Lily Vanilli - London Bakeries - Field Trip!

A series of posts from visiting interesting little (and large) cafes, food-related establishments and other places of inspiration.

I first heard about Lily Jones and the Lily Vanilli bakery a year or so ago through a friend who was telling me about the zombie-themed cakes Vanilli had become famous for. What got me really interested was the quirky style of many recipes in the more recent Sweet Tooth recipe book.

Not much in the way of horror-cakes (though there is one for a glistening cake shaped like a human heart), the recipes are quite fun and punchy with chilli powder in the ginger biscuits, crushed and crystalised edible flowers as decoration, and strong alcohol in the caramel popcorn. I also liked the chapters on cool techniques that are then used in various recipes, like making sugar glass, honeycomb and candied fruit.

Having enjoyed making a few of these desserts, and just quite liking the Vanilli style I wanted to see if I could visit the bakery while in London, which is only open on Sundays.

Needless to say, it's *very busy* when it's open. Crammed with curious people like me who like the book, people who've heard of the commissions they have made for celebrities, and others wandering in off the equally busy Columbia Road flower market.

It must be lovely quietly working in the kitchens here when the bakery and market is closed, it's a beautiful area.

I gather that catering, wholesale orders and other commissions must form the backbone of the Lily Vanilli business model, with the one day a week walk-in bakery perhaps running as a fun exercise or PR channel.

Inside the bakery there were sausage rolls, cheese on toast and tarts available as well as the cakes. I got myself some of the thickly sliced courgette and onion cheese on toast, the taste of which reminded me of the fried onions you get with hotdogs at the fairground, and a red velvet cupcake, yum! In one of these pics you can spy a bag of flour from Shipton Mill - they seem to get everywhere :)

The bakery is definitely worth a visit if you're a Vanilli fan and want to try the real thing, or like a bit of an arty retro aesthetic, but do be prepared for the queues and busy staff, the elbow-to-elbow eating while standing and for making new friends at the tables and counter seats if you're lucky to grab a spot. Perhaps early is better than later in the day, and it does open from 8:30am.

Food served on cute porcelain saucers

Leiths School of Food and Wine - short course

To celebrate the start of my new venture and to perhaps pick up a few professional cooking and lesson-giving tips along the way, in early December I had a little cooking holiday and attended the enthusiast's course run by Leiths School of Food and Wine - Intermediate Course (I did the 'white' course - there is also a 'blue' course which covers different dishes and runs in April-May).

Along with their main diploma courses and a host of one-day, evening and half-day lessons, Leiths run two 'key skills' courses, two intermediate courses and one advanced course. Aside from being an internationally well-regarded school with alumni including current TV chefs and restauranteurs, a friend had whole-heartedly recommended the school, having completed a course there herself.

Though I'd been looking forward to it immensely I found myself a little nervous as the day arrived, not knowing what types of other students would be attending - how competitive it might feel, and what atmosphere the teachers would create.

After coffee and a short orientation delivered by Managing Director Camilla Schneideman (Prue Leith sold the business in 1995, and there are currently two separate Leiths businesses - the main school in West London, with some informal pop-up courses held in a new Portobello road location, and a catering business) we were straight into the kitchens and let loose fairly quickly on choux pastry for our first dish - aubergine and prosciutto gougeres.

Not being a particular staple of British home cooking, I hadn't made choux pastry since school but the teacher pointed out the key steps (when to pour in the flour, how long to beat initially, the appropriate cooled temperature at which to begin incorporating eggs and what a "reluctant dropping consistency" should look like) in his quick demo and everyone ended up with an eminently successful lunch along with the choux pastry knowledge with which to create eclairs, cheese-puffs, profiteroles etc. in future at home.

During our first practical session we also had a professional kitchen health and safety run-down. This included never leaving knives in the sink, using appropriately coloured chopping boards to prevent cross-contaminating food (Leiths has two, red for raw ingredients to be cooked, and brown for ready to eat things. Some other businesses use a variety of colours for fish, meat, vegetables etc.), and my favourite rule, which was calling out "hot pan" as you walked across the kitchen carrying dangerous things.

With about 20 people including staff in each side of the teaching kitchen (a large room divided in two by rows of ovens and gas burners, with 4 aisles of 3-4 students in each classroom half) movement within the kitchen became more gracefully dance-like as the week progressed and as we all got used to each other, where things were, and to not just waiting around for the staff to bring us things. I'd say there were between 30-40 people on the course in total.

