Mayuyama Ayako

 　
  In early 2021 I began preparing for the Buddhist memorial services to be held for that year’s 23rd anniversary of the death of Mayuyama Junkichi. I needed photos of Mayuyama Junkichi, and so I turned to the family archives and began to select images for use at the services. I opened the manuscript boxes and started looking back through his life via the photos with their attached caption cartouches. This period overlapped with COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, so I stayed at home and gradually read through all the materials I found. I matched up photos with books and articles, spread them across my room, and spent the days getting up, reading them, sleeping. During this period I used digitized images of the materials I carefully selected to create the Mayuyama Junkichi Archives website pages.
　

　As a young man Mayuyama Junkichi was a helpful eldest son, often looking after his younger brothers and sisters. He was passionate about his studies, always working straight towards whatever goal he set. He was a deeply trustworthy and scrupulous gentleman, and a tolerant, generous grandfather. That character, combined with his training as an art dealer, made him Mayuyama Junkichi. He was in essence a simple man. He longed to become art dealer company on a par with Yamanaka & Co., and he spent his life with “art dealer” as the model for his behavior. And such a life gave him great joy.

　
   In early 2022 I received a request from an NHK program production company, asking if we could lend some of the pre-war materials that Mayuyama Junkichi had preserved. This was one of the impetuses behind the creation of this website, this recognition by others of the materials that Mayuyama Junkichi had kept at hand until the end of his life, these materials that convey our family’s roots. 

　
    Mayuyama Junkichi was my grandfather. He was 55 years old when I was born as his third grandchild. Today, I am the only remaining Mayuyama family name grandchild. As I was raised learning about art works and being an art dealer from my grandfather, I became interested in the gap between the oft-recounted episodes of my grandfather’s handling of legendary masterpieces with those of his everyday life, his simple, plain diet and his careful cutting up of old calendars in order to reuse the paper. My grandfather and I share the fact that from childhood we have been raised and lived as art dealers. We have lived in the back of the shop, so that from the time we get up in the morning until we go to bed, we know what everyone is doing, who has come and gone. And indeed, it might be that the one thing my grandfather most wanted to convey to me was this close-at-hand experience of an art dealer’s job and its enjoyable lifestyle.