connections began to grow. Once again, our thanks to everyone at FlowerNoritake.

A side note —

The dates of this Tsuri Fes happened to be double-booked with my own wedding, so the preparations and operations on both sides were more or less chaotic. Sleep deprivation in the lead-up caught up with me; just before, I had a fender-bender in a brand-new car only two months out of the dealership. After all the work that went into building such a fine space, the entire team was absent during the middle stretch of Tsuri Fes — gone to the wedding. Since the booth still needed someone, the YouTuber Naichuun-san stepped in as a pinch hitter, and the team and everyone around us got pulled into a few weeks of frantic, sleepless improvisation. It is also a good memory.