Blue & White

Shop Talk…Amy Katoh’s Iconic Blue & White

March 19, 2013 by Tokyo Jinja

So it occurred to me in writing last post on LuRu Home that Claire and Liza are possibly at the beginning of a similar journey to that started some time ago by Amy Katoh, author, shop owner and flame keeper of all Japanese things handcrafted, indigo and folk art. When Amy Katoh moved to Japan in the 1960s, the local mood was to jettison everything Japanese and traditional in favor of things western and modern. This wasn’t a new trend – it had been happening since the Meiji Restoration – where seemingly overnight Japan went from an agrarian culture to an industrial one. But pockets of the old ways remained for those who sought them out and at the forefront of this group was Amy and her perfectly named shop Blue & White.

It seems ironic that it takes an outsider to shine the light into the corners of a culture, pulling out and saving the pieces that are about to be discarded, both figuratively and literally. Amy went to markets and bought up old indigo work clothes, almost warm from their former owners backs, tools considered defunct and pottery no longer wanted. She started out by saving things and went on to re-invent and help create new things from the old. She has been instrumental in bringing outside interest to the folk arts of Japan and it is that very outside interest that has helped the Japanese see the magic of their traditional arts culture themselves.

It is not just her knowledge that makes her so compelling, but also her very personality. She is never still, never bored and always interested in seeing and learning more. Whenever I am with her she is engaged and excited about something – a new exhibition or experience – and her vibrancy is infectious. Many a new expat wanders into her shop only to be seduced by the charm of the goods and their proprietor. In fact, I’ve head from numerous people that they chose their neighborhood and apartment because it was near Blue & White.

Lately Amy has been very involved in working with handicrafts fashioned by the handicapped, a group that can often be overlooked. Her committment to numerous groups is strong and the wares in the store reflect that. In May, after Golden Week an exhibition featuring handcraft by the handicapped from Tohoku will be on display. The regions hit by the tsunami were known for their traditional arts and much was destroyed. It has been hard to get those small industries up and running and particularly so for handicapped artists. Money raised from the sale of the genki tenugui (written about here) will also be put towards this cause.

The Blue & White shop is an atmospheric hodge-podge and has bits of everything, from antiques and modern ceramics…

…to charming little chopstick rests. Do I spy Otafuku?

It’s the kind of place where at any moment, an itinerant indigo peddler may show up and stark unpacking his wares. I’ve been lucky enough to be there on one of those days. He should be coming back quite soon, perhaps in the next week or two.

Kasuri slippers anyone? Not to jump the gun, but you’ll be hearing a lot about kasuri from me in the coming days.

While there is no formal lesson schedule posted, Kazuko Yoshiura does teach sashiko there…

as does Akiko Ike, who teaches the rough and primitive form called chiku chiku, which is the sound a sewing needle makes when going thru cloth. I can’t imagine actually using these charming dust cloths for their said purpose.

And Amy has almost single-handedly kept traditionally dyed yukata fabric from Tokyo Honzome (a consortium of dyers) in production.  No one can afford to buy the handmade rolls anymore for making yukata, but she sells it by the meter, perfect for projects like quilting.  You all know how often we have turned to her for the fabric in the ASIJ quilt borders. These days the dyers are surviving by making tenugui – the Japanese equivalent of a dish cloth – with the traditional techniques and stencils and Blue & White has a large selection of those too.

One of the most beloved things sold at Blue & White are the small quilts and hangings by Reiko Inaba. She uses vintage mosquito netting, kasuri and other fabrics to turn out her charming kimono and fish quilts, something she started doing as cancer therapy.

For those of you who can’t just pop in and visit, Amy’s books have been reprinted a million times and still feel as fresh as ever.  She is currently working on a fifth – I’m not sure that I can give away any details on it!

For me personally, Amy has been an inspiration, a teacher and a wonderful example of how to live a life full of constant discovery. She sees the wow! in everything.

Put Blue & White on your bucket list….

