By Stephen Szczepanek of SRI Threads (srithreads.com)

Written on March 25, 2012

Although we don’t need reminding that Japan is beautiful, Amy Katoh has a way of constantly renewing our appreciation of the beauty of Japan.

Rather suddenly, Amy announced that for a period of three weeks she is showing a segment of her marvelous collection of Japanese folk textiles in a still-occupied warehouse in her Tokyo neighborhood.  The backdrop of the warehouse’s unfinished, dark wood interior is a dramatic and inspired foil for her beautifully chosen collection.  Have a look.

On the one year anniversary of the life-shattering day of March 11, 2011, as it grew darker, the form of an indigo shibori glove hanging in the window of Blue & White was projected onto our sign Te, or hand.  This powerful sign was no accident. It was nature’s reminder to us all to go Hand in Hand for the long years of cooperation (teamwork) that lie ahead for Japan to resurrect, restart and rebuild.

Let’s all do our part and never forget our friends / brothers and sisters / in Tohoku.

It’s February again and time to start setting out the dolls for Dolls Day, officially known as O Hina Sama.  When a girl is born into the family, a set of court dolls is displayed on 3 to 5 to 7 steps of rank.  The Emperor and Empress, the ladies in waiting, the court musicians, the ministers and the trays of food, the guards with an orange tree and a cherry tree. 

O Hina sama may be the most beloved celebration of the Japanese year.  All girls have tender memories of their own Hina dolls and the celebration in their family.

With beginnings in the Heian period, between the 9^th and 12^th centuries, when Hina-nagashi, straw and sometimes paper hina dolls were floated down the river in a boat and sent to sea, taking troubles and bad spirits with them.  The dolls protected young girls and kept them safe.  Since then, the custom became increasingly elaborate and luxurious, showing off both the meticulous craftsmanship of the doll makers, the luxury of materials and the wherewithal to have them made.

From the elaborate collections of the Tokugawa family, to the simpler prince and princess of other families, O Hina sama is celebrated in most homes and the 3^rd day of the 3^rd month is decorated with innocent pink  peach blossoms and perky green na no hana/ rape flowers or kohlrabi  and pink and white and green puffed rice and the beloved kompeto, colorful hard candies shaped like jacks or satellites. And sweet white sake. 

O Hina sama arrived at Blue & White last Friday, the extraordinary creation of our Reiko Okunushi and her anything-is-possible fingers.

Masterfully displayed by our resourceful Sayoko Hayasawa, who sees new uses for old objects hanging around at Blue & White waiting to be used:  antique windows become a platform for the royal couples.  Tansu doors replace the hackneyed (dare I say it?) old bleachers covered with red felt that are the usual setting for O Hina sama.

Okunushi san and her husband have been eating clams for months now – a healthy diet, we hope – to save the shells as the base for her princes and princesses.  Her materials are all natural.  Her bright pinks and vivid reds and smashing purples are culled from old children’s kimono, mostly torn or damaged ones that can no longer be worn.

O Hina sama  at Blue & White come in different versions.  This year, shells are the featured style.  Clam shells come as a pair, and no other clam shells fit together in the same way- a fitting analogy to a well suited Prince and Princess or husband and wife.zzzzz

Okunushi san’s stuffed daruma (dolls based on the Indian saint who prayed so long that he lost his legs.  In Japan the thinking is that Daruma is knocked over 7 times, but gets up 8, a symbol of hope and thinking that everything will be all right.

Or the graceful Prince and Princess in silk kimono with hand stitched eyes, nose and mouth with faux kanoko shibori appliqued cheeks.

O Hina sama bowing in their forest of pink peach blossoms

For me, Okunishi san’s  bright and love-filled princes and princesses come  to take you to their world of  laughter and  joy and imagination.  They sing and dance and curtsy and chatter in a vibrant and playful way that no other O Hina sama do for me.  People on their way to Peacock Supermarket next door, forget their shopping lists for a while and enter her magic kingdom and dream.  One wonderful moment years ago, when we had just finished displaying Okunushi san’s daruma, there was a thump on the window and we looked up to see a hopeful golden retriever trying to catch the daruma which he perceived as a delicious ball.  To each his/her own dreams. 

