Almost Everything on These Walls Came From a Customer

People ask where we sourced the stuff on the walls, and the honest answer is that mostly we did not. It arrived.

What We Actually Chose

Juraku was not started with money behind it. It was three people who had spent years in restaurants taking over a space that had been a coffee shop and wine bar, keeping a lot of what was already there, and redecorating around it.

What we put up ourselves was a collection of Japanese antique signs along the brick wall. Old beer advertisements mostly, and one for mosquito coils, which is the one people always stop at.

Those signs are their own thing in Japan. They are called horo kanban, enamelled steel, and from the Meiji era through the middle of the Showa era they were how products got advertised to people who were not reading magazines. A salesman would go around the countryside and nail one to the side of a shop or a shed or somebody's house, and often the shop got paid in product rather than cash. They started disappearing in the 1970s once plastic was cheaper. Mosquito coils and beer are two of the most common subjects you find, so a wall with both on it is fairly representative of what the roadsides of Japan looked like for about seventy years.

Then there were darumas and old Japanese toys on the shelves, and some fairly basic Japanese prints on the wall. Not because prints were the plan, but because at that point we did not know any artists. The network we have now took years to build and none of it existed at the start.

Why a Daruma

Our logo is a daruma, and that was deliberate.

A daruma is a round, weighted, hollow figure modelled on Bodhidharma, and the design is the point: knock it over and it rights itself. The saying attached to it is nanakorobi yaoki, seven falls, eight rises. It comes with both eyes blank. You fill in one when you set yourself a goal, and the other only once you have got there.

For three people opening a restaurant with no backing, it was not a subtle choice of mascot.

Then the Room Started Filling Itself In

The anime figures and the trinkets crowding the shelves now are almost entirely from guests. So is most of the art.

Nobody organised this. People started bringing things, and we started putting them up, and at some point the room stopped being something we had decorated and became a record of who had been in it.

Chichi's Room

The clearest example takes up an entire wall.

I met Cecilia Gault's dad before I met her. When I did meet her, I asked if I could buy a poster or something of hers, on the condition that I got to hang it. What turned up later was the poster from her first album, signed to us.

She kept coming in, and became a regular, and then a friend. We built two cocktails for her, Hidari Chichi and Migi Chichi. They were not on the menu, they were just drinks we made for her, but she would put them on her Instagram stories and people started coming in and asking for them by name, so we put them on the menu.

Then I asked her to do a photoshoot for them, which is a whole story of its own and not this one. What came out of it was two posters styled like Japanese beer advertising from the eighties and nineties, which is exactly what the wall on the other side of the room already had a hundred-year head start on.

About the names. Hidari and Migi are left and right. If your grandmother asks, that is because one poster hangs on the left and one hangs on the right, which is entirely true and is the version we lead with. Anyone who reads Japanese got there ten seconds ago: chichi can mean father, and it can also mean breasts. It is a childish joke. We are not going to pretend it is anything else.

Ayaka made a neon sign that says Chichi's Room, so now it is not a nickname, it is signed. A guitar Cecilia signed finished the wall off.

The Two Walls Next to It

We gave the next wall to TEN TEN, the arts nonprofit that meets here on Wednesdays. It has two picture frames and a digital display so the work in them can change without anybody getting out a hammer.

Next to that is the wall for OMRC, the Old Man Running Club, who use us as their winter home base.

And then there is everything else scattered around the room, given to us by guests over eight years, which is too much to itemise and is the entire point anyway.

What the Room Actually Is

If you walk in and it looks curated, it is not. Two things on these walls were a decision: the signs and the darumas. Everything else is the residue of people deciding this place was worth bringing something to.

That is a better outcome than anything we could have bought, and it is not something you can put in an opening budget. You can only wait eight years and find out whether it happens.