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September 1, 2007 USA

This was the trip to my sister's house:

And in my home town I caught a ball.

August 8, 2007 Hot Hare Here

Piyunta likes the hot days least of all.  This year I built him a summer house, a summer room really extension on his home, so he can get down and cool his belly in the dirt.  It seems a success.

July 27, 2007 Shibuya Crossing was like a sauna

Went to Shibuya yesterday - the busiest intersection in the world. It is no place to be on a hot summer day, as the businessmen in the front tells us with his expression. But I had to do some research for my next exhibition - Humans, angels, and Hungry Ghosts

July 23, 2007  Summer no doubt

My Yakisoba was working hard at the O Bon festivities on Konmurishindo last night.  Cold beer,  hot yakisoba, takoyaki, raw in the center.  Summer in Japan, time to live it again.

July 16, 2007 not dead yet

Yanaka is still alive.  Whiteness this happening at the old house taken over by young folks on the hill.

July 7, 2007  7-7-07     Tanabata

Tanabata, the Chinese star festival - lovers separated, come together - one chance in a year, not invented by pirates or Disney.  We make wishes.  We hang them on bamboo trees. Late at night we ride our bikes down Kapabashi Dori.  Magic is still all around us.

June 30, 2007  Carved in stone.
"It's not carved in stone."  But if it were, would you think it less transient?  Change is the only thing carved in stone here in Yanaka.

June 13, 2007 in my ears

Do you walk around with music in your ears?  I pull radio shows off the internet - podcasts.  Tokyo in my eyes, America in my ears -  modern times.   I made a youtube about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnLxShTZf9k

June 3, 2007 Landscape painting

I am a fan of landscape painting, Whistler oils paintings on small pieces of wood, J. Francis Murphy painting on anything.

Today I found a wonderful landscape in the most unexpected of places, youtube, by a person called rogjp.  Take a look.  See what you think.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDnMhO1kJn8

May 27, 2007     The Wall               They are breaking the walls in Nezu Station, on the Chyoda line.  Underneath are things like the photo above, that I took with my cell phone yesterday night.  It shows that even a subway can have wabi-sabi.  Thought wabi-sabi does not fare well in modern Japan.  And I expect that shiny new tile is already on its way to cover it.

May 23, 2007   Reencountered

An old painting of Adam and Eve, the rabbit and the dog at night on my roji, was recently uncovered by my youngest when cleaning her room.  Seeing it again was like running into an old friend.

May 13, 2007 The Empire

American art is colonial art.  At first it was straight European.  As time went on we developed an accent.  In the 40's Europe came to New York to escape the war.  American, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, South American, all the same art with slightly different accents.

Randy Newman said it in a song. "Europes have sprung up everywhere now as even I can see."

Japanese art is European art,  And it looks like Chinese is becoming the same.

May 6, 2007  Kurobera                                  Kurobera, Yamanashi, Japan

What did you do with your Golden Week?  I went to Kurobera.

Kurobera is the furthest a person can go from the city of Tokyo and still be in Japan.  It is a place that has never seen a convenience store, a place that cell phones don’t work.  People work in the fields all day and practice an ancient form of the Noh at night.  Family names: Fujiwara, Miahara, date back to the Heike, over 800 years.  Recent archeological digs show that people have lived here since the Jyomon.
Now there are less then 10 residents year round.  The youngest, 71, can bee seen dancing in this video -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtzPRQF8ans

May 3, 2007  Golden Week

Golden Week seems particularly un-Japanese.  The new year in Japan is celebrated in January, but is really April 1st when people begin the new school year and new recruits start their permanent jobs.  Then to have Golden Week, a week long vacation just one month later to disrupt and give time for reflection, for people to realize all their hopes and ambitions were illusions, there by bringing on a massive outbreak of "May Disease," a disease of despair and depression, often fatal as their are so many nice trains here to jump in front of, just seems very poor planning, very un-Japanese.  But perhaps it is just a conflagration of former emperor's birthdays, a sho-ga-nai situation, "it can't be helped," which is after all very Japanese.

April 29, 2007 Cameras in Yanakaland every day

It was a beautiful spring day.  Yanakaland was jumping.  Tourists everywhere holding maps upside down.  The tsutsuji (azalea) festival down the hill in  Nezu Shrine  exacerbates things I guess.  I ran into two separate TV crews out filming on my short ride from home to studio.   Yanaka seems to be on one TV station or another every day.  Why?

 The guys out filming Yanaka

April 22, 2007  a poem for Spring

April 14, 2007  Yanaka Cats

Yanaka is famous for cats -  stray cats in the cemetery and cat shops for the tourists, .   People go out at night in circuits to feed them in back alleys and parks.  Cats are everywhere, but a few less today than yesterday I think, as I saw the samisen man last night, out walking with his traps.

April 3, 2007  The Ebb Tide

Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of
many European races and from almost every grade of society
carry activity and disseminate disease. Some prosper, some
vegetate. Some have mounted the steps of thrones and owned
islands and navies. Others again must marry for a livelihood; a
strapping, merry, chocolate-coloured dame supports them in
sheer idleness; and, dressed like natives, but still retaining
some foreign element of gait or attitude, still perhaps with some
relic (such as a single eye-glass) of the officer and gentleman,
they sprawl in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island
audience with memoirs of the music-hall. And there are still
others, less pliable, less capable, less fortunate, perhaps less
base, who continue, even in these isles of plenty, to lack bread. 

It is the first paragraph of Ebb Tide, by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1893.  It made me wonder, as I sit here on the island of Honshu in the pacific chain of the Japanoes; how much has really changed?

　

March 29, 2007 Mapping the Foreigners    

The locals make maps.  A cynical friend said it was because they refuse to name the streets.  These hand painted maps are common on the streets hear  subway exits or just along main streets to identify businesses and residents alike.  The one I found today held special interest to me because of the quaint way they had labeled the local gaijin (outlanders, foreign people).  If you can not read Chinese, the second character of Gai Jin looks like an upside down "Y".