The only other candidates in my favorite O Hina sama dolls are the incredible and infinitesimal displays at the enchanting 4 generations of girls home of Yuri Konomi and her Mother, Fumiko Kikuchi.  Every year Yuri painstakingly unwraps and displays some 70! sets of tiny OHina sama and other miniature wonders.  She says that tweezers don’t work as they tend to slip when she is setting the pieces out, so every tiny princess and courtier has to be put in place by hand.  There must be thousands of figures, each set has a different setting: a tansu, a table, an alcove, a different room.  She says she sets them out in a day when things go well.  Does putting them away take longer? I wonder?  How can she remember which tiny doll goes in which tiny box?

Yuri generously invites all her friends, and they wouldn’t miss the delicious feast for eyes and stomach! – to one of many O Hina sama lunches she gives each year, served on the wonderfully  variegated dishes that her 91 year old Mother has made.  Gracefully presented and unsurpassably delicious, Yuri’s cuisine and hospitality make us all feel like princesses when it is time to go home and reluctantly return to reality. 

Dragons don’t follow conventions.  They have their own sense of time and order.

Three rather charming ones have entered Blue & White recently, and though we had closed the dragon door this year, these three were impossible to ignore or placate.  So please, help us welcome them to our world.

The first is an earthenware bell from Tamagawa Fukushi Senta, a sheltered workshop for people with special abilities.  The earthenware bell that they produce each year is a dragon this year and we found it even more charming than usual.

The second is a chipped old blue and white imari plate that I found at the flea market and loved for its dynamic and energetic design of a dragon entwined in a sky of clouds, a perfect balance of blue and white values, and an irresistible dragon.

The last dragon is a New Year’s Card from Seiichi and Reiko Hagiya, a humourous and resourceful couple whose work we have introduced on earlier blogs.  The energy and play of their colored pencil images are totally original and joy giving.  No dragons are fresher or more ebullient than theirs.

The musicians are uncannily realistic replicas of Seiichi and Reiko.

How can you refuse these Three Tardy Dragons?

I have recently read that there are 7 enemies that everyman faces in his lifetime:(According to the teacher of Osamu Tezuka, Japan’s famous cartoonist) Sickness, hunger, betrayal, envy, greed, old age, and then death. The ancients of Japan knew it all along and they celebrated Setsubun, a time for exorcising demons and driving them out. 

AKEMASHITE OMEDETO GOZAIMASU !  Happy New Year !

The New Year is celebrated in many forms throughout the world. The Chinese lunar New Year is a time for wild and noisy celebrating with fireworks and flamboyance.  In the United States there is excitement and party and champagne in the air. The Japanese New Year, as so beautifully presented in the book, The Japanese New Year by Reiko Morinaga Brandon and Barbara Stephan, is a sacred and silent time of purification and renewal.

Cleaning comes first in preparing for the New Year in Japan.  Business is brisk at year’s end at my favorite broom shop, Shirokiya Denbe in Kyobashi.  

Even the usually cluttered Blue & White gets a real sweep, and a window wash and a tidy.  Shoji are repaired, slippers and other tools of daily living are renewed and life begins afresh.

 The traditional is not forgotten in Tokyo.  Symbols of purification are everywhere.   New Year’s rice straw ropes and door decorations are sold in each neighborhood. Doors are hung with New Years’ signs featuring the dragon this year.  

At each shrine the ema, sacred painted wooded plaques with the animal of the New Year are on sale.  Prayers are written on the back and they are hung  at the shrine for the Gods to act upon.  At our local Fukagawa Fudo Temple in Fukagawa, I found some enchanting handmade plaster foxes sitting on the steps to a small shrine in the inner compound.  When I went to buy one, I found they were not for sale.  You pay ¥1,000 to take one from the sales counter to the shrine steps and say your prayers (foxes are usually in charge of business matters) and leave them there.  Now that is good business if I have ever heard of it.

