HOHOEMI NFT

Hi, we are maishinta, artists and entrepreneurs

We are a couple making music while raising a two year old girl.

This collection will mint a total of 2222 units of our best album "HOHOEMI".

As a first step, after we have sold out 1111 pieces, we will thank our collectors for their support.

We will airdrop a new musical piece.

As a second step, after selling out another 1111 pieces, we will launch the "HOHOEMI Foundation" and

After selling another 1,111 units, we will launch the "HOHOEMI Foundation" to provide assistance to needy women and children living in shelters in Nepal.

We will start activities to support creation and sales using NFT.

When we sell more than 10,000 units, we imagine a Budokan live concert and recording at Abbey Road.

Furthermore, when we sell more than 20,000 units, we will build an off-grid music studio in the great nature and create a meta-verse linked to the studio.
We imagine a world where anyone, from anywhere in the world, at any time, can come and play in the world of HOHOEMI music.

Specifically, we plan to provide Nepalese women and children with the equipment necessary to create digital artworks, deliver information on production methods and how to use them, and operate media to communicate the background of the artworks and their creators in order to support sales.

We would like to create opportunities for women and children in "developing" countries to create and sell art and music works from scratch, earn money, and live freely.

(*As of August 2022, cryptocurrency is illegal in Nepal, so we will start by supporting the creation of digital art and managing media to share the works of women and children in the initial phase of our activities, and then gradually introduce cryptocurrency and conduct activities according to the situation in Nepal).

HOHOEMI Foundation will operate as a DAO in which anyone can freely participate.

We hope that you can get involved while having fun and helping each other together.

Please look forward to hearing more about maishinta's music and the various activities that will be spun out during this project's journey.

Please look forward to hearing the music of maishinta and various activity reports that will be spun out during this project's journey!

maishinta

🎹 About HOHOEMI NFT utilities 🎹.

1. airdrop maishinta's next work after 1111 pieces are sold out.

2. access to the HOHOEMI NFT collector-only channel in HOHOEMI DAO.

3. access to the HOHOEMI music library for your own projects.

(*These are not album tracks or pfp works, but works that are intended for open use.)

4. those who have participated by the first 111 bodies can participate in the recording of the maishinta chorus.

New utilities may be added as the project progresses!!!

We hope to co-create a music-centered NFT project with you, the collectors 🌞.

About us

We are a father and mother raising a 2 year old girl. And we are artists and entrepreneurs.

Our daughter started preschool in the spring of 2022 and we returned to full time work.

From 2016 when we met until now, we tried not to let in too much outside information in order to focus on making music and raising our children.

Then, our daughter's preschool started and we were ready to resume our work.

On the evening of June 3, I learned about the web3 concept and NFT for the first time.

The world seemed to light up instantly.

The idea of web3 is exactly our ideal future of the earth, where centralized power collapses and independent individuals are free to express themselves and live.

We want to live in such a world.

We decided to learn NFT at breakneck speed and present our work.

We will present our works here with the conviction that the world will become a place where all expressive people can freely express themselves and live their lives.

⇩Recent update here our twitter⇩

message from shinta

 Hi, nice to meet you, my name is Shinta Sakamoto.

I met Mai about 6 years ago, and have lived until today guided by the premonition echoing in the song HOHOEMI, which was born at that moment.

And as I was washing the kitchen for tomorrow morning, I had a strange feeling of clarity, and I decided to talk about my dream.

(This message was written on 16th June 2022)

My dream is of a planet Earth where all people live in love and harmony, where all people dwell in their own joy, where no one rules over anyone, where each individual is aware of his or her own divinity and awakens to the fact that the sacredness of all beings resides in all things, and where we are immersed in eternity, enjoying absolute peace.

Technology and nature give to each other, people love culture and art, play with flowers, dance with the earth, paint with light, and sing of the sun falling between the sea and the sky. Children run around barefoot, bringing new awareness and possibilities to the world with their pure hearts.

This landscape has already been realized in my mind under a certain temporality. (Or, at this very moment, it is shining everywhere on earth, like the stars in the night sky.)

Our music is the sound spun out of that sensation.

All the music we play is the echoes that have blended into this moment from the world of unconditional love, the space where my dreams have come true.

Now that humanity knows that the idea that time is a one-way flow of past, present, and future at a constant speed is an illusion, we know empirically that we can find divinity within ourselves when we are deeply present in the here and now. It is the wisdom of the Buddha and the love of Jesus that has been minted into the memory of mankind 2000 years ago, a memory of the soul embedded in us that no amount of tampering could ever erase.

We access this eternal memory daily through the medium of sound, resonating with the tremors of our souls.
There is always an overflow of unconditional love.
And music played in that state of love has taught me that it is possible to stand in this world without descending from the world of dreams.

For some it may be painting, programming, or cleaning, growing grapes, playing with children, lying down, breathing, building a house,,,,

It could be anything that one does with joy.

These actions are still scattered around the world, shining an invisible light.

I interpreted NFT as giving form to this once-in-a-world invisible light and creating a connection of light among people.

