About Aiiro

Aiiro is a traditional Japanese color — a deep, settled blue. The color of indigo.

It’s also one of the colors that runs through the history of ukiyo-e. The blue of Hokusai’s wave. The blue of Hiroshige’s rain-soaked skies. Across four centuries of Japanese printmaking, this shade has been a steady presence. The name is a quiet nod to that.

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I first encountered ukiyo-e as a student studying Japanese art.

But knowing a subject and truly seeing it are different things, and I understood that only much later. Over the course of a career working with visual design, the compositions, the color, the force of line in these prints began to mean something different to me — layer by layer, slowly.

Work eventually brought me into closer contact with the world of ukiyo-e: time in a museum setting, experience curating and producing exhibitions. Working alongside people with deep specialist knowledge, I kept arriving at the same feeling: more people should know about this.

Floating World Journal is where that feeling went.

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Ukiyo-e isn’t an artifact.

It’s a living art — one that traveled to Europe in the 1850s and changed how Monet painted and Debussy composed; one that still breathes in the outlines of anime; one that someone, somewhere in a Japanese museum, is encountering for the first time today.

I write in English because I want to carry something of what Japanese art has to offer to readers who might not have found their way here yet. I’m Japanese, I live in Japan, and I spend perhaps a little too much time in museums.

Aiiro