Our Blue & White window each year is one of renewal and purification.  This year 5 cuts of fresh green bamboo are stacked on each other and tied with a loose knot of red and white mizuhiki, paper cords.  On a stool of twisted rice straw sits a symbolic red lacquer masu (box for measuring beans and other dry goods), old and venerable, we like to think.  Not everything has to be new at Blue & White.  God knows I’m not!  In it is an arrangement of fresh pine boughs from our generous friend Takako Nishikawa who sent them from Kanazawa, and my favorite Nanten, Nandena, a winter flowering tree with delicate green leaves and bright red berries.

Behind the arrangement hangs an elegant Dragon quilt by our own Blue & White treasure Reiko Okunushi, born in the year of the dragon,  for her husband, Tatsuo (Tatsu is dragon in Japanese).  It is a spectacular quilt of triangular blue dragon scales made of yukata, and white, quilted with subtle and joyful white stitched dragons. as engaging on the white back as on the blue and white front.  It is a work of silent and steadfast love mixed with joy and humor and incredible needlework that are Okunishi san’s signatures.

It is difficult to find charming Dragons this year.  I search the offerings of tenugui and ema as well looking for a lovable dragon and come up wanting. Okunushi san has certainly cornered the market with her quilt, and a smaller applique dragon that we have featured in our monthly window display at the nearby iconic Hotel Okura.  It is the most lovable dragon of all, made of old materials that she saves in her impressive cache of old materials.

 I found a nice-ish Dragon ema, wooden prayer plaque at the ancient Edo period Kuma no Jinja Shrine in Karuizawa.  It pictures a dragon with swirls of clouds/energy and has a dynamic that I find sadly missing in dragons these days.

But imagine our surprise when Rima Tashiro, our youngest and most beautiful Blue & White Sashiko student, came into the shop after we opened on January 5^th with her own Dragon work.  It is a Mottainai Dragon, made of scraps of all colors from our indigo dyer, who also dyes cloth using other natural vegetable colors.  Too good to throws away, for Rima they are treasures and she made a fiercely charming 3 dimensional dragon that comes from some wonderfully free place inside her head that is wired to the universe.   Apologizing that she had never seen a dragon, she offered this appliqued dragon that made us laugh and marvel.  It was the coup de Dragon!

It hung in the window for two weeks and brought untold delight to passersby who stopped to stare.

Dragons are everywhere.  But sadly most are computer generated and lacking in  the energy and frolic I look for.  I never found a perfect dragon tenugui for Blue & White.  But finally, in the neighborhood next to our house, I found my favorite dragon.

He was pasted on all the doorways as a New Years’ greeting.  I loved him!  And I waited for the entire New Year season to be finished, and the official time for taking down the New Year’s decorations and burning them to purify them.  I found one house that was late in taking theirs down and asked if I could have it.  They kindly gave it to me, and I will save it for 12 years to have made into a Tenugui in the year 2024 – the next year of the dragon.  Dragon power to you all in the New Year !

Blue & White has just celebrated its birthday with a small party of friends and loyal women who have made it work for thirty-six years.  The juggler we had planned on hurt his back and so couldn’t come.  The old blue and white broken plates and bowls with slight cracks and chips for him to juggle never arrived from our antique friend in Oiwake who had planned to throw them away.  So the celebration was in food and display and friends and family. But that is what Blue & White is all about anyway.   Nothing is more precious.   Sayoko Hayasawa changed the buttons on her annual indigo cushion to read 36 !   Reiko and Seiichi Hagiya brought a bright red fan with Blue & White 36 Omedeto ! written on it.  They also brought an amazing box filled with Otafuku shell shard pins  along with another box of green surprise baskets wrapped with red tape for each guest to have and to open.  Theirs is a remarkable resourcefulness from nothing.  Spending next to no money at all, they find unwanted, discarded things at the flea market and they hand shredded old paper to fill the small round baskets.  Inside the baskets we find a small candle, a chocolate coin, a hand painted wooden cube with feet painted on it or faces, and many other small delights.