I would like to carry the light I have found onto NFT and create a cycle of joy in the world.

Our first NFT will be "HOHOEMI", which was born when we met, and "AYAME", which celebrates the new life that has come to us through our life together. It is an album of 11 songs created over the past 6 years.

The songs are like jewels buried deep in our souls: the cycle of life and death, the wish for harmony between nature and technology, childlike pureness, the feeling that love is being, and the unlimited abundance of blue skies.

The song "HOHOEMI" begins like this

微笑みが響いてく / Gentle smile echoes through the air

朝がやってくる / Morning is coming

夢のかけらを集めて / Gathering pieces of dreams

Now it sounds like this to me. Dawn breaks and a world full of smiles comes with the morning. Gathering the pieces of countless dreams.

Everyone who resonates with my dream, welcome to the world of HOHOEMI, a world of love where all beings are accepted.

shinta

message from mai

<Table of Contents>

• Greetings

• Until I became a social entrepreneur

• How did my music career begin?

• Why we started presenting our works at NFT

• Our Dream of the Future

Hello. My name is Mai Sakamoto.

Since 2016, my husband Shinta Sakamoto and I have been singing and creating music together as maishinta and IRIS SUN.

For those of you who are new to me, let me introduce myself.

I grew up in a very small village in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan.

From junior high school, I attended a private girls' school in Sendai, which was a Christian school that frequently hosted guest lectures by humanitarian aid workers every year.

When I was 15 years old, I heard a lecture by Ryohei Takatsu, an NPO employee working in Nepal, and was so moved that I visited Nepal by myself when I was 17.

I volunteered at various places while staying with the Takatsu family for about a month.

After that, I started my own business in 2009 after graduating from university.

I became a "social entrepreneur" while doing various jobs related to Nepal.

I ran an NPO to support women in Nepal and started an organic cosmetics brand to create jobs for women who were victims of human trafficking.

In the course of such work, I gave lectures at various venues such as TED, published essays, appeared on TV program "Jounetsu Tairiku" and many other media, gave presentations to investors day after day, opened a street store in Omotesando, Tokyo, etc. Anyway, I have been extremely busy since becoming independent.

I think my activities looked successful from the outside.

But I myself was exhausted.

“I couldn't continue like this.”

In 2016, at the peak of my exhaustion, I decided to do an experiment.

"Let's take the care and love that I had previously directed toward the women of Nepal and turn it 100% toward myself and see what happens."

I thought that if each of us could make ourselves happy, there would be no one to support and no one to be supported, and the world would be in harmony on equal terms.

I turned all of my outward consciousness inward and began to simply follow my overflowing feeling of "wanting to express myself”.

Then, one day, without any context (epiphany?), I decided out of the blue to "sing" and went to a private voice training class.

And there, I had the biggest voice experience of my life.　I remember my teacher telling me at that moment,

"This is your true voice.”

More than the loudness of that voice, I was moved by that feeling of having every cell in my body tremble, and I realize that we can have such a happy experience with just one body.
Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that I remembered.

After that day, I felt as if I had acquired a one-of-a-kind treasure.

One week after that lesson, I met my future husband, Shinta Sakamoto, a musician.

I am ashamed to admit that I overslept and was 40 minutes late for our first meeting, which was almost our first meeting.

During that time, he saw a TED speech I had given and was inspired to write a poem, which became our first song and the title of our album, "HOHOEMI".

(↑Here is a video from our visit to Nepal together in the summer of 2016)

After HOHOEMI was born, it took many changes for me to immerse myself in music production, including closing the Omotesando store and scaling back the size of the company bowing down to the wonderful investors who had supported us, but I continued to follow my deepest interests.

Three years after I started making music, I had a baby.

Now I live with my daughter and her husband in a small town in Miyagi Prefecture, where I was born.

Here we continue to love each day and continue to make music.

In the past 6 years, we have finished recording 205 songs,

and there are still a huge number of songs in the sketch stage that we would like to complete.

(↑Last live concert before the birth @ Tower Records Shibuya)

As I mentioned earlier, I had actually been completely unaware of web.3 and NFT since 2016 and especially the last 2.5 years since my daughter was born, as I had not been actively taking in information from outside sources.

Then, in May of this year, when our daughter was going to start preschool and we were about to resume our activities again as full time artists, we learned about this concept.

In fact, during the past six years, as we have been going through the process of purely making the music we want to make and delivering it to our listeners, there has been something very puzzling to me, who had been manufacturing and selling my own products as an entrepreneur until then.

It was that when submitting our work to Apple Music or Spotify, the largest music providers, the creator, the artist, was not free to set the price.

Since it had been common practice for me to create original cosmetics, price them myself, and sell them, I was very uncomfortable with the fact that people were pricing their own creations without permission and at incredibly low prices.

It was very clear to me that artists were being exploited by the platforms.

I remember being really relieved when we rescued all of our work from Apple Music and Spotify.

✴︎

We began to price our work according to our own sensibilities and to publish it in our own online store.
It was a very comfortable feeling, and we decided that we would continue to ignore the existing conventions of the music industry and present our work as we saw fit.