Blue & White
2-9-2 Azabu Juban.
Telephone: 03-3451-0537

http://blueandwhitetokyo.com/

Fluffy white clouds stripe a blue Tokyo sky in the new year and set off the cold and steely Sky Tree, Tokyo’s newest quest for greatness:  the tallest, sleekest,  techiest tower of all.   The New Year has been long in coming – traditional preparations have been happening everywhere.

At the local bamboo merchant’s, they have been polishing and cutting and matching trunks of bamboo by the truckload.  The resulting handsome kadomatsu decorations of cut bamboo and pine tied with decorative knots of rice straw rope are New Years’ works of art placed at the entrances of sumo stables and restaurants and other prosperous establishments.

Inside too, preparations are underway for the New Year, including the last festivities of the year just finishing.

Pounding rice to make O Mochi, a sticky rice cake eaten at the New Year, at a local Sumo Stable near our house.

Despite the discouraging news that continues to emanate from Japan – slap dash cleanup of Tohoku, constant political musical chairs, collapsing highway tunnels, docks washing up on foreign shores, a more steady cultural heart beat continues to generate the country and keep it moving to older, deeper and less volatile rhythms.  The deepest set of these is the New Year with its rituals of farewell to the old and beginning of the new.

New beginnings, fresh starts, purification, all give heart and hope despite disappointments of the year that has passed.

In Japan the New Year is a time for cleaning, beginning afresh, and purification.

The first calligraphy of the year is celebrated along with the first mochi, the first flower, and the first tea.

In the New Year window of Blue & White, 10 year old artist and student of Japanese in New York, granddaughter Ruby Momo brushed her own calligraphy images together with her grandfather on a swath of washi cloth.  She helped hang them in the window of Blue & White on poles of new green bamboo with yuzu and pine and nandina from Wajima in Ishikaway Prefecture, under Shinto paper cuttings from Saitama Prefecture.

Later she will hang her New Year’s calligraphy written on squares of old washi in the Blue & White window at the Hotel Okura.

She was a perfect size to squeeze into the window to hang the Shime Nawa New Year’s decoration of twisted rice straw and sigzags of folded paper.

Job well done !

At home the New Year is taken more frivolously with 2013 glasses on the beaded African Yoruban Prince who welcomes guests.

Tokyo Tower, graceful Grande dame, that she is, changes her outfit for every occasion.  The New Year finds her lit in luminous orangey gold on some nights, and on others in an impossibly chic outfit of bright vermillion legs with sparky white lights on blue.  She far out dresses the lackluster overnight sensation Sky Tree whose lighting is so subtle as not to be noticeable at all.  Tokyo Tower knows what it means to go all out to celebrate the New Year.

And for all of it, there is gratitude.  ARIGATO sign at the tiny O Deki Jinja across the road from our house reminds us to be ever grateful for blessings past and still to come.

ARIGATO

Some take time to play out, but all preserve an indwelling spirit of hope and reassurance of renewal of the Japanese New Year, the very CORE of Japanese culture.

All are part of our Blue & White mindset.  They inspire and give insight into the psyche of Japan – sometimes mysterious and ineffable, sometimes bold and playful – and its steadfast and unmoving core of culture.

While the images above are not necessarily blue and white, they reflect the eternal wellspring of culture that flows up from deep within Japan.  Some customs have changed and adapted to the present, some are inviolate. They all feed the Japanese spirit. They are the inspiration for Blue & White.

 The Blue & White New Year Begins on a colorful note with our first full color version on Sashiko in all its permutations, except perhaps, traditional.

Starting with Sayoko Hayasawa’s prize winning portrait of the inner workings of her mind and Tuan’s, her black dog, and winding up with Reiko Inaba’s spiral of stripped kimono sewn through mosquito netting, these sashiko samplers are the results of a Crazy Sashiko competition we held during the summer and the works of our own Blue & White Stars.

The calendar is filled with new ideas and fun and surprises.  Have a look and if you like it, just email to order:  blueandwhitejapan@gmail.com.

On thick recyclable paper, ¥2,100 each, ¥2,300 with reusable tenugui bag plus postage.