This joy is making something of nothing may be what Blue & White has been about all these years.  In 1975, Blue & White started as an empty corner next to the Azabu Juban Supermarket  Seifu, where forgotten pots and sorry plants were sitting unattended. It is now an established shop that started with a needle and thread, cloth and seamstresses and plenty of ideas inspired by Japan itself.  

For 36 years, Blue & White has been all about food, and cloth and thread and pots and mostly friends.  I cannot hide my pride and feeling of accomplishment when thirty-six years of creative women who have worked for Blue & White and shared their ideas and hard work and kindness, gather to celebrate our birthday.  Blue & White is the product of their hard work and devotion.

For 36 years, they have been creating original works for Blue & White that have never been made before and may not be made again.  That is the fun of it.  One off creations bring surprise and pleasure to our friends and to those who want to have them, or just be inspired by them. All are made by hand and have that pulse of the maker that gives them life and breath.

Thirty six years ago, when we asked the landlord of the building whether we could create a small and simple Japanese boutique, he agreed for some reason and built a truly tiny box where three women (with three husbands and 10 children) could live their dreams of creating a stage to showcase Japanese crafts – to prove how beautiful they are and how useful they can be in contemporary life.  Everyone laughed!  We ourselves weren’t sure we could pull it off, but we did !  After a few years, we doubled the space – still tiny ! – and we took off from there. 

A different kind of Christmas tree! Split bamboo branches with embroidered decorations by Shobu Gakuen in Kagoshima, Kyush, and Reiko Okunushi

 The Blue & White message is also one of community and outreach.  People come from all over Japan, all over the world to take part in the friendly spirit we cultivate.  They sometimes come to show us what they have made, or ask questions about the neighborhood, or learn about Japanese crafts and how to use them, or to buy what we have on display  – always a changing  and unexpected scene.  They come for the heart-felt care and attention that our Blue & White ladies share with our friends.  They come for the laughter and the surprise and the wild imagination.  The warmth is always here.  They are always welcome. Blue & White takes a true interest in all who enter. 

Our sincere desire for 36 years has always been to try make people happier for having come to Blue & White.

Happy Birthday Blue & White.

Blessings in the New Year to all our friends and family!

Like his father before him, Kotaro Kobayashi san drives up to Blue & White twice a year, at unpredictable times, and brings us his cargo of newly dyed and woven indigo.  His van is newer now and larger than his Father’s.  And like his Father, he sleeps in it when he is on the road.  His trail is long and arduous. He has travelled all over Japan save for the islands of Hokkaido and Okinawa. He starts at the weavers’ and dyers’ workshops in the south of the country, and loads up the best of their work.  He is fussier, purer perhaps than his father who brought cutesy mice and clowns made of bits of leftover cloth.  No tchotchkes for the son.  No stuffed cats, or indigo owls. He cuts to the essences and brings strong bolts of blue:  lengths of indigo, strong ikats, (kasuri in the vernacular.  The threads have been pre-dyed to achieve certain designs.  A remarkable feat of the weaver’s trade! ).

Where Father brought in giant and unseemly Tupperware boxes with his treasures inside, cool son packs in plain brown cardboard boxes.  Our anxiousness to hurry up and see what is inside is augmented by the allure of the mysterious boxes with no name, no writing. Out pop handsome Ikat/kasuri shirts for men.  Straight, pure, simple shirts that will last a lifetime. Washing will only deepen their blues, clarify their whites, and make them soft friends for life. 

