Uchiwa Gallery

On the street behind Rouen Cathedral, Rue St. Romain, named after the city’s holy bishop, an interesting shop opens. Uchiwa Gallery, a Japanese shop with Japanese prints, books about them, albums by Utamaro, Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Japanese souvenirs. It is very appropriate that precisely in the birthplace of the Impressionism there is such a shop for Japanese prints, which inspired the vision of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionist so much that it is considered a separate movement called “Japonisme”.

We are browsing between the objects, leafing through the books. The saleswoman offers to help us. We start talking about the selected objects.

“Why did you open a Japanese shop? Does it have anything to do with Japonisme?”

“I don’t think so. The owner, my friend, started this shop as a picture framer, and in the meantime she became interested in Japanese prints, so much so that they now form the profile of the shop.”

“Who is your audience, who buys Japanese prints here?”

“On the one hand, collectors from all over France. There are maybe only four such shops in the whole country, so anyone who is interested in them will come here again and again. On the other hand, a lot of young people. France is the homeland of comics, most comics are published here and in Belgium. And within that, manga, too. After Japan, most manga are published here. Manga is familiar to young people who read comics, and they quickly notice the Japanese prints that are related to them. After all, in Japan, manga and prints form a continuum. It is mainly the thirty- and forty-something generation who, having grown out of manga, can appreciate the original Japanese prints and come in and buy.”

“Do you also have Japanese visitors? What do they say? Do they buy?”

“Yes, Japanese tourists also come in, and they are very surprised, even touched. Japanese people do not know how popular Japanese prints are in the West, especially in France, and they are shocked that there is a special shop for them here. But they don’t buy. In Japan, classical prints don’t have such a large audience anymore. They still make modern paraphrases,” she points out a few, “but even that is rare, because the genre is too laborious, few people undertake it anymore.”