The calendar is sure to bring you joy and laughter and Sashiko in 2013!

Indigo is the secret language of Japan, communicated on many levels, in many tones and fonts and channels.

Historically it was the most readily available dye used for cloth for wearing, for working and for household use – futon, floor mats and cushions.  Banners for shrines and temples and shop signs as well as any kind of public messaging were dyed in indigo.  Uniforms were indigo as were work clothes.  Indigo was the most available color and the indigo message was the one that people noticed and paid attention to.  The shades were infinite and the enormous range of one magnificent color may be without equal in the whole color spectrum/rainbow of Japan.

A remarkable indigo Ai Art project has been taking place in Tokushima this year called I am Ai, We are Ai.  Ai is fortuitously the Japanese word for indigo as well as for love, though the Japanese characters are different. Tokushima, historically known as Awa, in Shikoku is the home of 80% of the indigo produced in Japan and has been the leader in Ai cultivating and trading for over 4 centuries!

Rowland Ricketts, an indigo farmer and artist and dreamer, as well as being Professor of Textile Arts at Indiana University in Bloomington has conceptualized and orchestrated this 8 month I am Ai, We are Ai program using Shrines and fields and temples and warehouses and drawing people from all over Japan to join in this remarkable tribute to the indigo of Awa, its glorious history and its promising future.

For the fascinating story of the Awa I am Ai, We are Ai Project, click on the link to the website. 

http://awaai-iamai-en.blogspot.jp/2012/08/returning-indigo-at-omiya-shrine-july.html

One indigo dyer we know and champion opted not to join the Tokushima I Am Ai We are Ai project, probably because he experiments with different dyeing techniques – board clamped dyeing, shibori, and specially woven and combined and engineered fibers – all natural, mind you – silks, cottons, gauzes, gossamers – that have been revved up with elasticizing, layering, puckering and mixing.  For him just one solid indigo color on simple cotton was not enough and did not tell the whole indigo tale.  So Noriyuki Murata of Kosoen Dyeworks in Ome, in the hills of Tokyo, chose to send his creations to Blue & White instead (as well as a number of other larger and more significant galleries where he also exhibits).  His exhibit at Blue & White has been received with oohs! and ahs! and ais!  Have a look!  

Around the socks.

A simple sheer stole with shibori designs.  Indigo transparency is addictive! Just one is not enough.

Wrap around stole in mid tone of indigo with blips of random shades of blue fading to white silk.

Remarkable sheer silk gossamer stole shot with slubby indigo threads.

Wondrous joining of clamped board dyed transparent silk merging with felted silk or is it wool?  The magic of mixed media.  Indescribably delicious!

Amazing puckered cotton, with 1% nylon elastic, holds its stylish form while absorbing the tones of indigo beautifully.

The first word in Blue & White.  And the last, indigo and white gauze stole.

Indigo knit cotton sweater with Missoni like gradations of color.

With such an arsenal of weaving and dyeing and design techniques as Kosoen has – like no other I know of in Japan – it is no wonder that they decided not to take part in the more traditional, Awa I am Ai We are Ai Project.  Murata san and Kosoen have been changing the way Japan and the world looks at Indigo and championing innovation as the way of the future.

Blue & White’s very reason for being is to encourage BOTH tradition AND innovation and make sure they continue to stimulate and inform each other while keeping the fires of tradition and experimentation burning bright and simultaneously.

AT THE FUKAGAWA SCARECROW COMPETITION IN DOWNTOWN TOKYO

Walking down the street to our local Museum of Contemporary Art where there is a long line waiting for the exhibit: Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, that started in July and runs until October 6, we chanced upon a long parade of whimsical creatures on both sides of the Fukagawa shopping street in Koto ku.  This is the annual Fukagawa Scarecrow Competition, and every year it reaches new heights of homemade ingenuity and fun and outlandishness.  It attracts visitors from all over to see how far scarecrows have come from their original form of work clothes stuffed with straw and stuck on a bamboo pole in rice fields to frighten away crows. Indeed! It works! There are no crows here!

