Kyoto living

Among the many blessings of my life in Kyoto, my friendship with Judith Clancy, author of Exploring Kyoto is definitely quite high on the list. Aside from the pleasure of her company, her enthusiasm for life and all that it offers has given her a knowledge base that she willingly and readily shares. No matter what I’ve wanted to do, who I’ve wanted to meet or where I’ve wanted to go, Judith always knows the best and most enjoyable way to get there, who I should see and when would be the best time to go.

Having lived in Kyoto since 1970, Judith eagerly embraced the culture, studying a wide range of Japanese arts. And over the years, she’s become certified in Tea ceremony and well-practiced in the art of ikebana as well as interpretor for a number of international culture groups and translator for several books on Japanese textiles.

All of this knowledge and love for Japanese culture and the city of Kyoto has been distilled into a wonderful Kyoto City guidebook called Exploring Kyoto — on foot in the ancient capital. With the recent release of it’s third printing, the book has been newly revised and updated throughout. Exploring Kyoto will not only provide its readers with a walking guide through Kyoto’s streets and neighborhoods but also guide the reader through the exotic history of one of Asia’s most ancient cities. A quick peek at the reviews on Amazon will show you that it’s also the guide that even we Kyoto residents buy and use.

As an avid traveler herself, Judith can truly appreciate the finer points of tourism — those little details that make traveling a joy instead of a hassle — and she brings that perspective to bear in operating Kyoto Workshops, her own Kyoto-based tour business. Always mindful of the varying needs and interests of her clients, she has successfully arranged personalized tours for a wide range of tastes — Chinese dignitaries, martial arts enthusiasts, and art conoisseurs to name a few.

When not busy guiding private tours or writing her next book on Kyoto restaurants, Judith makes herself at home in an old Nishijin weaver’s studio that she remodeled into a beautiful home nestled in a tiny back alley near Myorenji Temple. Preserving the high beamed ceilings of the weaving studio but installing heated flooring to protect against the cold damp of Kyoto winters, she has turned her home into a perfect backdrop not only for her fabulous art collection but also her exquisite flower arrangements, both of which she changes constantly to reflect the season in perfect Kyoto style.

June is the month of Ajisai and their blooms just fill the city everywhere. My grandmother called them “hydrangea”, but that name never seemed to capture their elegance or soft femininity. So I tend to use their Japanese name ajisai (aah-gee-sigh), a softer sound that invokes the warm sighs of a languid summer day. I love the deep purples, rich blues and cherry pinks, the big round pompoms and the disk-like shapes that flower only at the edges.

On a June day the flowers are everywhere — they light my path as I bike around the city. Tall bushes spill their blooms over temple walls. Small bushes of cherry pink that sit at my neighbor’s door step or poke through the chain link fence at the school playground.

Beauty blooms on the street corner in front of the bank and along the edges of the canal by Philosopher’s Path, giving delight to all those passing whether they stop for momentary enjoyment or just savor a quick glance while continuing on their run.

Cherry blossom time may have world-wide fame, but in truth, Kyoto is a city in love with its flowers throughout the whole year round.

Recently my friend and ikebana mentor Kazuko Nishikawa was invited to arrange flowers for an exhibition of maiko kimono at the Some Museum (Museum of Dyed Textiles). Maiko are apprentice geisha and their elaborate kimono are much more ornate and theatrical than those worn by the average Japanese woman. As befitting a young woman, the kimono are furisode style with long sleeves. And as shown at the picture at bottom, the obi also has long trailing ends instead of the more common flat square knot worn by married women.

Since maiko are apprentices and have not yet developed the range of social skills

exercised by fully trained geisha, their duties mostly involve music and dance performances, which accounts for the colorful theatrical style of their kimono.

Maiko kimono are of course frequently decorated with brightly colored flowers and butterflies, but literary motifs are also common as are symbols of a traditional lifestyle. The blue kimono above features decorated clam shells, representing the kai awase game that was popular during the Heian era in the 11th century. Similar to the card game “Concentration”, the game used sets of clamshells rather than cards. Matching scenes were painted on the interior surfaces of each pair of shells, while the exterior surfaces were polished to a smooth blank, making hard to recognize which pairs would go together when all of the clamshells were placed with the painted side down. Some of the older sets contained as many as 360 pairs of shells, though simplified sets of 54 pairs based on scenes from Tale of Genji later became popular.