March 27,  2007 Hanami begins       

I rode my bicycle through Ueno Park yesterday.  It was a warm and sunny.  The blossoms were just beginning to open.  Lots of folks were out to greet them.  Groups of all kinds were stetting up their blue plastic tarps, and setting out their picnics.  Yesterday was graduation day at the nearby art university, so we had kimono too.  The strangest group I met was the Yakusa-san hanami.  Do you ever meet these Yakusa guys?  They have very good posture, but must wear faces like masks that prevents them from smiling.  And Yakusa, as a rule, do not make small talk.  Not so hard to spot a group of stiff backed guys with very serious faces sitting together  with yakitori, not speaking in a park full of fun and festivity. 

It was so sunny and fine that with out thinking I started to make a video.  I uploaded it to youtube just now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nWiKqVMi_Y

It is one in a series of unthinking videos I have put on youtube.

March 6, 2007  Fire                                                               

My Hibachi parties are  fun; a group of people gathered around a charcoal fire, what could be better?  But they also frighten the poop out of me. Not the parties themselves, but the hibachi.  And not the hibachi during the party, but after - the glowing embers.  When you live in a very small space made mostly of wood and paper it is best not to forget.  And the trouble is not limited to the person starting the fire.    If you live in an old neighborhood a fire can travel fast.

We have had two fires in Yanaka this week.  There has been death.  Fire is no joke in old shitamachi.

February 17, 2007              

It is a little surprising to find so many great bluegrass players right here in Tokyo.  These guys for example playing next Saturday night in Akenobashi. 

February 4, 2007 Chasing Devils

Yesterday was Setsubun in Japan.  At the same time it was Ground Hogs Day in America.

Ground Hogs Day reveals our agrarian past.  It is a forecast, a magic prediction for the farmers, carried by a creature that lives under the ground.  The god of the soil is informing us, telling us farmers whether it is time to think about planting or hunker down for more winter. 

Japanese, on the other hand,  throw beans to chase the devils.  We do it in our shrines.  We do it in our homes - chase the devils out and welcome good luck in.  It is a spiritual spring cleaning on this tippingpoint, this dangerous day, half way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

January 22, 2007 The National Art Center in Roppongi

Japan has just opened its biggest art museum.  All the morning shows were a buzz about the restaurant - French, a 3 star chief -  Ladies waiting in line for over an hour to sample it.  No word yet on the art.

January 16, 2007  Hot Sake       

I found a great little sake bar in Waseda.  It is new.  And has a great selection of nihonshu (sake) reasonably priced,  also maguro fresh from Tsukiji, and a very tasty pork nabe. I would give you directions, but it is impossible to find unless you take the streetcar, Toden Arakawa Line, (chinchin densha).  Take the streetcar to the last stop, Waseda.  On your way out you will see some vending machines.  Look between the machines and you will see the little alley and the lit up sign for the restaurant.  It is about a minute away. The owner’s name is Tsukui.  He doesn’t speak English.  But he cooks and speaks sake very well.  The beauty in the kimono is his wife, so watch out.

January 1, 2007  Hibachi party      

Took a New year bike ride through the neighborhood, past the line at the shrine.  Greeted some neighbors and got excited about tomorrow.  Tomorrow is a, "One day one tatami," day.  Ichi Nichi Ichi Jo.  I will open my one tatami gallery to pilgrims on their 7 temple march through Yanaka.

Most hibachi in my neighborhood have met the fate of the one above,  a home to plants or goldfish.  I love to fire mine up. 

There are few things more conducive to conversation than a fire and a warm cup or tea, unless it is a sip of sake, which we may get around to as the day fades away.

The drinks, the visitors, and the friends, but sometimes the best of is the sound, the silence before guests arrive, when the hibachi is warm and all is still except for the kettle softly singing, matsukaze, a sound best heard alone.

December 31, 2006 New Year’s Eve 

 I made a fire, burning the sticks and branches fallen in my garden since fall.  As the smoke rose and the flames started dancing I remembered my old nagaya and the roji where everybody knows your name.   

I used to make a fire in front of my old house.  Neighbors brought dried squid and the like to throw on the fire.  Cold air, a hot fire and warm conversation.

Tonight I will ride back up the hill and ring the local temple bell.  One of the 108 times.

December 25, 2006 Christmas gone

Another interesting thing about Christmas in Japan is how quickly it leaves.  The department stores start pulling it down on Christmas eve, to make room for the main event - New Year's.  It's rather inconvenient to have Christmas stuck so close, though no one seems to mind it rolling over Touji, the Winter Solstice, a formerly simple, now nearly non-existent celebration.

front window, WAKO, Ginza (The gold characters all mean "Wild Pig.")

December 24, 2006  Christmas in Japan  

chicken shop down the street	Christmas is gangbusters popular over here.   The parts of Christmas that traveled best are the older, pre-Christian, parts; the tree, the party, the jolly old elf - that you can see hanging with the tinsel strung over the chicken shop window.

December 10, 2006 my toilet  

Japanese do not heat their bathroom, but routinely heat the seat of their toilet.  It can be disconcerting for a person used to central heat; the cold of the bathroom of course but more so the heat of the toilet itself.  
        In my experience the only time one gets a warm toilet seat is when someone has very recently vacated it.
        Japanese shop for new toilet seats at the local electronics shop. All sorts of fountain washlets may be involved in your selection.  If  you push the wrong button you may well get squirted up the ass rather than getting the flush you anticipated.

December 3, 2006 Kumade on youtube

                              http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8A58bNM_Jc

In the 11th month on the days of the bird a festival is held in Tokyo. It is for the purpose of selling "Kumade." These objects bring luck, particularly luck in business. They collect and gather money. Styles and prices very. A small one will cost you 50 bucks; a large one can run you thousands. Every year you return you are expected to buy a larger kumade than you bought the year before. this festival proceeds the New Year, which is the most holy and special holiday in Japan.