Included in the course fees were the new (huge! heavy! excellent!) Leiths How to Cook recipe book which we used extensively throughout the week but could thankfully leave at the school each evening, and an enthusiasts course apron to use for the week and take home at the end. Leiths also sell their smart and simple white aprons with the Leiths logo at reception, along with knife sets and additional copies of the book.

When you sign up for the course they recommend that you bring tupperware to take food away with you each day, but this wasn't actually necessary as they had rather snazzy take-out foil trays and paper bags for the purpose.

At the top of the school is a recipe book library - a lovely little room I got kicked out of at closing time on the first day with books lining the walls, some of which were very well-loved and well bookmarked.

Speaking of cool things at the school, outside the classrooms I was intrigued to find this motley array of tools on display outside the classrooms (above), once belonging to Elizabeth David.

Video screens in the seminar kitchen

Tasting different stocks

The one-week courses are made up of half a day of quick-fire demonstrations of multiple dishes and methods in the seminar room (all passed around to taste too) and half a day in the kitchens preparing related dishes. Ingredients were generally weighed-out for us ahead of the lesson and awaiting us at our stations.

Our course covered meat, fish, pastry, meringues, bread, emulsion sauces and dinner party cooking. Foundational skills such as how to prepare different types of stock, or how to hold the knives and cut appropriately are assumed to be understood to some degree, but the teachers were quite happy to answer questions and demonstrate if anyone was unsure. Below are small dice sized tomato concasse (square and diamond) and julienne strips for fresh spring rolls.

It was interesting to see some of the brand choices in ingredients for the course, including some Shipton Mill flour (hurrah!), also how some things were stored and measured including this enormous bin of caster sugar:

Most butter at Leiths is salted, but this was for hollandaise

When applying I had wondered whether to do the key skills course instead of the intermediate, as I wanted to make sure all of my foundational techniques were best-practice, but I was slightly put off by the recipes being quite basic - crumbles etc. However, seeing how much additional insight you get, I think I needn't have feared being disappointed had I applied for a key skills course instead. The intermediate course seemed to be designed around 'wow' dishes to impress people with at home, this was great fun and certainly will be attempted at my home in that very spirit :)

My favourite part of the course was probably the fish day (heh, not very cake related!). The teacher giving the demonstration was so knowledgeable and excited about fish that her enthusiasm was quite contagious. She advised on sustainability, further reading, apps!, buying guides, and demonstrated a number of cooking methods including (I could not bear my own excitement at this) smoking mackerel.

This British breakfast flavour has been one of the foods I've dearly missed while in Japan - while we have probably the most wonderful fish in the world available to us in Tokyo, including various dried and smoked varieties of mackerel, I am yet to find the precise taste of the smoked mackerel from home. Until now! Hopefully… I asked lots of questions and took many notes :)

On top of the morning's wonderful demonstration, when we got to the hands-on part of the day, oh yes, there awaiting us were perfectly whole and beautiful sea bass, ready for us to descale, gut, fillet and de-bone. What an experience.

Despite my initial nervousness, the other students on the course were another very positive part of the experience. Students tended to stay at the same stations during kitchen sessions for the week and so you got to know your fellow aisle-mates a little and swap tips and opinions.

I found that most of the people I spoke with were really quite accomplished home cooks, and many had attended Leiths courses previously. Many were also living abroad like me, and had fit the course in as part of their winter vacation plans. I certainly had the impression that most of the people on the course were going to go straight back home and repeat and build on many of the recipes from the course, and the book.

Tarte tatin

Since returning to the North of England for Christmas my family has already suffered through choux pastry cheese puffs, courgette fritters with dukkah, pavlova, seared rib-eye steaks with chimchurri, pecan sticky buns, roasted red pepper and red onion polenta pastry tatin, braised red cabbage with apples… and I have many more pages of the book marked for experimentation when I get back to Japan!

Sugar poinsettias - Getting ready for Christmas

I've been indulging my crafty side recently having fun working on some basic gum paste techniques. The color scheme for my sister's wedding next year is purple and white so I've been practicing various flowers and things for the corsage-type decorations for the cake - but more on that next year I'm sure..!

Since I've been doing taste tests with coverings for traditional British Christmas cakes I thought I'd have a go at something a bit more seasonal as well and went for the red Christmas 'flowers' Poinsettias - the red things are leaves, but more on that in a moment - and some holly.

