Pursuing colour to the end

In a dim gallery of a museum of modern art, a year is on display.

 There are the wind chimes and bellflowers of summer, ears of autumn rice and the first snows of winter, the culmination of an exhibition that begins with the flowers of spring.

 But it’s not bells, grain and ice that have been arranged behind museum glass. Filling the cases like so many paintings are kimonos woven by an 88-year-old artist honoured by the Japanese government as a Living National Treasure. The pieces at the Museum of Modern Art in Shiga, the prefecture just east of Kyoto, are not still life works. The kimono titled Wind Bells has clusters of little purple lines scored into a white base: not pictures of wind chimes but their pinging transcribed.

 Artist Fukumi Shimura does not depict life; she suggests it.

 It has taken centuries for kimonos created through tsumugi weaving – Shimura’s speciality – to be recognised as art. Broadly speaking, kimonos can be divided into two kinds: those woven from threads that have already been dyed and those where patterns are dyed into white fabric. Most of the kimonos worn today belong to the latter kind.

 With their simple checks and stripes and woven from empty or deformed silkworm cocoons, tsumugi has long been seen as the poor country cousin of the kimono world.   

 But building fabric thread by thread can create a depth and gradation of colour impossible in dyed cloth.

 

 Tsumugi weaving depends heavily on the threads; Shimura uses those dyed at her own workshop in Kyoto. Her colours come not from mixing chemicals but from boiling plants such as gardenia – the fruit gives a bright yellow and – onion skin, which yields oranges and browns.

 ‘In every plant is a pure colour,’ Shimura said on The Professionals, an NHK documentary series which featured her in May.

 But behind the serenity of many of her works is a life with more than the usual share of turbulence.

 Born in Shiga, Shimura was sent away as a baby to relatives in Tokyo who raised her. At the age of 16, she visited her real parents’ home, discovering there an old loom. It belonged to her mother Toyo, who had been inspired by a folk craft movement but shelved her ambitions to support her husband’s work.

 She became Shimura’s first weaving teacher. Another family member proved to be a great influence: a brother five years older whom she became deeply attached to. Motoe wanted to become a painter but collapsed from tuberculosis after the war.

 Shimura still remembers what he painted as he was dying, works flooded with a brilliant, burning red. ‘I wasn’t thinking of weaving as a career then,’ she said in the NHK feature. ‘But those colours sank into me.’

 It was as if he was trying to do as much as he could in whatever time was left, she said. And the time he had left was little: Motoe died not long after his collapse at the age of 27.

 For a while, Shimura managed to lead a normal life, becoming a housewife in Tokyo. But upheaval returned when she found out about her husband’s infidelity and divorced him. She now had to work – she had two young daughters to support – but what could she do?

 She remembered the loom in her mother’s house: she would weave kimonos for a living.

 Her decision met a chorus of disapproval from her relatives. She had no training, no experience, they said, calling her an irresponsible parent.   

 She did it anyway, leaving her daughters in Tokyo and returning to the west of the country, to her mother in Shiga, where she began her training in earnest at the age of 31.

 Shimura readily acknowledges the enormity of her decision to go without her children, calling it a great crime, a deep sin.

 The first few years were difficult: the pieces she wove did not sell. She remembers the guilt she felt then, a mother who had not only left her children but could not even afford to send them sweets.  

 She pushed on anyway and gradually recognition – and buyers – began to trickle in.

 With a career of almost 60 years behind her, Shimura still shows every sign of being a woman fascinated by her work.

 ‘The best colours,’ she said, ‘are those that cannot be said to be colours at all.’ For her, indigo is not just a dark blue but something that impresses upon you the depth of life.

 Dyes have been extracted from plants for more than a thousand years in Japan, with indigo regarded as one of the hardest to handle. The dye comes not from boiling the plant but by fermenting it in a large vat. The temperature has to be taken every day and adjustments made. About a week later, if fermentation is progressing, a flower-like froth will appear.

 Shimura began working with indigo 45 years ago but it was only when her daughter Yoko, now also a superb textile artist, began to help that she managed to achieve a stable colour.

 She compares the process to bringing up a child. If the indigo is raised properly, it will reward its parent with a deep blue.

 Like humans, the vat of indigo has a lifespan. After about two months, the froth will disappear and the indigo will die. But just before it does, it will yield a particular shade known as kame nozoki – a glimpse of the vat.

