Wasn’t it winter a few days ago? All of a sudden, it is spring here and a hundred different shades of green are growing on the hills of Kyoto. The city is surrounded on three sides with almost completely undeveloped hills. And the shades of green are varied and rich. In Japanese, spring green is called shinryoku–new green.
In Collaboration with Photographer, Helen Hasenfeld
© Photos by Helen Hasenfeld
There are places of beauty that touch me, but the garden at out-of-the-way Rengeji Temple in northeastern Kyoto is one of my favorites. The shady courtyard entry was planted in wildflowers by resident priest Yasui Yuji-san, a passionate environmentalist. By impeccably maintaining the 400-year old Tendai Buddhist site, he provides us with a richly contemplative atmosphere. Rengeji a very special place for those who find their way to its gate.
Yasui-san was born in 1941, the son and grandson of Tendai priests at Rengeji. When he was nine years old, he received tokudo initiatory rites of the priesthood. On weekends and school vacations, he was sent to a relative’s temple in Fukui prefecture on the Sea of Japan, to assist at funerals and memorial services for temple members. Then, when in high school, after considerable thought, he decided to break with this kind of life. He walked out of that temple, returned home to Rengeji.
After finishing high school in 1959, Yasui-san left for Tokyo to attend a college preparatory school. He had no money and needed to support himself. Japan was still a poor country recovering from the war. For three years, he went to classes in the morning and worked after school. He had a number of interesting jobs, including that of a “sandwich man,” wearing signs like a sandwich and advertising a cabaret in the Ginza district.
World-renowned photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s installation at Naoshima consists of a shinto shrine connected to an underground room by a glass staircase. Sugimoto is probably Japan’s best known photographer. The style of shrine building chosen is a very simple one, more similar to the style of Ise Grand Shrine than of later, Chinese-influenced architectural styles.
After viewing the portion of the glass staircase that lies below the shrine, the viewer emerges from the sub-terannean chamber through a long corridor that perfecty frames the horizon.
The ocean horizon is one of Sugimoto’s favorite images. An installation at Naoshima’s Benesse House showcases a dozen or so photographs of ocean horizons around the world.
I rode my bike downtown yesterday. It was warm and sunny and my first day this year on my bike without a jacket. I rode down from my house almost entirely on quiet, narrow residential streets. The late blooming double flower cherries were shedding pedals like snow, while azaleas, dogwood, wisteria and yellow kerria were in full bloom, everywhere. My destination was Nijo Jinya. The Ogawa family has been living in this designated National Treasure for several hundred years, since the days when it functioned as an inn catering to feudal lords visiting Kyoto.
Ando Yasushi-san is my neighbor and friend. We sometimes go for coffee at a salon-like cafe, where people from various backgrounds come to chat. Ando-san’s hobby is country western line dancing. He is a renowned yuzen kimono painter in Kyoto. Yuzen painting is typically a craft that is cooperatively done by a combination of about 15 different specialists, including a designer, an outline painter, a person who applies resist to the fabric, a broad stroke background dyer, a person who removes the resist from the fabric, a person who paints intricate pictures on the fabric, etc. Ando-san is very unusual in Kyoto, since he does all of the jobs himself, except embroidery.
In Collaboration with Photographer, Helen Hasenfeld
© Photos by Helen Hasenfeld
I first saw the work of Fukami Sueharu-san while walking down Gojozaka in Kyoto, nearly 10 years ago. My colleague, Nancy Craft, and I spotted his work in a gallery window. Our jaws dropped to the ground. Neither of us had ever seen such striking work.
That afternoon, Nancy and I visited indigo-artist Fukumoto Shihoko-san’s studio. Again, our jaws dropped to the ground. Coincidentally, for the second time that day and the second time in our lives we saw a clean, direct and stunning work by Fukami Sueharu-san.
Though he came from a family of functional-ware potters in Kyoto, early on he wanted to do something different—to express himself as an artist. Obsessed with the image of very smooth, sculptural pieces, he decided to make blue celadon porcelain his life work.
To achieve his ideal, Fukami-san began experimenting with slip-casting of sculptural pieces. But the casting he had in mind had never been done before. There was no “book of instructions.” It took him 13 years of trial and error before he finally got the slip casting technique right. “I succeeded in casting just the right kind of mold, into which I poured liquid slip. After walls formed in the mold, I used a bicycle pump to remove the excess slip from the center, resulting in the kind of light, hollow form that I had dreamed of.
“Next, I have come to use very specialized hand planes to achieve a sculpting back of the cast form. After bisque firing the piece, I further refine it with a diamond polisher. It is very time consuming to create my pieces. I glaze both outside and inside of the piece to prevent cracking and warping. This too has been a process of continuous failure and learning.