Instead there are fresh and spontaneous and wacky works of people’s imagination, using mostly the materials at hand – bubble wrap, bottle tops, newspaper, plastic bags, old cloth.  That is what is endearing about it. Old familiar things have been saved and transformed into funny figures and sometimes cartoon characters, and creatures of fantasy.

Above is a prancing red lipped, striped horn Shiza from Okinawa. There is a huge giraffe, and next to him a blue snake in the tree, alluding to next year’s zodiac animal.

There is a stately but funny goddess in front of a temple and princesses and oafs.

Pictures tell the tail far better.

This is a famous fullsome female impersonating television panelist – news to me!

Beauty comes in all shades.

And ages.

This is Shizuka Gozen, an historical beauty from the 12^th century, a court dancer whose dance brought rain to the Emperor,  after the chanting of 100 monks failed to do so.

Country beauty today, dancing.

Some of my favorites were the rice straw figures, a material which Japan has always used masterfully.

The scarecrows were grouped somewhat by kind, and my favorite section was the fanciful, whimsical pieces: Not too anime.  Not too drawn from cartoons, but pulled up somewhere from the inner combustion of the imagination and the materials.

        Wo

        Aa

A jaunty striped snake for next year.

Not sure what this one was, but since it was blue & white it got my prize!

Surely the sweetest.

The array of characters went on for blocks and blocks, on both sides of the street.

And just when I thought we had seen them all, we came upon a simple and irresistible Blue Boy who was, like many of the other scarecrows, cheering for Tohoku, where the scarecrows originated.

When I asked a woman from the shop nearby, about this winning Gambare Tohoku figure, she told me it was the creation of third graders at the Primary School across the street.  They had made it of plastic bags and bottle caps and colored tape, and pet bottles as they are called in Japan.   Tomorrow is the last day of the competition – how lucky we were to have seen it just in time! – and the scarecrows would all be marched to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiba, where there would be a judging at 3 pm.  Come and see it, she urged.  But maybe I prefer them, just as they are, street art conjured up from the hearts and minds and hands and trashcans of Fukagawa in downtown Tokyo, a wonderful area in our neighborhood.

Ps  Kakashi Matsuri

It was growing dark as I was heading home from Blue & White tonight.  Bright lights and excitement were coming from the Higashi Azabu crossing.  To my amazement there was a huge  scarecrow robot blinking in excitement over the scarecrow festival/matsuri celebration. Full moon overhead as children and their parents in Yukata danced and delighted in the happiness of harvest.

Despite all the images to the contrary, Japan/Tokyo still has a country heart.

Our Blue & White invitation for a Crazy Sashiko Competition was received with enthusiasm and a wide range of  masterpieces arrived from the loyal followers of Blue & White.  But Sashiko is basically serious, purposeful sewing, not crazy.   It is a simple running stitch sewing to strengthen and reinforce cloth, sometimes to mend, sometimes to thicken clothing for wearing, warming, and working, cloths for carrying and sleeping or using.  Sashiko is functional and made to work.

But it is summer at Blue & White.  Why not have fun, we thought, so we invited friends and neighbors to a Crazy Sashiko event.  More than 65 entries arrived and we displayed them in our ever-changing window.  The result is a fun and eye- stopping, idea filled window of a wide swath of stitched creations loosely called Sashiko.   Some are traditional, some are works of impressive patience and care.  Some are slightly crazy, but all are joy giving and express inner thoughts.

The works are handsome and off the normally stitched sashiko path. They are filled with heart and dexterity.  The most touching were the works of Reiko Inaba who does handsome applique work of kimono and fish, drawing from her treasure mounds of antique kimono and under wear, mosquito netting and futon material.  She arrived with her husband first thing on the first morning to see the display, embarrassingly not yet up, on her way to hospital for yet another checkup.

Stopping in at Blue & White came first on her priority list.