 Shimura describes it as a light, clear blue, the afternoon sky after a shower. But even after almost half a century, she does not think that she has achieved it.

 ‘Colours I’ve never seen before – that’s what I search for,’ she said.

 So now even as she approaches 90 and regardless of the honours she has already won, Fukumi Shimura is still searching for what eludes her, for the colour granted only at the end of life.

An indigo-based kimono titled Autumn Moon (秋月) at Gallery Fukumi Shimura in Kyoto.

In praise of shadows

I heard cicadas for the first time this year last night - there's no turning back from summer now.

There will be compensations for the heat of course: festivals, sugared ice, yukata, wind chimes. But nothing so welcome as shadows and dark woods.

Rain flowers

28th May 2013

The rainy season has reached Kyoto, beginning the annual drenching 11 days earlier than usual.

But someone gave me a pot of hydrangeas - flowers of the season - just before tsuyu arrived. They seemed happy in the rain.

Spring in Joyo

The ume was late this year but it's bloomed at last.



And in the hills of Joyo, a city between Kyoto and Nara, the annual ume festival went on as planned. There were lots of picnics.



And lots of cameras.



But there were also lots of plum flowers, more than enough to go round.







And on the way back, I found more flowers in the road.

The last of last year's magic

The key to successful spring cleaning: demon removal.

By the reckoning of an East Asian calendar, the first day of spring comes in early February. This year, it falls on Feb 4. The day before – called Setsubun in Japan – serves as a kind of New Year’s Eve. To prepare for the incoming year, people purify their homes by throwing roasted soya beans out of the door. In some households, one person will don a demon’s mask and be pelted with beans, driven off in a symbolic cleansing.

Shrines and temples have their own rituals, with the one at Rozan-ji in Kyoto among the more well-known. The highlight of the event: oni odori – the demon dance.

A small temple beside the grounds of the imperial palace, Rozan-ji is quiet for most of the year. But on the afternoon of Feb 3, the courtyard is packed with visitors waiting for demons.

A man in the temple’s main hall begins to pound an enormous drum. Smoke rises in the distance as a red demon slowly comes into view. With a sword in one hand and a burning bundle of wood in the other, it lumbers onto the walkway leading to the temple hall. Two more demons follow – a green oni with an axe and a black one bearing a sledgehammer.

Armed and ungainly, they move by lifting their hefty legs high and stamping down in a move that should shake the earth. Now and then, they stop to glower around them, thrusting their horned heads at the crowd.

Nobody throws any beans because everyone’s too busy taking photos.

The demons invade the main hall, where monks are chanting, led by an elderly priest dressed all in white. Prancing around him, the oni menace the people there. A child among the rows of visitors starts to cry.



Outside, in the sunlight, the oni seem a little comical – men in padded suits and tiger-print loincloths. But in the dark of the hall, their horns glinting in the firelight, the oni look like the demons they are meant to be.

They disappear inside the temple; the monks keep up the chanting.

After a few minutes of this, a woman speaks over the public announcement system. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the demons will be running away shortly. The demons will be running away shortly. The bean-throwing will commence after the demons have run away.’

Two men lift conch shell horns to their lips and blow, the blasts like the lowing of demonic cattle.

And the demons burst out from behind a screen into the main hall, staggering about without their
weapons.

The chanting must have worked.

At Rozan-ji, the oni represent three things said to bedevil humanity: ignorance, desire and hatred. To drive the oni away is to express the hope that people will rid themselves of the demons riding their backs, the weights holding them back from a new life in the new year.

The defeated oni have fled outside into the crowd. But there, the purpose of the ritual seems to have been ignored in favour of a jollier one. People smile up at the demons, trying to touch them. The oni too have gone out of character, posing for photos with visitors. As he passes a little girl, the red demon pats her on the head.

Others in the crowd are already getting ready for the next event: bean-throwing. A mother shows her young daughter how to turn a plastic bag into a makeshift net. They practise holding their bags up.

The monks file outside with trays of rice cakes and roasted soya beans, covered with sugar in the auspicious colours of red and white. To catch and eat one is said to bring good fortune in the new year.