December 1, 2006 a government of the people

Here in Japan I listen to podcasts.  My ride to school is over 2 hours each way.  A pod cast or seven can help to pass the time.  This week I subscribed to a new podcast, great speeches, and the first one to come up was Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  Oh my.  Someone said he wrote it on a train to the place.  What a thing.  "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. "  Not something you would wish to explain to a beginning English student.  And not something you can easily explain to Japanese at all.  Japanese vote, but there is an expectation of corruption here.  "Them" is the government here.

I wonder;- I have been away for a while.  Is there still an expectation of democracy in America?

A government, "of the people, by the people and for the people."  Or has it given way to cynicism and greed - corporations giving wads of money to both sides to be sure that whoever is elected, they still get their way.  "People;"  Has it become a joke democracy like Japan?

Do people even talk about campaign reform anymore?

Patriotic Americans

November 16, 2006 Flags of our Fathers

Saw Clint's new film yesterday.  Made the decision to see it in Ueno during the middle of the day.  Hardest time and place.  Most of the audience was white haired Japanese men.  Puts an edge on things to be in a room half filled (the Ueno theater is never all filled) with people that went to or had the war come right home to them.  It seemed to be what the film was about, those inside and those outside war.  Mr. Eastwood is quite a film maker.  Do not know if I have the strength to see the next one though: the letters home.

November 12, 2006  Geisai   

Last week my art university had their Geisai, their annual school and art festival - food, drink, music and dance, and of course art.  I made a short youtube flim about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fywy1sGtUV0             

November 7, 2006   A Star

I teach in a high school for handicapped students once a week.  This week I drew a moon on the board.  We talked about the moon, "new moon, half moon, full moon."  Japanese have more words for the moon than we do in English.  Next I drew a star.

Kobayashi-san is autistic.  He was unable to operate in an open classroom and had to be isolated with partitions and assigned his own teacher until just this year.  He still finds communication a challenge.  I drew the moons.  He said nothing.  I drew the star:

He said, "Sapporo," in a quiet voice.  I did not realize at first what he was saying.  But Kobayashi-san was right.  The star is a trademark Sapporo beer.

And it spoke more about society than his autism.  He, like every other child in Japan, is so bombarded by advertising it should not be a surprise that he identified that star with a brand of beer before he thought of the heavens.

November 1, 2006 Halloween on the hill         

Happy new year, that is what Halloween is supposed to be, a leftover new year's eve.  We have lots of them in Japan, April 1st was leftover from a European leftover, and still taken very seriously here, first day for companies and schools.  The most recent leftover, the lunar new year can't be more than 150 years out, and still used by the Chinese, but is the least recognized now.  Of Jewish new year, or even the Thai's, there is no mention at all.

Halloween is getting bigger here.  When we started ours no one knew.  Now every sort of restaurant, shop, and bar seems to be putting up signs.  This year we had over 60 costumed kids, mostly young ones I no longer know.  Mrs. S does it.  She is still the communication center, gathers the fun around her, and works very hard.  You will not see her in the photo; she is on the other side of the camera.

October 14, 2006  to blog or not to blog?

Yesterday at the university one student, an outgoing voice and drama major, said she could not understand why people would diary open their diary to the world on a blog. 

Another student at the table smiled his quiet design student smile and said he couldn't understand why a person would take the time to write a diary then keep it secret.

Here are some friend's blogs:

   http://mitate.exblog.jp/  This guy is an expert in Japanese antiques and culture.  Sorry it is written in Japanese.

http://tokyobay-news.cocolog-nifty.com/ A friend that watches the bay, also in Japanese.

 http://japantalk.blogspot.com/  - Japan Talk - These Japanese university students are expressing themselves in English.

September 25, 2006

My Exhibition opened Saturday.  So far, so good.  Make a virtual visit if you wish -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbfp7ji6qN4

September 17, 2006

It is funny to witness the rush to youth in the art market continues.  My recent walk around the Chelsea zone in New York, and  the hot new shows in Paris - 20 year olds.  I just added some of my mother's paintings to this web page MCHathaway  My Mother is 80, has painted all her adult life.  There really is something to be said for maturity in an artist.

September 16, 2006 Urushi

I am working on my exhibition.  It opens in one week.  Finishing frames, putting the sticks on the end of the scrolls. 

Each year at this time I bring out the urushi - Japanese Urushi - translated incompletely as "lacquer." It is a natural product, made from the sap of the urushi tree.  It is a unique finish, soft and warm.  It is durable too.  It was the most durable finish in Asia for thousands of years, used so many ways.  But it has a few problems.  Urushi, when it is wet, is very much like the sap of a plant we have back home called Poison Ivy.

Some people react badly, and can not use it.  If you just mention using it to Japanese they get frightened looks upon their faces. 

I love urushi and have enjoyed using it for years.  At first I used it at home, but noticed my young children with thier sensitive young skin began to itch just from walking through the room in which I was working. 

I transferred the work to my studio.  But year by year my skin has been getting worse.  Until this year I turned bright red, and for 3 days my left eye was swollen shut.   I have been itching like the writer of The Singing Detective.

It looks to be my last year using urushi on my frames unless I resort to a space suit or some other sort of full protection.

As a side note - urushi is quite safe and nonreactive when it hardens.  I have never heard of allergic reactions.  It has been extensively tested and appears uniquely safe for humans, is completely non-carcinogenic, something not so many modern paints or finishes can boast.

September 5  Back again

I have just returned from a trip to US.  Here I am, back in Japan. 

Leaving the house today I turned the corner and bumped into a sumo wrestler.  He was coming out of the dentist's.  It surprised me a couple of ways.  First I was surprised that it didn't surprise me.  Bumping into a sumo wrestler around here is no big deal.  Second I was surprised by his size.  He was a full sized Sumo-san, oiled down topknot and all.  But he was smaller than the fat lady with tattooed arms that served my daughter in MacDonald's in my home town. 

It always happens going back and forth.  it is a problem of scale.