She has been creating appliqued pieces for us for maybe 15 years or so, always bringing along vegetables she has grown, fish she has smoked, fruit she has dried.  Until recently her energy has been unflagging.  Her Sashiko is bouncy.  Her eye for old fabrics knowing.  Wanting to do something different this time, she decided to use strips of torn silk kimono material for her thread and produced a colorful collage of design and texture which warmed my cockles with its warm individuality.

It sits unassumingly beside a carry bag of gentle sashiko squares by Megumi Kajikawa, a stalwart staff member of Blue & White.

Next to them is a thundering boys’ day banner that has been stitched in thick fairly widely spaced stitches as if to emboss the already dynamic composition of a fearless samurai leading the battle on his bright eyed stallion.

Got your back!  The reverse side of the Samurai is a peaceable scene of rising sun and sails at sea.

Zokin, or dustrags are a popular canvas for sashiko.  The stitches connect two sides of an old towel when doubled over, and give the finished cloth style and grace while reinforcing it for hard work.  The color of work: the beauty of function.

Below the Zokin is a small and playful indigo furoshiki by Blue & White’s favorite artisan, Reiko Okunushi.   Thick white unbleached cotton thread, double ply, makes strong and whimsical patterns on the square of indigo that can be used as a wrapping cloth or even a small table cloth to lay down a picnic for two.

Everyone had made such an effort – a group of grannies had painstakingly stitched their dustcloths, newly recharged by the challenge.  22 women from Gungendo in Shimane handed in a long, patiently patched panel of sashiko.  There were clothes and noren and crazy glasses and strips of bright colored ends of tenugui stitched together with white sashiko thread – folded over it could be a sensational obi on an indigo kimono, we thought, for someone who dared stand out in a crowd.  All were so good that we realized there should be prizes for everyone.  So we made 45 original blue and white necklaces made of long rolled triangles of the thick paper of leftover pages of Blue & White calendars.  No overnight affair.

And while all the participants got a necklace or a tenugui, we did give 5 honorable mentions for creativity, imagination, sensitive use of materials, indigo patchwork originality, and sashiko perfection.

The Craziest:  Indigo wrapped glasses and a hotspring mark on sashiko eyes made from an old clothes hanger by Mitsuko Katoh (yes! a relative.  My clever sister-in-law, but I was not involved in the judging.)

The Blue and White Prize:  a wonderfully original Blue & White noren of random odd shapes of stuffed and stitched indigo hanging on braided twists of rope – too wild and unwieldy to photograph.

The Most Colorful: by Fusako Matsumoto

Best use of materials:  Reiko Inaba’s kimono spiral on mosquito netting

Most useful:  a zokin/ dustcloth by a sewing group of Obaachan/ Grannies

This was the first Crazy Sashiko event at Blue & White, but it was received with such gusto and enthusiasm from passersby that we look forward to making it  annual.

We may even find a way to manage international entries.  So wherever you are, think Crazy Sashiko next August!

And many of these sashiko masterpieces will be featured on our 2013 Sashiko calendar that will come out in October.  It will give a burst of original creativity every month for the kitchen, the study or your work room.

The last word  

Indigo Patchwork and Sashiko perfection:  by Kayo Hayashi

ART SHOWS THE WAY

ECHIGO TRIENNALE ART FESTIVAL, NIIGATA

When my friend, Akiko Ike of Niigata Gingka, a craft shop in Niigata City, invited me to her SozaiTen, Materiels Show, to be held in Tokaichi, Niigata, I couldn’t say no.  The Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale was being held at the same time, and what more could you have in one place?  Art and craft together in country Japan, my favorite locus – I cancelled everything else and got myself to Niigata hoping to take it all in.

Of course that was impossible.  There was much too much going on in too many places.  And will be until the 24^th of December should anyone be in the area.  It is well worth a trip – a trip with wheels.  So much to see but the venues are spread out over a large area. And a car and car navi are essential.