There are about 100 to 150 maiko in Kyoto. Most live and work in the Gion or Ponto-cho areas on the east side of town. They are considered professional entertainers and tourists flock to the area to glimpse a “geisha”, just as Hollywood tourists might hope to see a movie star. Maiko dance movements are highly stylized and use the long flowing sleeves to add a graceful flutter. The dance often represents a poem or enacts a literary scene. Click here to view a brief performance.

May is the season of shin-cha or “new tea”, when tender spring leaves are harvested to make tea. And somewhere up in the hills in the southeast of Kyoto prefecture lies the tiny village of Wazuka surrounded by emerald green tea fields. Since tea is one of the quintessential experiences of Japan, the Kyoto Prefectural International Center sponsored a tea-picking tour for foreigners last Saturday. It was a great chance for a whole bus load of us to get away from the city for a day and enjoy the rolling countryside. Most of my fellow tea-pickers were foreign students studying at one of the many universities in Kyoto. From Taiwan and Lithuania, Thailand and Ireland, the Ukraine, Italy and a long list of more places than I can now remember, the two hour ride itself was an experience in internationalism.

For a few of our group, there was the chance to don the traditional fieldworker’s garb made from wonderful indigo-dyed ikat cottons with layers of aprons and scarves and fingerless gloves in bright turquoise. With fewer outfits available than the number of people who wanted to wear them, we played several rounds jyunken (similar to the game of “rock-paper-scissors” played in the US) to whittle that number down. Sadly, I was knocked out in the first round, but one of my friends Kiyomi Yatsuhashi (shown above) was lucky enough to be among the chosen. Only the top two or three leaves of new growth are picked and dropped into the wicker basket at her side.

Even without the delights of the costume, there was a relaxing beauty of being in the tea field. Looking up the hillside, rows of tea bushes criss-cross the slope and electric fans gently whizz away any low-lying fog. Some of the bushes are shielded from sunlight with a loosely stitched mesh of vinyl ribbons. The covered bushes produce a lighter sweeter and more delicate tea, while tea from the exposed bushes is stronger and more astringent.

Sadly our rain-shortened venture into the fields produced only meager tea pickings, but these were battered and fried, then served as tea-leaf tempura with our lunch.

And a little P.S. on 5/17: One of the others on our trip just sent me this photo of the eight lucky people who won the chance to dress up in traditional tea-pickers clothing:
On the far right are my friends, Kiyomi Yatsuhashi and Moya Bligh. Third from the right is Aliona Yefimova from Lithuania, who gave me this picture.

Kyoto abounds with wonderful textile traditions that have been skillfully blended to create treasures like the 19th century kimono shown above, where the subtle use of dyes have created a wispy cloud-like texture as the background for this fabulous embroidered garden. In its day, such a kimono was probably worn by a lady-in-waiting of the imperial court, but is now the property of Kyoto National Museum.

Smaller exhibitions of embroidery shown at Shishu-Yakata, The Embroidery Museum and School of Kyoto include both modern and historical pieces. A 40-minute course in Japanese-style hand embroidery is offered at a nominal fee. The museum school also offer classes in making a Japanese pastry called Yatsuhachi-an, a fresh rice flour dough filled with sweetened bean paste.

The classical Japanese embroidery used to decorate kimono worn by members of the imperial court was adapted from techniques that spread from China and Korea some 12 to 13 hundred years ago and requires the mastery of approximately 46 different stitches or stitch combinations. These elegant embroideries are generally stitched with a fine silk filament on silk or a fine linen-like ramie and featuring birds, flowers or scenes from poetry or classical literature.

Of course, there are also many other wonderful Japanese embroidery traditions such as sashiko and kogen that were used by farmers and fisherman to repair, reinforce or pad their clothing. These clothes were often made of coarse indigo-dyed hemp fabrics and stitched with a sturdy white thread, creating a special rustic beauty all their own. But I’ll save a discussion of that for another post.

