File#10
Moguri rooM
Shop and Gallery
1-16-8 Kitahorie, Nishi-ku, Osaka
TEL 06-6531-6996
moguri@hjn.jp
http://hjn.jp/moguri/
*Turn right onto the side street next to the Kippei bar-restaurant
Hours: 13:00-20:00 (Closed Tuesdays)

I am a great fan of any type of printed matter and among the fliers and free papers available everywhere, I first found out about the Moguri Room about a year ago in the free magazine, Horie Junction (hjn; vol. 000/no. May-June 2002). The name of the place caught my eye and it had a good reputation.
Special events were apparently their forte. A shelf-lending system called the Moguri Dormitory also sounded interesting. Hiro, who made an appearance
in File #8, happened to know the owner, Kuse Wakame, and had also been intrigued by the Moguri Room for the longest time. But despite talking about going, we never quite made it down there. Then by chance, in an issue of hjn's email magazine, I noticed that an exhibition of a bunch of artists' "drafts" was scheduled as part of a second anniversary event and off I went. I printed out the map from the Moguri website and with this as my guide, I set out. But finding the place proved to be difficult. Though I knew it was somewhere in Horie, one wrong turn and...then I noticed a sign on the side of the road. Turning down a side street, with tall buildings towering off in the rear, I found the shop at the very end of the street in a strange place that seemed to have stopped.

The first thing that caught my eye was the mannequins. In a common room, Wakame and a few other people were preparing to send out some direct-mail fliers about their next event, "The Tanabata Dream Diary." Although it was my first visit, I received a hearty welcome. (No doubt many people are attracted to the place because of Wakame's winning personality.) There was a wide assortment of fliers, which I was told the shop sorts through every week. In the roughly one hour I spent in the Moguri Room, there must have been about 20 people coming and going. The name of the shop was decided on for the way it sounds. Moguri is often assumed to mean, "diving." Talking to Wakame, a very animated person, you start to feel energized. She explains that the Moguri Room started two years ago on June 23 with only a single two-week event scheduled. A tatami room was converted into a gallery space. The events have continued uninterrupted to this day. And that's no small feat.