August 14, 2006 In front of my home

Tonight I sat in front of my house tonight.  I brought out an old whicker stool, and a taste of beer.  It was the first time.

 Up in Yanaka I always brought 3 extra glasses.  Tonight I brought my own glass and the mosquito coil.

The reaction was mixed.  Actually not - most everybody gave me the eye.  I said, “Hello,” in Japanese of course, and they stared up at my house wondering whether I was  supposed to be here, then back down to the street as thought we had never exchanged, made contact. 

 Not everyone was the same.  One very old lady on an unsteady bicycle gave me a cheerful hello, as did the only person walking a dog.  Back in the old place dog walkers were the staple, the patrols, keeping the neighborhood safe, upholding the world.

 My wife came home.  She had been out shopping.  “Get inside! What do you think you are doing, drinking on the street!”

 Just wanted to meet the neighbors.  It’s been 6 months.  Seemed about time.  They do it in New Orleans all the time I hear.

August 9, full moon, 2006

A Japanese magazine editor asked me for a recommendation.  She wanted to know where I would advise their travel writer to go in October.  Of course I recommended Kuroberra.  If you do not know Kuroberra, do not feel alone. 

The second time I went there I was driven by a friend.  He had a "Navi."  It is the nearly compulsory satellite navigation system over here - We got just so far and then we were off the map.  Our arrow, our car, was flying through places with no roads at all.  When we got there, the Navi said we were no place at all.  That is the way I like it, just fine.  Kuroberra is the kind of place that people eat the bears that come to eat the bees that hang in giant nests from their roofs.  I saw their elementary school.  It was a hole in the ground.  They said, "Our youngest person is 63, so we figured we could get along without it."

Young people, those that there are, move to the cities, mostly Tokyo, and kick up my rent.

But back to Kuroberra.  My favorite part of this story is the magazine writer calling me back.  She had called Kofu, the largest city near Kurobera, and no one in Kofu had ever heard of it.  She asked if I knew anyone up there.  I had to tell her that I knew all 12 of them, and if she went up there she could meet them too.

Kurobera

August 1, 2006

As a preteen I watched a TV show called, "Manix."  It was a Quinn Martin Production.  Manix was strong, smart, a private detective - always on the go, driving a big American convertible, or in his bachelor pad.  No tough guys were too tough or too smart for Manix.  I wanted to be Manix.  I watched every Saturday.  One night I realized that Manix didn't watch TV.  Of course - too busy beating the crooks and getting the girl.  But here I was, a wanting to be him, watching all night long.

July 27, 2006 a toast from the Irish

Let those that love us, love us.

And those that don't love us, let the good lord turn their hearts.

But if he can't turn their hearts, let him turn their ankles,

So we can know them by their limping.

More and more I am finding the Tokyo gals don't like us.  Or so says their limping.

July 26, 2006

my new video on youtube -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqmMZge3iMc

July 24, 2006

I have been thinking about the long tail.  Is this a chance for us, on the edge, as opposed to the middle, to be seen and heard, or just a chance for middle men like Amazon to turn a buck on us?  Both I guess

July 18, 2006  Great exhibition

of Giacometti paintings, sculpture and drawing in Hayama, The Hayama Museum of Modern Art, until the 30th.

July 10, 2006 rats

Rats danced on my ink stone last night.  First they must have waltzed first in cobalt blue.  It almost makes up for the paintings they chew to make their beds last winter.

July 9, 2006 Famous Artist

The master in the Ueno Pub tells newcomers that I am, “The Sesshu of Yanaka.”  It is grotesque in the size of the flattery, but does not actually mean much to the foreigners that visit, as Westerners do not learn many Asian painter's .  He probably says it because Sesshu is the only ink painter's name he knows.  Most folks here do not care much about sumie either.

Locals say I am famous, and it is true.  But let me explain what famous means in contemporary Japan.  When I moved into Yanaka there was a mansion on the corner of Ueno Park, across from the former Imperial Art University.  It was a grand old house, taken over by the Taito City office, for taxes probably, lent out by the hour to oldsters teaching flower arranging and the like.  All the people I met said, “This was the house of a FAMOUS artist.”  I was, at first, impressed.  I asked them, “What was his name?”  No one knew, but they all assured me he was very famous.

I too am famous, but one or two steps down from that guy.

I was famous on my street.  Japanese call it a “roji,” mistranslated into, ”alley.”  A roji is a living unit, small tenements - long houses, strung together, and a few real houses in between, all on our roji.  Everyone knew me, as everyone knew each other.  We were all famous.  We were each others entertainment.  We were more than friends.  Our lives were mixed in a way that no longer happens in modern Japan.

That old tenement house is now gone, just a patch of dirt, waiting.   I have moved down the hill.  No one knows me here, nor do they care.  I am famous no more.

June 21, 2006  "I can't draw."

I never met a five year old that said, "I can't draw."  I never heard a seven year old say, "I can't paint."

Education, socialization, fear of making a mistake.

Computers can not make a mistake.  It that our goal?  Do we aspire to be more like the machine? 

Is that what schools are for, shame building, machining our kids?

Maybe it is DNA.  I never met a kid that couldn't draw, and so rarely meet an adult that can.

May 21 Grafting

Today the tree cutters took down the 5 story cedar in the back yard.  Its center was eaten out and full of ants, so with advice from the cutters the landlord decided to take it down.

           I did not count the rings, but would put it at 50 years old, a real stand out in this neighborhood of small houses and cement apartments.

           I asked the tree cutters to save me some twigs from the top, so I could graft them onto the stump and see if the tree could start again.

           My father used to graft fruit trees.  We had a tree that grew 3 different kinds of apples back home.  He showed me how to do it.  But he had his tools and his materials.  Here I am in Japan in the middle of small houses and apartment buildings.

           My pocket knife worked for the tools.  For materials, I lacked the pine tar and bee’s wax, but made due with prayer candles melted with olive oil and Sapphire gin.

           The tree cutters said, “No way.  It ain’t never going to work.”