I'm undecided whether I prefer a simple decoration of something like holly on a flat surface, just the traditional spiky snow scene with a ribbon and no gum paste decorations at all, or a very over the top and showy poinsettia decked out in ribbons. I'm slightly embarrassed by how fun it was trying them all out.

The traditional royal icing snow scene

If you go to a Wilton shop you can get all kinds of handy tools and cutters to make leaf and petal shapes for various flowers and mats to imprint leaf textures etc. Poinsettias however appear to need to be made free-hand - unless you order a set from abroad. I relished the challenge, and had a go.

This is my first attempt, the leaves of which could probably be made a little finer and would benefit from some dark dusting powder to show the textures better. I assembled the red bracts in much the same way you would make a lily petal, folding the little flap over each wire, and then cutting them freehand with scissors.

Designing this reminded me how weird and amazing plants are. Earlier we covered the fact the red bits aren't actually flowers, but have you ever had a good look at the centre of one of these plants? There are crazy things going on in there! When poinsettias are depicted on fabric or in a drawing, there are often just a couple of yellow or gold circles in the center, but on the real plant there are actually intricate little flowers, or "cyathia" there in green, red and yellow. Though strange, my representation in sugar doesn't even do full justice to the wonderfully bizarre arrangement of the actual plant.

The spiny leaves of the holly were created using lily cutters and then a small round cutter to remove semicircles from around the edge. I put a dot of clear varnish on top of the berries so they would shine. Since these displays are for placing on cakes that are for eating, all the wires need to be wrapped in floral tape so that the metal doesn't touch the cake. Note that if you have a large display that you want to anchor into the cake, you should insert your wrapped stems into a plastic flower spike that you push into the cake.

There is, of course, an inherent strangeness to this kind of sugar craft. You go to all the trouble to make something delicate out of sugar, only to include wires and make it inedible.. It is a conundrum, but they are not completely redundant as aside from being quite impressive when made well, they don't wilt as would fresh flowers, and since they are made for special occasions, they can be kept indefinitely as a memento of the occasion if you're careful with them.

It is also possible to make simpler gum paste decorations that contain no wires and would be completely edible, albeit crunchy. You would need to mount them on a gum paste base to set them on the cake, or glue them directly to the cake with edible glue. Similarly, if you make simple decorations using fondant or marzipan, they would be completely edible too.

Oh and yes, all these decorations travelled with me to the UK too, carefully wrapped in tissue in a box in my hand luggage this time. No problems at security for these or the oh, 100 or so macaron shells packed along side them - "you do macarons don't you?" says my sister, the bride to be, "this 10-layer tower I've seen looks great!" (Next year I'll need to take more than 100 macarons..) The Christmas sugar decorations survived the journey quite well, with just a couple of the spiky tips falling casualty along the way.

Royal icing vs. rolled fondant - Getting ready for Christmas

Traditionally speaking, British Christmas cakes and wedding cakes are heavy, rich fruit cakes that are made weeks or months in advance of the date they are needed, matured and 'fed' regularly with brandy, then covered in a 3 mm or so layer of marzipan and finished off with a hard, white layer of royal icing.

These days if you search online for information about royal icing, you're more likely to find yourself on sites discussing decorating cookies, or perhaps creating lasting decorations. The Wilton site even goes as far as to recommend royal icing is not used as a cake covering. Certainly, the sometimes impractically hard covering created by royal icing would be a strange match for a butter cake or chocolate cake, but I do think it has a place still for fruit cakes.

This year, partly as preparation for making my sister's wedding cake (congrats!) next year, and partly to do the kind of side-by-side taste test I love so much, I made a few Christmas cakes for a rolled fondant vs. royal icing showdown.

Fondant is extremely easy to work with - it stores well if you don't use all of it at once, is easy to cut slices of once it's on a cake, and you can get creative with colours and make all kinds of decorations. The downside for me is that, depending what brand you use, there are a bunch of things in there I wouldn't usually choose to eat, like shortening, thickening agents, emulsifiers, preservatives etc. I have also seen recipes for home-made fondants that include stabilised cream and butter rather than shortening, but I wonder how they would hold up under heat.. more experiments ahead!

Royal icing by contrast is traditionally made with just egg whites and powdered sugar. Some recipes also include the additive of food-grade glycerine (a sugar alcohol) to stop it from drying too hard, others add lemon juice. Many modern British recipes suggest using powdered egg white, or pasturised egg whites instead of raw, to remove any risk of salmonella.