I started with the materiels event happening at the Tokaichi Cross 10, Products Center.  Walking into the 2^nd floor exhibit hall, a long line-up of  fantasmagorical masks / head coverings made of grasses of every seed and fiber welcomed visitors with wild surprise.  They made me laugh and cringe and cower with their energy and humor.   The staggering variety and imagination of Yamamoto Amayokasim  burst forth from her masks and their grassy sources.

Around the corner from the masks, she had wound twisted grass twines onto bamboo spindles with photos of their sources, and notes as to what grasses had been twisted to create the twine.

Grassism, Yamamoto san calls her craft:  principles:  Not buying materials.  Going on foot to gather grass materials.  Not using electric tools.  It is totally from the earth and using what the earth gives. . . using it with captivating resourcefulness and dexterity and an abiding sense of beauty and order and fun.

MONSTER MASKS

Upon entering the exhibition hall, we were greeted byTakasuka Katsura’s incredible soaring grass/weed/ root fashionsl.  He sees the earth and the sky as one continuum connected by fibers which he seizes from the earth as they grow and weaves and rearranges them into high fashion jackets and dressed and gowns to marry in.

FROM THE EARTH FASHION

Silks, grasses, hemps, cottons natural fibers of every origin were shown in all their glory and even I wanted to get my hopeless fingers moving to try to create something with these heavenly fibers.  The installation was inspiring and inviting.  Akiko Ike’s Chiku Chiku exhibit of simple sashiko stitching applied to every and any surface of cloth to strengthen and augment and embellish encouraged everyone, even me, to try to leave our mark / our needle print on any discarded fabric.  Nothing is wasted.  All odd scraps of cotton cloth are reinvented and reworked into fresh new creations from banners to bed covers, from dust rags to jackets.  Why didn’t I take pictures?

Between events at the SozaiTen / Materiels Exhibit, my photographer friend Sakurai Taishi took me and my friend Kawasaki Kei of Gallery Kei in Kyoto, out to outlying Echigo Tsumari Triennale installations.

Most primal of all the hollowed earth formation by local farmers who carved out a meandering series of subterranean chambers, earth spaces that were rooms without ceilings supported by beams and trusses and garnished with mosses and grasses that had volunteered to be part of the venue.   Walking through the corridors with rough earthen walls on either side, you became one with the earth.  It comforted and reassured.

We only had time for about 10 installations :  Kusama Yayoi,  several old minka that had been infused with art and Oribe and washi and LED’s in original ways that made you rethink art and architecture and their interconnectedness. Inspiration was everywhere.  Everyone found a place / way they could express themselves, artists and viewers alike.

Subterranean installation created by local people digging out spaces of  timeless beauty and peace, reinforced with beams and wooden timbers.  Natural moss and grasses add green adornment

Long walls of rusted iron wall and enclosed space between brilliant green rice fields and a bubbling river that has benches in one section as if for performances or meditation, and a space open to the river perhaps for singers to sing to.  Inspired architecture by a Finnish Architectural firm replaced a former garbage dump site.

MINKA SERENDIPITY !

Unexpected  surprise.  Just when we thought we had seen all we could, we happened upon the village of Ogijima with its 70 houses many of them thatched roofed minka, and sadly many unlived in.  As beautiful and provocative as the international art festival had been, these minka win all prizes.  They are are ancient peoples’ response to their place of living.  They are timeless monuments to man’s interacting with his environment with cooperation and resourcefulness. Using materials available, they were able to construct dwellings of consummate beautfy and grace, sliding silently into and emanating from the environment  – at one with it.  The sense of place, the spirit of peace and harmony that emanate from these buildings is something that remains engraved on my soul.

Flowers to dry for.  Pliable obaachan working in her garden in Ogijima.

Takayanagi Community Center, Ogijima,  Niigata

THE WAY FOR THE FUTURE

Kengo Kuma, architect, built in late 1990’s.  Kuma san has taken the essence of minka, the form, the shape, the thatched roof, the washi, the shoji, the light, the language, and reformulated it into a public space for the village to use and be inspired by.  He creates a modern minka, using the materials available in the village to provide a public space in the local vernacular – a language that all can understand and speak.  Washi produced by Kadoire Washi is pasted on glass windows on the left to infuse a luminous cloudy light that captures the mystery of washi while bringing light to the notoriously dark minka interior.