           And from the way they took that tree down I am guessing they know their job.  But I tried anyway - a dozen little scions grafted to the stump and painted with prayer candles and Sapphire gin.  Time will tell if any of them take.

           Stay tuned.

May 7, 2006

Tokyo is cloudy. We may have rain.  It is just what most of us need, a quiet day.  We have survived another Golden week, congratulations all.  Hope the exertions were worth it.  Nobody works as hard as a Japanese on vacation.  And the general rule here  is that if one person has vacation the whole damned country does.  Prices go through the roof - and every place is full, every train, every hot spring, every pop stand, every park.

But in all the hubbub I found an empty place - a big beautiful mountain shrine, in Agano, 7/8ths of the of the way to Chichibu.  It was more like a hiking course than a shrine,  walking sticks in a big ceramic bucket at the bottom.  Free.  Nobody there at all.

Big metal getta at the bottom of the mountain -  fair enough and not really so strange in Japan.

It is a modern shrine - the mountain first explored by a priest in the Meiji.   What makes it unique in my experience is that it seems to be a shrine to imperialism.

Instead of the usual lions guarding the entrance, this shrine has a bullet form a large naval gun on one side and a Russian mine, from a battle in the Japanese Russian war on the other.

And half way up the mountain was the only existent statue of Togo Heihachiro in Japan.  

May 1, 2006 Yanakaland

Maybe it is the new Loop Bus, or all the fake matsuri going on, it could also be the build up of tourists lost with various inaccurate maps in their hands.  But Yanaka is looking more and more like Disneyland everyday.  I think I will have to start calling it Yanakaland from now on.

  Tourists in the bochi,  Yanaka Cemetery,  May 2006 (Oden's grave just visible over the water fountain)

Mori Maiyumi sat next to me in a noodle shop in Yanakaland today.  I said hello but did not try to speak.  She is a fine writer, but is not so good with names.  She always calls me, Allen,  the other gaijin painter in Yanaka.

April 13, 2006 Exploring Kanmurishindo

I am exploring the new ground.  Kanmurishindo the locals call it.  But try and find that on a map.  It is very downtown, and still has a heart.  There is a dagashiya just around the corner.  A dagashiya is an old style Japanese penny candy store, selling things like rubber balls and dried salted squid on a stick.  They used to be everywhere, a hang out for the kids after school.  Try and find one now, or if you want an even bigger challenge - try to pay the landlord in Tokyo selling penny candy.  But in  Kanmurishindo we still have ours. 

    And I found a shokonin.  He makes wooden handles for tools, wooden malls and mallets too, fine stuff, things that dance in your hand.  We are butted up against MikawaShima, so there are still the little family factories making all sorts of parts to things.

April 9, 2006  Sweeping the garden

My friend Kato just came back from China.  He said they don't go for cherry trees over there.  He thought the cherries were to gaudy for the Chinese, and did not last long enough.  He said, "Chinese can be stingy that way."  And they got no joy from watching the pedals fall.  "A short beautiful life," the image so appealing to the Japanese. 

I am a plum lover myself, maybe the classicist in me.  But we have had a great cherry season in Tokyo this year, beautiful, splendid. 

And today while sweeping dead leaves in the garden a single pink peddle traveled from a neighbor's to fall on my ground.

last night

April 3, 2006  I slid off the mountain today
I was up there for nearly 12 years.
    I remembered when I moved up. I told the tofu man across the street at my old place. His eyes got wide. He said, “Oh, yama.”
Yama means mountain in Japanese. I was only moving 6 minutes away by bicycle, but as he noted, I was moving up the mountain - Not a mountain by Tibetan standards, not even by the standards of my hometown in Upstate New York. Back home it would hardly be a hill. But this is the great Kanto plain. It doesn’t take much of a rise to make a mountain.
Ueno Mountain, that’s where I moved after talking to the tofu man.
Now I slid off again, into the Nipporis, deep Shitamachi, Mr. Sidensticker’s, “Low Town.”
    My part of the Nipporis is bisected, trisected, cut up like a cherry pie with railroad tracks and highways.
    There is a violence in crossing the paths of these steel, diesel, and electric beasts.
    There are few things a person meets on a regular day as powerful, aggressive and loud as a 16 wheel diesel truck on a highway. But a freight train is one of them.
    To reach my new house I must cross over or scurry under the Yamanote line, the Kehin-Tohoku, the Sekyo line, the Skyliner, the JR freight line, and the Bullet train going north, as well as two major truck routes.
    It is something people do not have to do on the mountain.

  a neighbor

February 14, 2006 -  6 foot Valentine

 I walked past the old Maruzen bookstore in Nihonbashi, which isn’t a building now, but a construction sight. Their main store is over on the other side of Tokyo station while they rebuild.  There is a smaller place down, temporarily down  the street from the construction.  On my way back from the smaller store I noticed an art gallery that looked very So-Ho.  From the street it was just a sign, “Gallery Sho,” and a whitewashed stairway leading down.

           The young lady with me was interested, but hesitated to go down.  Japanese are reluctant to visit places they cannot see.  Japanese hate surprises.  It is the reason for the quality reproductions of food outside restaurants here.  It is not enough to see the words, “fried rice, and a price posted on a menu.  One feels so much better to actually see the food reproduced, what that particular fried rice is going to look like if one actually goes inside to eat.

           People do not like surprises, and worse than surprise is embarrassment.  Embarrassment for the customer not satisfied, embarrassment for establishment that does not measure up.  To go all the way down those stairs and find you are in a gallery you do not wish to be in.  Oh my.  What a situation.

           I discovered this when I had an exhibition in a gallery downstairs in Yanaka last year.  It was a nice gallery, in a fine location, art minded people passing by at all times of the day.  But none would brave the stairs and venture down.  The only visitors I got in my exhibition were friends and people that had visited the gallery before.  After years of struggling the gallery is now closed.

           In Nihonbashi I took courage and my friend by the arm.  We went down the whitewashed stair.