Smooth, but slightly pocked royal icing surface

Slightly bobbly surface of rolled fondant icing

Royal icing can create sharper lines on your cake than fondant, it's also a brighter white than most types of fondant and can hide the lumps and bumps of the fruit cake better, though there are ways to improve the bobbly appearance even when working in fondant. A downside to royal icing as a fruit cake covering is that it's not easy to get a neat cut - even with glycerine it dries very hard! The layer of icing frequently cracks as you cut into the cake, and shatters either side of the knife as you cut down.

Considering its use in traditional wedding cakes, and the common ritual cutting of the cake together, this is a fairly big consideration - you don't want the happy couple giving the impression they can't achieve things together by failing to cut into the cake :) I've found that using glycerine, whipping up the icing to stiff peaks and building the icing up in thin layers on the cake, smoothing and sanding between each layer creates a more powdery (rather than concrete!) covering that a sharp, thin knife can handle relatively easily. I'm still experimenting here.

Having cut these cakes in half I wrapped them up, sealed them in a cake tin and stowed them in my check-in luggage. In preparation for the wedding I also need to discover how well these coverings travel. Indeed, and whether the purported similarity of fondant to Semtex means my case arrives in the UK at all.. :) I'm currently on the plane and shall report back. (Edit: travel success! They both arrived in good condition and were not exploded by airport security.)

In these tests, for elegance and taste the royal icing won hands down but the fondant being easy and practical means it has a lot going for it. I kinda hope my sis choses the royal icing for her wedding cake, but we'll see..!

This year's mincemeat - getting ready for Christmas

Just a quick post to remind any ambitious parties who are planning to embark upon making their own Christmas puddings, mincemeat or Christmas cake, stir-up-Sunday was just this weekend and it is perfect timing to get stuck-in and make your house smell like Christmas.

I wonder how much mincemeat I’ll be making this time next year? I’m so excited about getting started with the business I can barely concentrate on all the (still many, many) tasks at hand in order to start... This year I made a modest amount just for gifts, samples, and I’m reserving a special 400g of it to take back to my family in the UK in a couple of weeks time, to bake mince pies “for Father Christmas” with my niece and nephews.

I made this particular mincemeat with butter instead of the traditional suet, as suet suitable for baking is hard to come by in Japan and I wanted to see if I minded the non-traditional version. I’m pleased to report that I don’t mind at all! It is really lovely. Of course it also means that my vegetarian friends can enjoy the mincepies too.

Here is the recipe I used, adapted from Delia Smith and Mary Berry's recipes.

Ingredients:

• 225g Bramley apples cored and chopped
• 175g raisins
• 110g sultanas
• 110g currants
• 25 chopped almonds
• 110g butter
• zest and juice 1 lemon
• zest and juice 1 orange
• 175g brown sugar
• 60g dried apricots, chopped
• 50g candied lemon peel
• 60g candied orange peel
• 1 teaspoon mixed spice
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• pinch of salt
• 4 tablespoons of brandy (or preferred amount to taste)

Method:

1. Combine all ingredients in a large pan and heat gently to melt the butter and sugar. Continue to heat through very gently for 10 minutes, stiring occasionally and leave to cool.
2. Once cool, add your preferred amount of brandy and decant into sterilised jars. 
3. Store the mincemeat in a cool dark place while the flavours develop further until you need it at Christmas.

Note that if you are using glass jars with metal lids, it's best to put a piece of plastic wrap between the lid and the jar to avoid any reaction between the lid and the acidic contents of the jar. 

The best thing about making your own mincemeat is that you can adapt the mix of dried fruit to your own tastes – just keep the total weight of dried fruit roughly the same as your recipe. Many recent recipes add cranberries, I like to add dried apricots, as I think they go fantastically with the almonds and brandy.

If you've also made your own British mixed spice and customised your blend of spices to your preference, then you’ll have a totally unique mincemeat of your own!

Choosing consistent colours for branding your business

Near my current office in Tokyo is a branch of a the paint shop Benjamin Moore. I popped in the other day to take advantage of their wall of colour swatches (free to take!) and to start homing-in on colours for my business.

Despite appearances, I'm not planning pink!

For consistency in your brand identity – making sure your online content, business cards and in-shop decor match as far as possible - you will want to define your brand colours across a few of the standard colour systems.

