A gallery for the floating world.
Galerie Yanaka occupies a former merchant house in the heart of Yanaka, one of the few Edo districts spared by fire and war. There we collect and show ukiyo-e prints.
From a print shop to a gallery
In the Meiji era the house was a shop for paper and brushes. We kept its beams, the earthen floor of the entrance and the low northern light, ideal for looking at a print.
Our work: to gather prints in good condition, to document their state and provenance, and to present them to a French-speaking public that often discovers ukiyo-e through the Great Wave alone.
Every work shown online is in the public domain; reproductions come from museums and Wikimedia Commons.
Three people, one house
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Aoi Tanaka
DirectorPrint historian, trained in Tōkyō and Paris. Founder of the gallery.
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Kenji Mori
ConservationPaper conservator. Oversees the condition and mounting of impressions.
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Camille Royer
French-language guideTranslator and guide; welcomes French-speaking visitors and leads tours.
How we work
A print is not a unique painting: it is a matrix, layered colours, one impression among many. To read a print is to read a state, an edition, a publisher.
We favour clarity over rarity: a well-documented late impression beats an “early” proof with no provenance.
- The state of the printing and colours
- The edition and publisher (hanmoto)
- Provenance and collectors’ seals
- Any restoration
Admission is free. Come and look at a print up close. It is the best way to understand the floating world.
Find us