           Downstairs we were greeted by a perfectly acceptable Wolf Kahn painting.  Kahn was, and perhaps still is a New York painter and teacher of fame.  He does colorful country landscapes, easy to like.  Around the corner we found a 6-foot painting of a young lady’s wide-open vagina with a young man’s dick up her ass.  It was full color and photographic.  Except for the scale of the thing it could have been straight from a magazine that would not yet be legal to sell in Japan.

           My lady friend screamed.  It was a scream I had never heard before, but then it was probably her first six foot vagina.  I also recall a shiny black stomach garment and red boot were involved.

           “Photograph?”  She asked me in Japanese.

           “Serigraph,” I said,  “a photo silk screen touched up with oil.”

           “What?” she asked in Japanese.

           “A painting,” I answered.

           “Oh,” she said.

           Then she asked me, “Why?”

           That is just the way the art business was in New York, competitive.  People had to be noticed.  Quality was no longer easy to judge.  There were no real standards.  Shock counted for a lot.  People that could get the art world’s attention could be famous for a couple of years.  New York was really a small world.  But it was restless.  And churning, the way stockbrokers churn stock.  Fame did not last very long. 

We walked around the rest of the gallery.   I showed her the artists that used to be famous, they even had a Warhol print.  Of course there was a Basquiat.  As my teacher used to say of Warhol, “He is known for being known.”

           I wondered what became of paintings that are in great demand no more. 

Some found their way downstairs into a gallery in Nihonbashi.

February 9, 2006   A rabbit on our street                                                   

Our rabbit’s name is Piyunta.  He lives in the street.  But our street isn’t really a street.  Japanese call it a roji.  roji is often translated  as “alley.”  But that is not right.  A roji is a small street with a wealth of cultural  associations.  It is one of the units of life here, or used to me.  First there was the family, which was quickly extended by the nagaya, a “long house” a convenient style of tenement construction, were poor people lived one next to another with very little space and even less privacy.  Life inevitably spilled out into the street.  And that street was a roji.

           Tokyo Metropolitan government is ding their best ot eliminate the roji, and rework the old neighborhoods into more modernly convent human storage unites - apartments stacked one on top of each other as far as they dare into the sky.  Individual cement units stacked that tend to isolate the individuals.

           The old poor people storage units were made of wood, thin wooden walls, and made for unavoidable connection and a very communal sort of existence.  Poverty was different too.  Now we poor all have TVs to hold our interest.  Before people tended to involve themselves with people.  People were unavoidable in nagaya living.

           In front of the nagaya I am soon to leave is our rabbit Piyunta, named by my youngest because that is the sound a Japanese rabbit makes when it jumps - “Piyun, Piyun, Piyun....”  I think the, “ta,” suffix is supposed to inform us of his masculinity.

           Piyunta lives in the street, or rather in a tall cage in the street; the cage is tall because it was not built for a rabbit, but rather for our previous pets, the uzura, a variety of Chinese quail we bought by accident in a shopping street in Koenji.  I built the cage up off the ground to keep them out of the eyes of local cats, and to make them feel more at home, and made sure to give them plenty of head room for flying around.  I did not know at the time that uzura are nearly flightless.  They prefer to race around the bottom of the cage shouting a distinctively uzura shout, that gave the neighbors something to complain about for a while.

           My wife used to take the uzura for walks until one day, ironically enough, they flew away.  This left us with the empty cage that my youngest soon filled with Piyunta.  Living on the street he has more contact with neighbors than I do.  I was surprised to learn that everybody stops and say hello to him.  He is a special favorite with the young mother with small kids.  A couple of the homeless men that live around the corner in Ueno park treat him as their own pet, spending time talking with him every day.

           Piyunta watches, but unless someone regularly feeds him he pays then mo real mind.  Having the base of his cage at eye level (it was built for uzura remember) makes him even more accessible.  It also caused a number of complaints.

           “Rabbits are ground animals!  Don’t put it up in the air!”  Japanese can be nearly as invasive as  Puritans when they are roji neighbors.  Though not begin a master of the language helps.  It brings a sort of quiet to a situation that could be otherwise.  I listen and I smile.  But Piyunta repudiates their complaints by spending a good part of his time on top of the box I made inside his cage, for him to go into to get out of the wind.  He prefers the highest vantage he can get.  Even on chilly days he can be found snug on top watching the roji.  Surveying it like an emperor.

Piyunta, the rabbit on our street,  part 2

Piyunta receives tribute.  People pass by and speak with him.  If they do not speak, at least they look in.  Some bring gifts. 

           When I first put Piyunta ot on the street my next door neighbor said I must lock the cage.  Tokyo is a large town.  You never know who will pass by.  And you never do - our roji is like Dr. Susses Mulberry street in this regard.  But after some time the lock got more and more tiresome.  One must attend to a rabbit rather often.  locking and unlocking, it just got to be too much.  The lock was often not locked, and after some years it disappears completely. 

           Most gifts to the rabbit are left politely outside the cage, though some do take it upon themselves to slip things inside.  The middle school boys sometimes give him  envelopes  from food packages that read, “Do not eat!” It is a kind of  preservative of freshness for cookies and cakes.  Piyunta does not read, but neither does he eat these envelopes.  I find them in his food dish sometimes.  Young boys are curious by nature.  Perhaps these things are offered as a form of science, or medical experiment.  In any case it is one in which Piyunta declines to be involved.

           When the vegetable stand down the hill puts out a box of discarded turnip greens, some find their way up the hill.  But most often Piyunta’s tribute comes in the form of cabbage leaves, the outside ones that people do not want to use, but are reluctant to throw away when there is a rabbit available to feed them to.

           This was the case today, or yesterday rather.  a great volume of cabbage found its way into Piyunta’s cage.  and cabbage is a vice our rabbit can not resist, though he knows full well it will give him the runs, as it did this morning - a great and wonderful volume of loose rabbit shit decorated the full range of his cage, even inside his little box domicile which he uses to escape the wind.  Mounds and mountains of shit.