Smiling, the monks fling handfuls of beans and cakes into the crowd, who angle hats, plastic bags, rucksacks or just their bare hands in a frantic effort to catch them. A young monk at one corner tosses the beans as he is supposed to – then slips a few into the hands of nearby children.

For those who don’t manage to catch anything, there’s always the option of the temple shop, which sells the beans in bags decorated with a paper demon mask.

But the spring cleaning isn’t complete till the final event of the day. Visitors have not just come to see demons expelled; they’ve also brought the paper fortunes, charms and amulets that they’ve received at shrines and temples over the past year. These have to be disposed of in the proper manner.

The visitors leave them outside in a heap surrounded by sacred rope and strips of white paper. At 5pm, two monks put their hands together and chant over the stack. Ceremoniously, they set fire to the lot.

A few people watching them draw closer to the blaze.

Today may be the last day of winter but it still turns dark before 6pm, the temperature plunging to around zero.

We warm ourselves by the fire as the last of last year’s magic is burned away to make room for the new.

Though the trees are still bare and the days cold, tomorrow it will be spring.

Hatsu mochi

明けましておめでとうございます。本年もよろしくお願いいたします。

My first meal of 2013 - done in the auspicious red and white. Though I don't think the ancients had this combination in mind.

Merii Kurimasu

The graveyard look

Konkai Komyo-ji isn't a temple so much as a sprawling temple complex. I found this in one corner of the grounds.

When the light hits at just the right angle, the leaves turn into lanterns.

Many of the famous momiji spots in Kyoto are in temples, so going to view the autumn leaves will probably take you to a cemetery at some point.

Here are a few interesting faces from the Konkai Komyo-ji graveyards.

Giant turtle.

Shy statue.

Withered tree stump. Signs of life inside?

Gold as good as red

For much of the year, Renge-ji, a small temple in the north of Kyoto, is quiet - a good place to think while enjoying views of an Edo-period garden.

In autumn though, the place is flooded with visitors. Here's why.

To get there, take the Yase Hieizanguchi-bound train on the Eizan line and get off at Miyake Hachiman station. Cross the river and turn right. The walk to Renge-ji takes about 10 minutes.

On the way there, I thought about asking a girl pushing a bike beside me for directions. Before I could, I heard her asking someone else for directions.

A narrow gravel path leading off the main road will take you to the temple. The leaves were bursting out over the walls.

Renge-ji is probably best known for its garden views, which fill two walls of the main hall.

But there was much to see elsewhere.

Not all the maple leaves had turned red. Some were still gold.

Others had darkened to orange.

One last look up before leaving.

Red leaf season

Spent today showing visitors around Ohara village. Hosen-in was our first stop.

Our second was Sanzen-in nearby. This is the view that greets you when you leave one of the toilets.

But some of the nicest things we saw were found along the way.

Umbrella and chrysanthemums outside a souvenir shop.

On the road back to the bus-stop and the city.

100 poems for the ages

Autumn comes from the north. The leaves in Kyoto won’t turn for a few more weeks but in the colder reaches of the country, they are already red.

Should you find yourself in a place where the maples are bright, and a river flows beneath, look in the water.

The gods have had
their wonders but
not even they knew
the crimson coursing
through the Tatsutagawa
when autumn
tumbles
in.

This image of a river red with maple leaves has passed through the ages in a poetry collection that took shape around 1235. Known as the Hyakunin Isshu – 100 poets, one poem – the anthology is precisely that: 100 poets each contributing a poem.

Covering more than 500 years of Japanese poetry, the work influenced composition even into the 19th century and is still the most famous verse collection in the country. Yet no one can say for sure why the compiler picked the poems he did.

Born 850 years ago into an aristocratic family, Fujiwara no Teika distinguished himself not only as a poet but also as an editor and literary critic. He could be stubborn when it came to poetry; he was known to go head to head with his patron Go-Toba, the retired emperor who controlled the court through boy rulers.

Teika put together a number of anthologies, most of which were meant to be used as poetry textbooks. The Hyakunin Isshu, though, is a private collection. At a relative’s request, he chose poems to be written on decorative paper that was fixed to doors in a mountain villa.

Teika was 74 when he began compiling the Hyakunin Isshu. He would live until the age of 80: a rare achievement at a time when it was common to die before turning 40.