It's quite fun and not too difficult to do to a basic level (if you want to take it quite seriously however, look here and here). It can reinforce your brand's message and helps you build a recognisable and trusted identity with your clients (good summary in that link), while also avoiding giving an unprofessional, slapdash impression by not having thought about it.

Where to start depends on where you will be using your branding the most, because the different colour systems create colour differently - for example by using light, or using ink - and not all colours are available across all systems. You probably don’t want to start in a paint shop, fun though that is. :)

If you’re mainly online, then start by looking at RGB and hexadecimal colour picking tools - use design software such as PhotoShop or one of the tools listed below. If printed material will be more important to your brand, then it’s probably best to start with CMYK, since most of your printing will probably be done using digital printers.

Many major brands choose specific Pantone colours for their branding. Pantone corporation developed this system of uniform colour definition and produce sample books of colours that are used by manufacturers, designers and brands to ensure their materials are precisely the same colour wherever they are produced. These colours are labeled with a PMS (Pantone Color Matching System) number, and approximations (or exact matches for some of the colours) in CMYK are given in some of their swatch books.

It can be handy to know your equivalent or closest approximate PMS number, in case you need to manufacture goods in your corporate colours, or to do large single-colour offset printing but in general, it appears that decisions on CMYK and RGB/Hexadecimal will be enough for a small business.

For a degree of consistency across various media, once you have your main brand colour defined in the most suitable colour system for your business, you can look up the closest matches in the other systems using conversion tools like those listed below.

Note that there are many more colours available online (RGB/hexadecimal) than can be created in ink, and so if you are starting with a web colour, it could be hard to get a perfect match. If possible, test print the CMYK version of your chosen brand colour before doing your first large print project.

Building outwards from your main official colour, you can also use colour theory to look up contrasting and complimentary colours and create a brand palate (try this color calculator tool).

Keep note of all your colour values and create an official colour guideline for your brand - in RGB, hexadecimal, CMYK, Pantone if you like, and perhaps even a paint range! You can then refer to this guide when you design new online materials, need to ask a designer to create something, order panels for your trade show booth, or a sign for your shop-front...

Have a look at some brands' style guides to see how they do it. Note that large brands often go into tremendous detail (pdf) and include (pdf) direction regarding fonts, required space around logos etc. You probably won't need to be quite as extensive or strict as these examples, but preparing at least a basic style guide for colour sets you off in the right direction as your business grows.

Some useful tools to play around with:

http://www.sessions.edu/color-calculator - Cool little colour wheel you select or input your hexadecimal and get to see various workable colour combinations to go with it.

http://www.easyrgb.com/index.php?X=SEEK – Great tool converts CMYK or RBG (and other) colour systems to equivalents in well known paint ranges. Also helps look up complimentary colours and tells you the closest 'web safe' version of your chosen colour.

http://www.mypantone.info/ – An online Pantone colour chart (oxymoron?), click to see colour fill the browser window, also shows CMYK and hexadecimal values. This isn't an official Pantone site.

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/category.aspx?ca=86 - Official Pantone apps, including one that looks up Pantone colours from CMYK/RGB. (Video of app)

http://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/for-your-home/color-gallery – No Pantone or CMYK values here but a fun colour gallery with images of rooms using your selected colour along with complimentary options if you want inspiration.

Incorporated! Becoming a kabushiki kaisha

It’s official, the business is incorporated! It took about 3 weeks in all, with the help of a fantastic lawyer to prepare and submit the documents.

The official seal (round), and the every-day seal (square)

It costs about 400,000 JPY including lawyer’s fees to incorporate as a kabushiki kaisha (stock corporation - the most common company type) in Japan - standard notarization fees are 52,020 JPY, registration duties are 150,000 JPY and there are some other sundries such as company seal creation in addition to the lawyer’s service fee. Though it is possible to prepare and submit the documents yourself, I felt it was more than worth it to have a lawyer's help for the process to happen quickly and efficiently, without the mistakes I undoubtedly would have made, and to be able to ask questions along the way.