        No small cleanup was required.  First his home and then his butt.  I took over the former, but the latter is something my wife is far better at doing.  It is an operation she pioneered, the rabbit sitzbath.  She fills our bathroom sink with warm water, and sits the rabbit in.  Piyunta manages to retain his dignity, even in this awkward situation.

February 5, 2006   Meat and the line

Leonardo Divinci would eat no animal that had eyes.  The American comedian, Dick Gregory went further and ate nothing but fruit and nuts from the trees.  He would disturb no living thing for his food. 

              It all depends upon where you draw the line.

              Japan used to be a vegetarian country.  It was the law in Edo.  Tsunayoshi, the 5^th Tokugawa shogun, is remembered for imposing a death penalty on anyone who killed a dog.  The people of Nara are famous for waking early; some say it was to check the front of your house for dead deer.  For having one of those holy animals killed could bring the death penalty in Nara.

              Facts like these prove a constant annoyance to vegetarian visiting Japan.  For they can scarcely find anything in a restaurant here that does not have at least a little meat in it. 

              There soba is usually OK, and if you are armed with a guide book and good directions you may also be able to find a tofu restaurant still around in a bigger city.  But most any other local shop seems tainted by meat.  I even found little slices of roast beef on the rotating conveyor of the circle sushi place down the street last week.  Roast beef sushi.  What a world.             

              But the fact that Japan used to be vegetarian is not a fact at all.  One of my friends runs a Sukiyaki shop of some repute in Tokyo.  His family has been in the meat business since Edo.  "Since Edo?" I said.  "How can that be?  Meat was against the law." 

              My friend tipped his head as folks here tend to do when trying to explain such things to a foreigner.

              "Well," he said, "maybe it was not allowed to eat meat as food.  At that time it was sold as a kind of medicine, a kanpo."

              His family's place was just across from the big red gate that is now the entrance to Tokyo University.  In Edo it was the main gate to the estate of the Maida family, the great and famous Kanazawa Daimyo.  He said whenever the Daimyo came out my friend's family would politely cover the meat until the procession had passed.

              Japanese have always eaten birds.  And any elementary student of Japanese language has studied words for counting – ichi dai, ni dai, san dai - one machine, two machines, three machines.  They have a counting word for large animals and for small.  They also have a counting word for birds.  You quickly learn that a rabbit is counted as a bird.

              It all depends upon where you draw the line.  Here they draw it differently than they might back home.  It is a different place.

February 1, 2006 Rainy Night With the Secret Police

I walked through Ueno Park tonight and watched the secret police.  They are not usually so obvious.  But the five o’clock cold rain made loiterers outstanding.  It was funny to see the young ones holding cheep clear plastic umbrellas.

              On another day I might not have noticed all the wires in their ears.  The young ones with black, older ones had gray and clear spiral cords feeding back into their collars, very cool. 

              I looked around and saw the homeless gone.  They have been thinning them out all winter, staking the ground around the ones they remove so others will not move in to replace them.

              But tonight all the homeless were gone.  Things became clear – an imperial visit.  They don't sweep the mountain for a member of the Diet, or even a prime minister.  Only the emperor, or tonight I am guessing it was for his wife, get this service.

              The long car passed, not the imperial black, with the single gold carnation for a license plate, but a serious gray car, back seat fully secreted.  A cop on the corner changed the red light green with a poke of the remote switch on a wire from the box, and the car slid around the corner to the Diet’s Children’s Library.  Children’s books are a pet project of the empress.

              I kept walking.  The rain got worse.  It soaked through my shoes. 

              I have a habit of twirling my umbrella to spin off the rain when no one is near by to get sprayed.  Tonight I spun it a little too hard.  The thin metal shaft broke, leaving me with a sturdy umbrella handle in one hand and a shortened version of the umbrella in the other.  I worried that the broken wooden handle might look threatening to the secret police, but none gave it or me a second look.  Nothing more natural in the park than a white guy with a broken umbrella.

              Passing more police, uniformed and secret, still standing guard, still protecting the empty road, my thoughts returned to the gray limousine.  What a different world for her, for all the limonene riders, but more for the ones that have a police on every corner they pass.  It is a world I can only imagine, one I would never wish to try.  High and low at the same time - a king is just a lion in a cage these days.

              What a funny crossroads is Ueno. Where the richest most elite people in the world nearly rub shoulders with the poorest.  These people that live in the park make their houses of blue plastic hung over ropes stretched between trees, like boy scouts.  They use broken umbrella handles for tent stakes. They cook their food in old pots found discarded in the street.

              In this park they mix with professors and tourists come to view the museums, with young mothers and their kids come to see the zoo, with emperors and presidents here for speeching.

              What a strange and wonderful place this is.

January16, 2006 for the New Year

My favorite place in the world is in front of my house. On the roji watching the evening sky.  Sip a beer; speak to neighbors as they pass. The moon and the stars never still.  Upstairs my kids watch TV.  They used to come out and play.  My wife at the kotatsu, telephone in her ear..

No room for a husband in a Japanese house.

My place is outside. 

In the spring my house will be smashed to pieces, put on dusty trucks, burned.  The land sold to strangers that do not know what I did here, as I did not know when I came.

Who knows my future? One thing I have decided.  I will take this moon with me when I go.

October 13, 2005 time for a haircut
My last exhibition started this hot sticky September 23 and ended October 10th.  Tokyo has managed to find autumn now.
    What did I find?  I met some old friends and made a few new ones.  Sold a few paintings, and enough books and postcards to pay for the tea.
    Making an exhibition in Tokyo is a little like staging a two and a half week long wedding reception - smiling and shaking hands, meeting and greeting -  the artist in a fish bowl where most artists, ironically enough, prefer not to be.
    When Hemmingway finished a novel he went out and got a haircut.  Mine was only an exhibition, but I treated myself to a haircut today just the same.
    Tomorrow is a new day.
 