He also experimented with color. “I love the gradation in celadon, from white to blue. Where glaze is thin, the color is lighter. When it is thicker, the color is bluer. The color is based on thickness that follows the form of the piece. In the kiln, the glaze builds where it does not rest, adding to the form, the shape. I think that thickness, itself, is also a type of form. Most ceramic sculptors do not use glaze. It is more difficult to express with glaze. I feel that the combination of color and shape creates a new form that is neither sculpture, nor ceramics. Rather, color and shape, together, make something new, something beyond.
“I didn’t want there to be crackles in my celadon. They interfere with the impact of the shape. I want my expression to be straight and honest, and crackles get in the way of that.
“Until I was 43, I worked and tried so hard that I thought I would collapse. I wanted to make this technique my own. For years, my wife and I struggled, just to survive. Both of our families helped to support us through those very difficult years of trial and error.
“Though I have been told by various critics to try something else besides celadon, I am not at all finished with it yet. I feel as if I am moving towards a distant light, refining as I get closer to it. I have long wanted to create a Fukami niche in the world of celadon. I simply want to find my own little place that would be very much my own expression, my own contribution.”
I knew nothing about the Sayamaike Museum, except that Tadao Ando designed it and that it is located in sub-urban Osaka. After a relatively easy trip from Kyoto with a few train changes, I found that the site far exceeded my expectations. Ando combines light and water with poured-in-place concrete, wood and glass to create a poetic and playful public space that delights and surprises at every turn.
Sayamaike is Japan’s oldest irrigation reservoir, dating back to about 600AD. The museum has very cleverly sliced a cross-section of the 1400-year old bank into a pyramid-shaped wall.
The entrance consists of several parallel waterfalls and parallel walkways running about 250ft in length.
Yesterday, I visited my friend Kawasaki Kei-san, proprietor of Kyoto’s upper Teramachi textile gallery, Gallery Kei. The gallery had just finished an exhibition of 100 year-old offertory bags. The old adage about saving patches of cloth large enough to wrap 3 beans came from a time when all textiles were precious. Kei-san explained, “People in pre-industrial Japan would patch together various bits of cloth in long rolls.
“They would then cut off pieces in order to create special bags which would be filled with azuki beans or rice, and placed on the altars of Buddist Temples.”
Gallery Kei specializes in museum-quality folk textiles. Until the modern era, cotton was difficult to come by in rural areas, especially in northern Japan. Clothes were made from hand-spinning such things as linden bark, wisteria vines and kudzu vines. Also used washi paper was cut into strips, hand-
spun and woven with cotton to create shifu, an excellent light, beathing textile.
Forty years ago, when 21-year old Fulbright scholarship recipient Yoshiyasu Suzuka was asked with whom he would like to study photography, the young art student said that he didn’t know who to ask for. “Ok, then,” said the American advisor. “We will assign you to Mr. Adams.” Mr. Adams turned out to be Ansel Adams. Now, 40 years later, Suzuka-san teaches at Kyoto University of Art and Design and a major photographer in Japan, working in several areas including pinhole photograhy. He also uses a unique process to print some of his pinhole work on handmade washi paper. The above image is from a series of hands photographed on Shikoku Island’s 1200-year old Buddhist pilgrimage route.
TV news anchors talk about it, daily. Newspapers report on its progress. Kyoto’s parks and Shinto Shrines are filled with parties of people celebrating it. And, this year, the display of cherry blossoms is especially vibrant. Unusually warm weather in March opened the blossoms earlier than usual. Then, recent unseasonably chilly weather has helped to keep them on the branches longer than usual.
On Tuesday night, I attended my tea group’s annual ohanami cherry blossom viewing party, held at Hirano Shinto Shrine. The shrine is set up with temporary party pavilions that hold dozens of separate party groups. Like other groups, we brought our own food. Since several of our members are restauranteurs, we had a spectacular spread of sashimi, gyoza dumplings, very crisp deep fried chicken, crunchy pickled bamboo shoots, Chinese spring rolls, rice balls cooked with red beans, Hakkaisan sake and beer.
I had a long chat with a member whose family shop in Kyoto has been selling matcha (powdered green tea) to tea enthusiasts for generations. He recently completed a full year learning the family business on a tea farm in Uji, Japan’s oldest and most famous tea growing district. I learned that matcha, like coffee, is best enjoyed soon after grinding. Whereas most people buy their matcha in 100 gram cans, some tea devotees actually visit their shop once each week to buy 10 grams of the powered elixir. Most people buy matcha by looking only at the price and never really understanding the differences among the dozens of other kinds of matcha in their inventory. He promised to explain their product mix to me, the next time I visit them.
Our party ended, of course, with a round of tea sweets and matcha. And instead of paper cups suitable for a picnic at a shrine, we sat that evening under illuminated cherry trees and drank matcha from real tea bowls. The party organizers had arranged to serve the 35 party participants with bowls representing 35 different ceramic styles!