Cherry blossom time is such a special season in Japan, I’m glad to have gotten home in time to enjoy it. The trees in the park near my home, and indeed all over the city, seem to suddenly burst with blooms and everywhere there are picnics with happy people enjoying the advent of spring. It is good to be home after my travels.And where, you might ask, have I been? Where else but the American Embroidery Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, of course.

After a year of anticipation and months of preparation, I spent last week seeing old friends and making new ones at the annual AEC. And what a conference it was, with tons of opportunities to learn from each other and from the marvelous line up of teachers organized by Dianne Pomeroy, the AEC conference coordinator.I studied Embird Studio with Amy Webster, multi-hooping with Jeannie Miller, problem solving with Terri Hanson, embroidered a shawl under the guidance of Santi from Hatched in Africa, and was inspired to achieve greater heights of style by Bobbi Bullard and Sue Lord.

At left, is my own little fashion show entry — a denim kimono. Made with white denim trimmed with a printed polyester, it features multiple repeats of a snowy egret motif that I digitized myself and was gratified that my effort received lots of nice attention from my fellow conference partcipants. Since white on white embroidery can be a bit hard to see from the runway, a closer view of the motif is shown at right below.

And now that the conference is over, it’s already time to start anticipating next year! Since Dianne makes a habit of out-doing herself each year, who knows what amazing classes will be in store for us in 2009. And in the meantime, I’ll take everything I’ve learned and every bit of inspiration I’ve gained from the 2008 conference and see how far I can go during the year to come.

There was a bright glow in my bedroom when I opened my eyes this morning. That light and the particularly cold nip in the air told me before I even looked out the window that it had snowed during the night. At left you can see the snapshot I took from my upstairs window. Snow covered the tiled roof of my house and dusted the camelia trees of the temple across the street.

We don’t get a lot of snow in Kyoto — a fact for which, my little California soul is quite grateful. But the lovely gracefulness of Kyoto sites become all the more glorious with a gentle touch of winter white. Below is a picture of Kinkakuji, the famed Golden Pavilion of Kyoto. On a normal day, its just a 15 to 20 minute bike ride from my house.

Of course, snow makes that ride just a little bit more challenging.

So maybe it’s just a very, very good day to stay inside with my sewing machine.

For over a thousand years, Kyoto has been the textile capital of Japan and my house in Kyoto is on the edge of Nishijin, the silk weaving district of old Kyoto. Although the number of weaving families has diminished, there are still places where I can still hear the thumping of the heddles and slap, slap of the weaving shuttle sliding back and forth across the loom as I bike around the narrow back streets of my neighborhood. The Nishijin style of weaving uses yarn dyeing, in which yarns of various colors are woven into intricate patterns. This technique is both time-consuming and labor intensive compared to other styles of weaving, but it is indispensable for creating the elaborate designs required for kimono fabric. Despite considerable evolution of kimono styles throughout the ages, Nishijin has remained a major production center for high quality textiles.

Silk cultivation is thought to have spread from China through Korea and finally down to Japan during the Yamato period about 1500 to 1800 years ago. The earliest kimono developed at that time but were generally a plain woven white, since silk dyeing techniques were not developed until the later Nara period. By the Heian era when the Japanese capital was moved from Nara to Kyoto around 1200 years ago, silk weaving had evolved to a highly complex art catering to the tastes of a sophisticated aristocracy. The most intricate of Heian era kimono could have as many as twenty layers of fabric. Although this type of kimono, called a “juni-hito” or twelve-layer, has disappeared from common use, it is still used for the most ultra-formal of ceremonies such as the wedding of Masako-sama to Crown Prince Naruhito in 1993.

As kimono styles simplified, the range of fabrics increased. Major development in textiles came in the 16th century, when Japan saw imports of new patterned silks, damasks (donsu), figured satins, woven silk stripes (kanto), rich, heavy brocades interwoven with gold or silver leaf laminated onto washi then cut into thread-like slivers(kinran and ginran), new patterned silk gauzes (ro and sha) and light silk crepe (chirimen) from China and cotton calico (sarasa) from India. By the end of the 16th century, Japanese weavers began to imitate these styles, producing their own distinct variations. The range of these weaves in combination with a variety of surface design techniques ranging from brush-dyeing to intricate embroideries has made Japanese textiles among the most treasured fabrics in the world.