But the poems dealing with old age suggest that longevity was not an unmixed blessing. They speak of gazing out into the long rains, wondering if the years have been spent in vain, and of a life where no one comes, visitors dried up like grass in winter.

Who is left who
still knows me?
The Takasago pines too
are old but I cannot
call them friend.

Teika’s life also coincided with the waning years of the imperial court. About 15 years before he started work on the Hyakunin Isshu, the ruler he served tried to wrest power back from the samurai government on the other side of the country. In the civil war that followed, the imperial forces were routed. Teika’s lord, Go-Toba, was exiled and the court sank even deeper under shogunate control.

Go-Toba, the 99th poet represented in the Hyakunin Isshu, lived in turbulent times but the five centuries of poets before him also knew upheaval. In the background of the collection lie shipwreck, exile, forced abdications and assassination.

Yet all this is merely hinted at in the anthology, which prefers to make art from everyday experiences – snow falling on sleeves, perhaps, or a lover who breaks his word.

The universality of the poems also masks the fact that they represent only a tiny section at the top of Japanese society. There are eight works by emperors and 10 by direct descendants of emperors. Thirty-four of the 100 poets are close relatives, while 28 come from the Fujiwara house – Teika’s clan, which dominated the court.

This aristocratic collection has somehow managed to attain and maintain mass appeal. The poems inspired the creation of a card game in the 17th century, prints by generations of woodblock artists and, more recently, a manga series. An anime based on this ended its run on Japanese television just last month.

The subject matter of the poems may help to explain their popularity: almost half have to do with love.

Now that what was kindled
inside blazes,
may I not tell you?
I am no Ibuki herb
to be set alight,
and yet I burn.

Long-dead aristocrats are not so distant if they have also been tossed through the cycle of longing: attraction, trepidation, the moment when you declare yourself, fear that vows of constancy won’t last, and bitterness when they don’t.

So it matters little that few today know that Ibuki herbs refer to mugwort, burned in moxibustion therapy. Even fewer have heard of the nobleman behind the collection’s 16th poem, something he composed, a promise he made, before leaving the capital to take up a post in the provinces.

Almost everyone knows something of promises so this one has been kept for over a thousand years, a verse of common inheritance.

We must part for
I leave for
Inaba. But there, if
the mountain pines
sigh and it is
your voice I hear,
I shall return
at once.

Illustrated poem cards from the Hyakunin Isshu at the Shigure-den museum in the Arashiyama area of Kyoto. This year marks the 850th anniversary of the birth of the anthology's compiler, poet Fujiwara no Teika.

Summer fires

Fireworks have been part of the Japanese summer for centuries. In the Kyoto area, the Uji Hanabi Taikai, held every year on August 10, is one of the bigger fireworks festivals.

If you want a good view, go early. Three hours before the show starts should do it.

There are stalls selling food and drink if you forgot to bring any. Shaved ice is a must at every summer festival but this was the first time I'd seen such a complicated machine dispensing syrups for the ice.

'Should I have gotten that flavour instead?'

But on with the show!

Some of the fireworks looked like flowers.

Some like things drifting in the wind.

And others like creatures from a strange, dark sea.

Some were in a hurry to go somewhere.

Others just had to, you know, go.

From the finale. This maple tree will be bright when its leaves turn in autumn but on that summer night, it had a little help.

On the move

Just a notice for those who follow the Letter from Kyoto in The Straits Times. The column will be moving from the Opinion pages to the Saturday section with effect from this Saturday (July 21). It will no longer carry the Letter from Kyoto tag but I'll still be there.

If you're in the area, come say hello.

Raining names

Find me a clothes line, hang me up to dry – or I shall throw myself into a tumble dryer.

The rainy season is here. The Japanese call it tsuyu but I call it The Great Damp. Even when the weather’s fine, the air is thick with moisture that seeps into you, into clothes, into bedding, and into the top of my fridge, which has taken up mould farming.

On the days that it storms hard enough to wash angels out of the sky, I stay indoors and read. More often than not, a book about rain and its many names ends up in front of me. Shigure, yudachi, tsuyu, mizore, akisame – I learned a few of them in school; these past few weeks, I’ve been looking for the rest.

There are the names that tell you when, how long and how much. Hijigasa ame – elbow umbrella rain – the one that comes so suddenly you have to shelter yourself with your sleeve while you run for shelter.

