Sometimes an idea calls me. When it does, I like to say yes.
The day after visiting Atami I used my JR East Rail Pass to visit Akita City. It is home to the Akita Museum of Fine Art: Hirano Masakichi Museum of Fine Art built by architect Ando Tadao as well as the Akita Senshu Museum of Art. Continue reading
When I bought the Shinkansen tickets to visit my friend in Yonezawa, the ticket agent informed me that it would be cheaper to buy a JR East Rail Pass. A pass would allow me five unlimited trips in a seven-day period to any destination in the JR East system. Fortunately, due to a major exhibition at Sogetsu Kaikan, some of my ikebana classes had been cancelled. I had time to use a pass during the limited window offered. Win-win.
Where in JR East’s world did I want to go?
Cloud streaks caught the setting sun and bathed the valley in soft light as I disembarked from the Shinkansen at Yonezawa Station on a late October Friday afternoon. The crisp air was faintly redolent with smoke–like incense–as farmers had burned the rice stubble from their fields earlier that day. I had arrived in Japan’s countryside or satoyama with its own distinctive nature and culture. Continue reading
It has been a while. Longer than I’d hoped. After an eventful weekend in the Japanese countryside followed by jaunts to distant areas of Japan and several hours on trains to write about the adventures, the computer got balky.
What do you dress as when you’ve unexpectedly been invited to a Halloween karaoke party and you don’t want to spend big bucks on a costume? I’d bought a cheap wig in Tokyo but left it behind as it was hot, uncomfortable and shed like crazy.
October moves into its final week and I am more acutely aware of the flow of time as my stay here is limited to the end of November. There are only so many days until Christmas, and in what will seem like milliseconds we will be ringing in the New Year.
In Plautdietsch or Low German, a language used among Mennonites for more than 500 years, there’s a saying: Daut klaupt aules. Meaning everything claps. In English we say everything clicks to describe such a state of convergence.
Monday’s International Class at Sogetsu Kaikan was like that. Continue reading
Near the end of January as my first three-month adventure at Sogetsu Kaikan was drawing to a close I met Mayumi in the elevator of my apartment building. The cultural norm in Japan is not to engage with strangers. It’s assumed that you are content to mind own business and should politely ignore others. But somehow, and I can’t recall who initiated the conversation, we got to chatting. Continue reading
Saturday evening I was about to go out for another round of exploring DESIGNART TOKYO 2018 when thundershowers hit the city. Instead, with soft jazz streaming I poured the wine, laid out the bread and cheese, and pulled out the computer. Continue reading
The first week of ikebana lessons started well; however, the challenge has been huge. By Thursday of the first week I was punch-exhausted from all that jetlag, settling into my apartment and resuming classes entailed.
Image credit to Sogetsu Ikebana website http://www.sogetsu.or.jp/e/
To complicate matters, the steel grass I’d chosen for the design I’d imagined was predisposed to bend into sharp angles where I wished to create curves. The flax leaves split, were hard to fix and gave me a considerable amount of grief. Continue reading
