We had an interview with mera and Toshi, the two organizers of "36 BLOCKS OF FUJI", so please go take a look!
mera takeru crypto artist Twitter: @mera_takeru
Toshiaki Takase (Toshi) TART K.K. CEO Twitter: @toshiaki_takase
mera: My name is mera takeru, and I am a crypto artist (NFT artist). I have been working on creating my own digital art as NFT since April 2019. The concept of “sharing Japanese culture with the world” has been so important to me since the beginning.
Toshi: I'm Toshiaki Takase, and I've been developing and working on Ethereum based services since 2016. I’m trying to support the creation of an ecosystem using NFT and social tokens under the theme of "supporting creative activities for creators".
mera: I think I got a DM from Toshi on Twitter in March of this year and we had a Zoom talk. Then, we got to talking about the creator economy and social tokens, and I literally saw that he was really passionate about them, so we thought that it would be great to do something fun together.
Toshi: I first met mera's work when he released a POAP project with another company. Since then, I've seen his activities on Twitter and thought that I really wanted to work on something with him someday. Then, we started talking through social media, and now here we are.
mera: Since the project was inspired by Hokusai Katsushika's "Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji", which is divided into 36 blocks of 6x6, I felt "36 BLOCKS OF FUJI" was a great name for the project. And as you can see, it’s a bit long name, so feel free to call it "36FUJI".
mera: The reason why I decided to start this project is that there is a collaborative work called "First Supper(https://async.art/art/master/0xb6dae651468e9593e4581705a09c10a76ac1e0c8-0)" by 13 world-famous crypto artists. The work was released in February 2020, and I've always thought that it would be great if something like this could be done in Japan someday.
Toshi: At the time when we started supporting NFT artists at TART, which is my company, we happened to be working on building a system to distribute sales of collaborative NFT works by several artists and to return the sales even when the works were bought and sold across the NFT marketplace. As a supporter of the project, I also strongly felt that we needed to improve our ability to communicate not only in Japan but also overseas. I thought that it was time to take on the challenge of creating a global NFT from Japan. Then, I heard from mera that he wanted to try a Japanese version of First Supper, so I asked if I could help provide some technical support to achieve it.
mera: The main goal of this project is to share new Japanese culture with the world, but I also feel that it's really based on a pure curiosity about how wonderful it would be if Japanese artists got together to create a single work of art.