Even with a lawyer’s help, there are certain things you will need to decide and prepare for the articles of incorporation to become a 株式会社 / kabushiki kaisha / joint stock corporation:

• 会社名 / kaisha mei: company name 
• 住所 / jyusho: company address 
• 資本金額 / shihon kingaku: starting capital 
• 代表取締役 / daihyou torishimariyaku: Representative Director 
• 取締役 / torishimariyaku: Director 
• 出資者 / shusshisha: investors 
• 目的 / mokuteki: business activities 
• 取締役の任期 / torishimariyaku no ninki: serving term of Directors 
• 営業年度 / eigyo nendo: financial year
• 定款 / teikan: articles of incorporation
• 代表者印 / daihyoushain: company's representative seal, registered with the legal affairs bureau. Your most important company seal as it legally represents your company (also called 会社実印 / kaishajitsuin, or 社長印 / shachoin)
• 会社印 / kaishain: corporate seal for every day use, stamping invoices etc.

Note that after incorporation there are a number of notifications that need to be submitted within specific time frames to the tax office by your accountant, and so you’ll probably want to be sourcing an accountant while you are undergoing the process of incorporation. TBEP have many good and often bilingual accountants to refer you to if you are not sure where to start.

For the company name, you could start by checking here (in Japanese) to see that no-one has already registered a business under the name you are considering. I have found that not all companies are listed in this database, but it's not a bad place to start.

For a more complete database and also bit of help deciding what you'll list up for your business activities, if your Japanese is quite good, consider registering with www.touki.or.jp and have a look at the articles of incorporation for other companies. You'll need to know their company name and what region they are registered in, in order to look them up. You can also drop in your local legal affairs bureau and look up company records at their office, if you don't want to go to the trouble of registering with this site and wading through the kanji.

This site can be helpful to see what kinds of activities other companies have listed, and also includes the documents for companies that have since closed. You need to register a credit card to use the service, and wait for your user name to arrive through the post (snail mail!).

There is a small charge each time you request a pdf of a company’s incorporation document, and the system only keeps them in your account for a short time. When listing your planned business activities, the general advice is to be quite broad and extensive, as changes to your articles of incorporation later on will incur additional charges. Strictly speaking, you're not supposed to carry out any activities not covered by your incorporation document.

If you do not yet have an office address and don't want to/can't use your home address to register, some virtual offices allow you to use their address for setting up new companies, and for registering with bank accounts as well as serving as a mail box/mail forwarding service until you are set up at your new premises.

Regarding the financial year, you can choose to have it whenever you like. You don’t have to keep with end of March like most Japanese companies, and perhaps it will be better to have your year end at a time your accountant will be less busy with other year end accounts. Another important consideration is that setting your year end to almost a full 12 months after your date of incorporation means that you have a couple of financial benefits – you have the longest period of time before your first corporate tax bill and you get to benefit from not paying consumption tax for a full 24 months (if your accountant has submitted the appropriate tax notifications for you, as these have effect for the first 2 financial years of your business).

Once you've decided the details of your articles of incorporation (in English or Japanese, depending on whether translation is included in the service you use) your lawyer will prepare the necessary documents for you and any other shareholders to stamp with your officially registered personal seals. You’ll need certifications from the ward office to prove your personal seal is registered with them as officially belonging to you (they take a copy of your stamp's impression and keep it on record).

With these documents submitted, you will now need to show proof of the starting capital for your company. A kabushiki kaisha can now be created with any amount of capital, but most small companies have between 3-million and 9.9-million yen. Note that you will need 5-million or more if you are going for a business manager/investor’s visa. Higher than 10-million yen takes you into a different tax bracket.

Since you won’t have a corporate bank account yet, you prove your capital using the passbook of your bank account. I used my Shinsen account which is online only, and so we proved the account was mine by using an official statement I requested printed on Shinsen headed paper for a previous month, and then a screenshot of recent transactions showing the amount of capital.

Somewhat strangely, this involved me having to withdraw the exact amount from my account and re-deposit it into the same account, so that the exact amount of capital was visible on one line on the screen shot.. Oh, and I had to do this physically, with the cash, at an ATM..!

If you are planning to withdraw and redeposit like this, do call the bank in advance, as certain branches don’t have millions of yen in cash available every day and may need to order it in for you, and they may also want you to book an appointment to do it. Similarly, if you’re planning to just transfer the amount in bulk to another account you own, make sure your daily transfer limit is set high enough in advance so everything will go smoothly. Finally, if there is more than one investor, you’ll need to transfer everyone’s contribution to one bank account.

Once you've submitted this proof of capital you can then start using it if you need to, to pay your lawyer etc. My lawyer’s incorporation package very handily included her sorting out the company seals for me too, and so once all the documents were submitted I just needed to wait for the update that everything was approved, and it was. Hurrah I say! Now we can start having serious fun :)