Hito shibori – one wring – not long but heavy, as if someone had wrung a rain cloud dry. A close cousin, ippatsu ame – one blast rain – stops almost as soon as it starts.

Then there are the rains named for their shape, named because they look like thread, zeros, cat fur or the shafts in a bamboo forest.

Every now and again, there is kai u – strange rain. Fish, frogs, tadpoles and insects have all apparently splattered down from the heavens, the victims, according to one theory, of whirlwinds or tornadoes that sucked them up into the air.

Not everything can be explained. Not, for instance, soboro ame – random rain – which appears unexpectedly, for no apparent reason. It just sort of – falls.

Another everyday oddity: the rain that comes even when the sun shines. Fox rain is one name for this, probably from folktales of foxes taking on human form to deceive. Another name: rainbow pee.

There are the names that remind you that it’s never just water spilling from the sky; there is always someone at the other end who will be dampened, drenched or delighted. And that someone need not be human.

In spring, there is yuei u – flower pleaser – just as there is mugi kurai: barley devourer. In summer, there is baba odoshi – granny scare – a sudden downpour in the afternoon that sends someone who has left beans or other things out to dry into a panic.

Regardless of season, there is yarazu no ame. It falls hard when a guest or lover is about to leave, and holds them back a little longer.

The rain here comes so close, it pours inside the body. Ji u – ear rain – a ringing in the ears. Kokoro no ame – heart rain – something that covers a heart, and will not let light in.

But the most common rain names are those that show the season. At times, they lead it in. Kan ake no ame – frost end rain – falls around the first day of spring though the rains of this period are still cold, sometimes mixed with snow or ice.

Much warmer is banbutsu jou – all creation – which revives all those that winter left for dead. And when life returns, so does colour: kurenai no ame – crimson rain – is the rain spanning the weeks when flowers of every shade of red – azaleas, rhododendrons, peach – bloom.

The summer entrant aoba ame – green leaf rain – follows, coating leaves so they appear even shinier.

Splitting summer in two is the rainy season – tsuyu. Mukaezuyu – welcoming tsuyu – may go to meet it. It appears before the season begins in earnest, raining on and off for a few days.

There are times when the rains don’t come as expected. Farmers dread the empty tsuyu; its other name: withered tsuyu.

Also feared is abarezuyu: rampaging tsuyu. A deluge that roars down from day to night, it swells rivers until they burst.

A stretch of fine days around the middle of July may lead you to think that the rainy season is over. But sometimes kaerizuyu – returning tsuyu – nips back and keeps the weather wet for another two or three days.

With autumn, the rains grow cold and hawks go south. The rain that comes when they leave: taka watari – hawks crossing.

After they go, the days grow only colder, bringing at times amayuki – rain mixed with snow. Another winter visitor: kazahana, wind flowers. Early in the season, under a clear sky, the wind sometimes snatches up snow and drizzle, tossing them about before letting them fall.

But the days of wind flowers are still far off. It is tsuyu now, The Great Damp, and tomorrow’s forecast is for showers – more time, perhaps, to stay in and read about rains so that when they come, I may greet them by their proper name.

Bite-size poetry

Summer returns with/ mosquitoes. Come back, winter/ all is forgiven.

Daigo of the flowers

The cherry trees of Daigo-ji, a temple in the south-east of Kyoto, have been famous for centuries.

There are about a thousand sakura trees on the grounds of the temple but the weeping cherries are probably the most well known.

The other varieties are worth a look too.

In April 1598, warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi held a flower-viewing party at the temple. Hideyoshi, remembered best for unifying Japan in the 16th century, liked bright colours, gold leaf and things done on a grand scale. His hanami involved 1,300 guests, 700 sakura trees brought in from surrounding areas, tea pavilions built for the occasion and musicians to provide entertainment. On the second Sunday of April, what would be Hideyoshi's last hanami is recreated at Daigo-ji. The man playing Hideyoshi gets to ride in a palanquin (above) borne by attendants in white.

A dance performed for the latter-day Hideyoshi and his entourage.

There was a mock fight too by actors from the Eigamura film park.

And a monk busy taking photos.

The final performance was a dance by girls from a nearby primary school. They had sakura in the patterns of their kimono and in their hands.

One of the dancers.

Her smile looked like this.

One last look before going.