User:Fred Cherrygarden

Fred Cherrygarden (born 28 November 1996), also known by his other noms de plume Carol Roger and Koharu Watanabe, is a Japanese fantasy author, antique dealer, amateur numismatist, YouTube content creator, translator and freelance writer, known for his lifelong love for Alice, as well as his interests for etymology, philology, history, and comparative mythology.

A spontaneous traveller with an insatiable wanderlust, Cherrygarden has travelled to 65 countries so far, including Belgium, Hungary, Iceland, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, the Republika Srpska, the Free State of Saxony and the Republic of Kugelmugel.

Early life

Born in 1996 at San-Ikukai Hospital in Taihei, Sumida City, Cherrygarden grew up in Tokyo’s quiet shitamachi area along the Arakawa River as the eldest of three children. His father is from Aomori Prefecture, whose ancestry can be traced back to the medieval Uda Genji clan, descending from the 59th emperor of Japan, Uda, while his maternal lineage has its roots in the Watanabe clan, descendants of Emperor Saga (which is not a rare case in Japan, where the surname is estimated to be shared by upwards of 1.3 million people).

When he was about 10 years old, Cherrygarden was given an assortment of foreign coins by his great-grandmother, which included a Jefferson nickel, a Southern Rhodesian shilling and a silver cuarto de balboa from Panama dated 1962. Along with Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, these coins sparked a numismatic interest in him, eventually leading to the establishment of the so-called Cherrygarden collection.

After graduation from Shinobugaoka High School in 2015, Cherrygarden briefly worked at the Ueno Zoo, and then as a cast member at Tokyo DisneySea and Tokyo Disneyland. He has held the title of Lord of Sealand since 2017 and was named co-castellan of Château de Vibrac in 2019 as part of the Dartagnans crowdfunding campaign.

Cuffnells Gallery

In 2016, Cherrygarden established an online antique shop named Phlizz Numismatics on Yahoo! Auctions and Mercari, mainly dealing in antique and ancient coins, some of them never-before-introduced in the country. Shortly following the soft rebranding during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was renamed Cuffnells Gallery after the now-defunct estate of Reginald Hargreaves in Lyndhurst, Hampshire. Its current logo features the obverse of a denarius attributed to Titus Carisius, on which a bust of Juno Moneta is depicted.

Today, the shop deals in a wide variety of collectibles including ancient coins, banknotes, antiquities, antiquarian books, engravings, film props, and Disneyana. These items come directly from the Cherrygarden collection, acquired from such established international auction houses and dealers as Heritage Auctions, CNG Coins, Stephen Album, Scott Semans, and Prop Store. A small portion of the collection has been scanned on Cherrygarden's Nikon D5600 and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

From 2021 onwards, Cuffnells Gallery has been involved in the joint production of the upcoming YouTube docuseries Curiouser as well as its sister series All Manner of Curious Things, in association with Lutwidge Films and Goodbye Snowdrop Productions. Created by Cherrygarden and directed by Allen Smithey, the series is set to cover a variety of relatively lesser-known topics such as the El Cazador shipwreck and the history of the Jimbōchō Book Town. Actively using Creative Commons-licensed contents and footages from public domain films, the series will feature extensive credits, frequently "starring" such actors as Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Hedy Lamarr, Angela Lansbury, Mark Hamill and Dick Van Dyke, while directing credits often go to the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, George A. Romero, Sam Peckinpah, Yasujirō Ozu, Maya Deren, and Ida Lupino.

Atlas Obscura

In 2019, Cherrygarden joined Atlas Obscura and has since written more than 600 articles for its “Places” section, arguably contributing to the international popularization of several under-recognized travel destinations such as Roger La Grenouille, Ichimonjiya Wasuke, St Briavels Castle, and the remains of the Servian Wall standing next to McDonald's in the Roma Termini railway station.

Bibliography

Short stories

"Barking Dogs Seldom Bite" (2012), first published in Nightmares, the periodical publication of the Shinobugaoka High School Literature Club
"Fire of Unknown Origin" (2013)
"There's Always Time for Tea" (2019), unpublished
"Little Gecko" (2021), unpublished
"The Milk Hall in Candle-Town" (2023), written for the annual Chiyoda Literary Award

Links