January 24, 2005 not japanese
Takamura Kotaro wrote an essay about being Japanese. (Green Sun, 1910)   He wrote that he was Japanese but was not conscious of it every second of his day, in the way a fish is not conscious of being wet.  He wrote this when Japan was empire building.  There was obviously pressure to create  a national esthetic.  He was rebelling against it.  He was fresh back from his foreign adventures.   He disliked that paintings were being judged by their Japaneseness rather than by the honesty of their vision.
     He also wrote that although the fish is not conscious of being wet, sill it is wet, as Kotaro was Japanese, this would show itself in his art, naturally, and again stressed this had nothing to do with the quality of the art.
   Probably having nothing to do with any of this is the fact that my favorite of Kotaro's sculptures is a small catfish carved from wood, now residing in the National Museum in Ueno.

I am a painter in Japan using Japanese ink and Japanese paper and Japanese brushes.  Many times local people say to me, "Jim, you are more  Japanese than I am!"  It is the local person being polite.  It is meant as a compliment,  but we both know I am not.  I do not pretend to be Japanese,
nor do I wish to be.  In the words of a great American, "I am what I am."

Kotaro was Japanese, the son of a famous Japanese artist born of the Edo Era. His father was the most talented sculptor of wooden Buddhist figures at a time in Japan when no one wanted Buddhist figures.  People were burning them.  Kotaro's father had to support his family by carving decorative fans and umbrella handles to sell to the tourists.

I am an artist from New York..  If a Japanese artist came to New York  in two or three years the artist would be a New York artist.  It is natural.  Most every artist in New York came from somewhere else.  Ethnic background is used as a selling point in the galleries.  But come on, all artists working in New York are New York artists.

If I survived for 100 more years in Tokyo, and painted every day, I would never be accepted as a Japanese artist.  Like Takamura's fish, I would still be wet.

January 25th, 2005 half way
Maybe your fault is in going only half the way.  Kotaro took his trip to New York and to London, and finally to his beloved Rodin's Paris.  Then he jumped on a boat and headed back for Japan.

Jim, you are still sitting in Tokyo.
 

1999, Ink Painting in Japan

I met a Bulgarian man outside a beer shop down the street from my house.    He had just come to Japan having won an international prize.  It was a scholarship prize to study at The Japanese National University of Fine Arts in Tokyo.  The Bulgarian man was afraid.  His intention was to study ink painting, an ambitious plan.

Black ink brush painting on Japanese paper has been the highest form of artistic expression here for over 1000 years.  It is not traditional painting.  It is high classical art.  Ink painting is entwined with literature and with Zen Buddhism, so close to the Japanese esthetic heart.

He knew that Japanese are masters of the brush.  Even as small children beginning school they learn to manipulate a brush to form the characters that make up their language.

How could he, an outsider from Bulgaria, ever hope to catch up let alone compete at this the most competitive art University in Japan?

I sometimes ask my Japanese friends to guess how many students are studying ink painting at the National Fine Arts University.  They know it is an exclusive school, so they guess low ? 25?  50?  100?

 I have to tell them that there is only one.  It surprises them, but not as much as finding out that one student is from Bulgaria.

 The sad fact is that very few people care about sumi ink painting in Japan anymore.  The young people and the art community are more into oils, or other more contemporary things.  If the universities want to act Japanese they teach nihonga, a tempera paint that came into fashion before the war as a Japanese alternative to Western art, to assert the national character, but ended up looking very much like the oil painting it was trying to combat.

 Even my Bulgarian friend gave up.  After a year of attempting to learn ink painting he too turned to nihonga.  When his scholarship ran out he went back to Bulgaria and to printmaking.

 It used to surprise me that the young Japanese people that come to my exhibition almost always say, “This is the first time I have seen an exhibition of sumi ink painting.”

At the end of a lecture I gave in Tokyo last month a lady stood up with a question.  I had concluded my lecture by doing a large ink painting, to demonstrate the tools and techniques.The woman had the look of a painting teacher.  She prefaced her question by saying my painting looked very western to her and wondered if Americans would have the same reaction to it.

I studied western materials and techniques for fifteen years before coming to Japan.  I would hope a person with a traditional eye would notice something different about my painting.  But it was hard for me to answer her question.

Here in Japan there is a history of ink painting.   Japanese are introduced to ink and brush in school as part of their basic education.  Although few may understand very much about ink painting, most are wise enough to keep their mouth shut when confronted by it in a formal situation.

 Americans are not afraid to speak.  Nor do they seem at all embarrassed by the depth of their ignorance on the subject.

I recalled the words of a Japanese friend returning from making his first exhibition in New York - “I have found more people in America that can understand the math behind the Superstring Theory than can understand how to look at an ink painting.”

This form of painting had been around for a thousand years before oil paints were invented.  It is the principal painting history of a billion Chinese, and of hundreds of millions of Japanese and Koreans.  In our Eurocentric world most Americans are not exposed to it.

Most Americans have no point of reference, other than a possible visit to a Chinese gift shop.  Most can not name, or even recognize the name of one Japanese, or Chinese painter.

What would most American’s reaction be to the ink painting I had just completed?  “It is very hard to say,”  I answered.

The next question I got was, “Why do you like ink painting?”

This was easier.  I said, “I love ink painting because it is new and because it is alive.”

Most of the people in the audience tilted their heads to one side in confusion.  For Japanese ink painting can be a dusty thing - old scrolls at their grandfather’s house, a required trip to a museum in elementary school.

Americans understand the newness of it.  It was the advantage of a Eurocentric education - it kept ink painting new.  It was a whole new world of materials and techniques to explore and discover.

Beyond the techniques are visual concepts that unfold - a new language of perspective and space and balance.   A whole new iconography is involved.

Everything about ink painting was new, and every new discovery led to another.  One of the most exciting was that ink painting felt good.  I discovered that ink painting fit my hands.   It is a deeply sensitive and flexible medium, capable of great expression in our modern world as it was in the past.