We gasp when we see the delicate cotton kasuri scarves in ever so slightly varying patterns.  They are soft on the neck when wrapped, they set off any blue or white or red, of course, when they are worn.  How have their slender supple threads been woven, we wonder?  

In this day when everything seems to have been made in China, quiet craftsmen of Japan are weaving their magic in indigo, around Hiroshima largely, but also in other parts of Japan. Theirs is a luminous blue that has the evening sky in it, the ocean depths.  To see this unassuming, gentle indigo cloth reassures us that the textile/craft tradition of japan is still alive and vibrant.  Despite the thunderous calamities of the year, and the destruction of confidence and sense of well being that they have wrought, these textiles confirm that life is still going on.  People are still going about their daily life, doing their daily work with the same quiet virtuosity of their mothers and grandmothers before them. 

The peddler son, handsome sportsman like his Father, has edited the work of the weavers. He hasn’t just brought everything.  He has carefully chosen the shibui, the cool, the bold indigo.  Quiet and elegant, the best of the Japanese indigo ikat/kasuri aesthetic is in his boxes.  It is the Japan craft tradition updated and available in smart collarless shirts, cover-all aprons/Kapogi, Samue kimono jackets and pants and 12 meter bolts of indigo to do with as you will.  The material fairly begs to be made into slip covers and cushions, table cloths and coats and jackets.  Fresh from the indigo vat, fresh from the loom, the handprint of the makers is still in the threads, the pulse of the weaver beats in the weave.  When they are used and made into something for the house or something to wear, they bring soul and spirit into daily life that no machine-made thing can do.  They last forever and bring an honesty and virtuosity to everyday that consoles and enriches our living.

Kotaro Kobayashi follows in a time-honored tradition of peddling indigo throughout Japan. Since the Edo era, and no doubt before, peddlers have spread indigo dyed and woven cloth throughout the land.  They have created a country called Japan Blue as observed by the British scientist William Atkinson in the late 1800’s when he came to teach chemistry.

It always amazes me to see Kobayashi san drive up in his van and begin to disgorge its pristine boxes of newly dyed indigo, newly woven ikats fresh from their makers, like fresh bread hot from the oven.  We are honored every time the indigo peddler stops at Blue & White and want to encourage this rich tradition of craftsmanship and time honored system of distribution, and show the world that Japan is still creating and disseminating things of enduring beauty.

BLUE & WHITE SEES RED

THE NEW CALENDARS FOR 2012 ARE HERE!

For the first time in Blue & White’s 25 years of creating charming and original handmade calendars, we have brought red to the party. Red dispels the gloom and calmity of 2011. Red is a perfect partner for  Blue & White. It brings joy and helps celebrate the sunrise and sundown of each day. The new promise in each square.

Otafuku, Japan’s beloved Goddess of Mirth, is the star performer of our 2012 calendar. Her images are taken from tenugui patterns, Otafuku artifacts, and whimsical drawings of Otafuku at play.

Many of the Otafuku artifacts are waiting for you at Blue & White. You can’t have too many chirpy quirky faces to see you through the day! She reassures you that things will be fine. And even if they aren’t, a good laugh helps dispel life’s choppy moments.

We have marked full moons and auspicious days to help everyone go for the lucky, but just to be sure, we have invited Miss Otafuku, the joy of Japan to be with us each month.

Her face brings smile and merry making to you from Blue & White as you hang the calendar in your kitchen, in your study or your bedroom. Otafuku will make you smile and feel the goodness of each day, each week, each month, or just cheer you up.

Change is another essential for making life better. We have changed the layout of our calendar from horizontal to vertical, hoping that it will make you think again and reconsider each day and the next.

The squares are generous as usual to fit in all your dates, birthdays, appointments and evening plans. Each day precious, each day a gift.

2012 is in fact the year of the dragon – an animal that brings energy and splash and auspicious times to life.

Together with Otafuku they make a perfect couple – joy and delight coupled with energy and good fortune, we wish you all of these in 2012.