Here in Japan, the lunar new year is preceded by setsubun, a minor holiday marking the division of seasons and announcing the start of the lunar year. But unlike the major celebrations currently on-going in China and other parts of mainland Asia, the Japanese setsubun is a relatively simple holiday filled with bean-throwing, maki-sushi eating and a wee bit of merry-making.

“Bean-throwing?” you might ask. Yes, the tradition on this day is to stand in front of your doorway and thow handfuls of dried soybeans towards the northeast while chanting: “Oni wa Soto; Fuku wa Uchi”, which is generally translated “Demons get out; Good luck come in.” Then family members each eat a serving of beans equivalent to their age plus one for good luck. That is, a 5-year-old should eat 6 beans and a 60-year-old should eat 61. Children, of course, make more of a game of it — dressing in oni masks and pelting each other with candied beans. Though devilish in appearance, oni seem to be more like mischievous poltergeists.

Local Shinto shrines also participate in ritual bean-throwing. This picture was taken at Shiramine shrine, where shrine maidens, celebrities and politicians tossed beans from the walkway surrounding the main shrine. The tradition was apparently imported from China about 750~800 years ago, but originally rice was thrown as an act of purification. Later soy beans were used, since beans were thought to be better able to blind any malevalent attacking spirit, driving it away. Other protective traditions include placing a holly leaf and a dried sardine head on the gate post outside one’s home, as the sharp prickly spines of the leaf and the dried fish odor are also thought to drive away oni.

So now that 2008 is well and truly here and all the new year’s parties are over, I guess there’s nothing left to do but get on with the year and see what kind of luck 2008 will actually bring.

Monday was my first day back at work after a lovely long week of relaxing my way into the new year.

After days and days of preparations, the new year began with the bells at the Buddhist temples across the city tolling at midnight, 108 times for the 108 delusions that affect humankind. Many people stay up till dawn to see the first day break of the new year, some even hike up the hills surrounding Kyoto to view dawn from a mountain top. And then comes family time. New Year’s is a family holiday in Japan. I’ve been told that at breakfast on New Year’s day, many families have a ritual of thanking each member for what they have contributed to the family in the previous year.

First prayers of the New Year are also significant. A visit to one of the many shrines and temples is often the first outing of the New Year. Fushimi Inari with its famous pathway under a succession of orange torii gates is a favorite site for New Year’s visitors as shown by the sea of people crowding the path in the photo above. During the New Year’s holiday, several million people visit Fushimi Inari. While there, people write their hopes and wishes on small decorative wooden plaques called ema, shown at right. Being an inari shrine, many of the wooden placques are shaped like a fox head, since foxes are regarded as a spiritual messenger of Inari. But for New Year’s, each shrine will issue a limited edition of holiday ema featuring the animal that represents the new year, for 2008 a mouse, and some image that reflects the shrine, in this case the path of torii gates. Each shrine offers their own special ema and often they become collectors items.

For those who practice Chado, the way of tea, another important “first” is hatsugama or “first kettle”. One of the most colorful and festive of Tea ceremonies, it is a time for using the most auspiciously decorated tea bowls, tea kettles, and other tools to create an elegant and welcoming celebration of the New Year. The lobster design on the cup at right serves as an indication of the luxurious sentiment that accompanies the first Tea of the New Year. Guests will dress in their finest kimono and the tea master will prepare the most elegant foods to accompany the Tea drinking.

Of course, there are also many many gatherings that are less formal than Tea. Called shinnenkai (New Year ‘meetings’), they represent the first time friends get together in the New Year and will continue to take place throughout the month as people re-new and re-fresh contact with various circles of friends, colleagues and associates.

But for now, as we come to the end of the first week of the new year, we arrive at kotohajime, the first day of work. For me, that was January 7th.