Then, on the evening of June 3, 2022, my world was flooded with information about web.3 and NFT.
With goosebumps all over my body, I took what little information I had in Japanese and translated it into English to read and learn about what was happening in the world.

I am still learning, but I felt that the fastest way to learn was to experience it for myself, so I decided to share this information with Shinta and present HOHOEMI as an NFT ver.

We ourselves, with joy, express ourselves freely, and our NFT works reach good collectors and are appreciated. The NFT work becomes a living organism, passing from person to person, living out the life of each piece.

We are excited about this from the bottom of our hearts.

We will continue to make music.

We hope you will add our works to your collection.

I believe that each of our works will live out its life as a living organism when added to your collection.

I also have a strong passion to contribute to the world while making music.
That is why we donate a portion of the proceeds from our ,usic to an NGO that supports women in Nepal.

And I pray from the bottom of my heart that one day the world will be a place where such NGOs will no longer need donations or activities.

We have longed to meet others across the globe, beyond national borders, who resonate with our sound.

We also want to tell our daughter, who will grow up in the future, that this world is a wonderful place to play.

From the bottom of our hearts, we hope to bring this work to people all over the world.

And we look forward to the day when we can meet and exchange words with those who resonate with us.

There is no limit to what we want to do through our music, such as creating real studios, visiting countries with collectors, and real live performances.

First of all, we would like to purchase a Steinway grand piano with the purchase of this first collection HOHOEMI 2022.

This piano will undoubtedly be the piano we will share for the rest of our lives.

We will airdrop the first born album to all collectors by purchasing the piano that will always be with us in our future productions together with our collectors.

Let's enjoy it together.

WAGMI!

酒本麻衣　

Mai SAKAMOTO

SHINTA SAKAMOTO

Artist / Musician

Born in Tokyo in 1991. Graduated from Waseda University Senior High School. Dropped out of the Department of Information Science and Engineering, School of Fundamental Science and Engineering, Waseda University.

He started playing piano at the age of 3. At the age of 12, he started composing, improvising, and recording music. And his interest in computer-based music production led him to enter a science and technology university. During his studies, he co-founded the music label Tokyo Recordings. As a composer, he has provided music for artists (e.g., Wednesday's Campanella, Nariaki Obukuro), films (e.g., "Tokyo Sunrise"), and corporate commercials (e.g., TOYOTA, Hebel House, Halekulani Hotel).

In the winter of 2015, he witnessed the death of his grandmother and had doubts about his way of living and creative activities, so he took a break from work and university to go to London. After returning to Japan, he started writing his own poems and songs .

In the winter of 2016, one year after the death of his grandmother, he wrote a song called “ONE LIFE“. At the moment of the song's birth, he experienced himself being enveloped by great love. He makes up his mind to sing with his own voice.

In the spring of 2016, he met Mai, who would later become his wife, and after listening to her TED speech, he was moved to write a song called "HOHOEMI". They hit it off immediately and became partners in both public and private life. The two created one song after another as they traveled together to Kauai, Nepal, Paris, and London.

After completing 171 songs, they had a daughter and got married. In 2019, he and Mai established a music label, 8th MAY Records.

Released three albums as the unit maishinta, which were sold at Tower Records nationwide, and produced the best album "HOHOEMI. Released four albums as 8th MAY and IRIS SUN, an improvisational creative project with vocal and piano. They has released 171 songs, including solo piano songs, produced over the past three years through streaming for a limited time.

His latest song is "AYAME", a song filled with love for her newborn daughter.

MAI SAKAMOTO

Artist / Entrepreneur

Born in 1982 in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Dropped out of the University of Montana in the U.S. and Sophia University in Japan. Graduated from Keio University, Faculty of Policy Management.

At the age of 15, she met a humanitarian aid worker in Nepal, and at the age of 17, she moved to Nepal to participate in NGO activities. In 2009, upon graduating from university, she started the Coffret Project to bring out the beauty of Nepalese women through cosmetics.

In 2013, she launched Lalitpur, an organic cosmetic brand, to create a place where Nepalese women who had no relatives can work with pride.

In the course of her work, she began to receive an increasing number of requests to give speeches and talks at various venues, including TED, and as she gained more experience, she became aware of the wonder of the voice. She began writing her own poetry and reciting.

In 2016, she met her future husband, Shinta, and started singing and making music. She closed her Lalitpur Omotesando store and downsized her business, and then set up a private studio with Shinta in the nature-rich Okumusashi area, where she produced music for about three years.

The 171 songs they produced during that time were streamed for a limited time, with all proceeds going to Nepal.

In 2019, she and Shinta established a music label, 8th MAY Records, and released three full-length albums as a unit, "maishinta", which were sold at Tower Records nationwide, and a best-of album, "HOHOEMI". She has also released three full-length albums as IRIS SUN, an improvisational piano and vocal project with Shinta.


Awards: 2012 Avon Women's Award, 4th Youth Leader Award, etc.
Appearances: TED x Sapporo/ TED x SFC, etc.
TV: "Jounetsu Tairiku", etc.