Time Remembered, Ogijima Shrine and ancient pine tree.

It was all about materials. The thatched roofs, sometimes clad like this sinewy shrine roof of galvanized steel to cover ageing thatch and follow its contour,  the brilliant green blades of rice whose straw is used extensively in crafts and architecture and tools for living, the windows covered with washi, the earth walls, the straw ropes, the wooden beams, the hemp kimono, the cotton sashiko.

The Japan country side produces these materials and uses them eloquently in daily life.  They are natural, native grasses and fibers, wood, bamboo, paper and local.  Clever country people have developed ways of using them in season to answer their needs for living and develop a lifestyle that is supremely practical and beyond that sublimely beautiful.

After a freshening and restorative trip home to Boston, my village of origin, New York, home of 2 of our 4 children and their children. our grandchildren, and Hawaii, home of a third, I felt I had come home.  Returned to my beginnings seeing family and college roommates at a shocking to even think of 50^th reunion, old Tokyo friends, family cousins and their spawn.  I felt I belonged again despite the long hiatus away from my beginnings.

The journey confirmed some part of me that is not always sure it belongs in my transplanted world, Japan.  The trip reassured me and maybe answered some unvoiced questions as to why I am the way I am.  Of who I am. Why I am.  That stubborn core that I somehow can’t shake.

Welcome home front door created by Ruby Momo Kaminsky, 10, glorious, resourceful granddaughter  made us feel we were where we belonged and were loved.

The month in the United States was reaffirming and centering and made me feel I belonged.  My family was there and I still felt at home there with a bit of a foreign (exotic) twist.  I loved the of-courseness of it. Things happened pretty much as I expected they would.  One of the strange joys of Japan is that every day is still a surprise.  There is always something unexpected because I don’t have that inherent foundation/ understanding  of how things will/should be.

But then wait!  After returning home to Tokyo, I exclaimed Tadaima!  I’m home! a Japanese expression meaning I’m back to where I am from.  And I meant it.  Returning to Tokyo after all these years of leaving and returning, I still have a real sense of coming home.  The same feeling of returning home as when I return to Boston or New York.  I feel a sense of belonging, a spirit-filling reassurance that I feel when I come back together with myself.  A sense of belonging in this fractured and multi directional world is a precious feeling of togetherness, of wholeness.  It is rare and I treasure it.

Coming home to Tokyo is coming home to the wellspring that fills up my mind with energy and inspiration and power sources.  My well is replenished and my booster cables attached to their power base.  I am reconnected.  Ideas start to flow.

Here are some of the places and images that give me power, that reach out to me and warm my soul.  They make me glad that Tokyo and Japan are home to me, earthquakes notwithstanding.

Two sacred places on our small road.  Basho Inari Jinja, a shrine to the beloved 18^th century wandering haiku poet, Matsuo Basho.

And below, ODeki Jinja, a shrine dedicated to improving complexions – think of it!  Does it do wrinkles?

The new Sky Tree, impressive in size, but disappointing in design and lighting.

Garbage men, highly motivated, run to get their job done.   Immaculate, thorough, helpful.

The graceful confluence of the Sumida and Onagi Rivers with Kiyosumi Bridge in the background – blue of course!

Dogs are the reason to walk along the river.  Here Komachi, Kyoko and big tongue Basho stop for a breather.

People make the difference.

Mr. & Mrs. Sugimoto, fellow walkers along the river way.  He sometimes walks to City Hall in Shinjuku when he has a complaint to register.  Once they walked round trip to Blue & White, probably 25 kilometers/ or 15 miles!  He just had to see what it was.  He’s a painter now exhibiting in Ginza.  His determination is inspiring.  She makes it possible.

The neighborhood teems with sumo stables.  Here is a moderately slim wrestler who wouldn’t let me photograph his sandy backside after he had taken tumbles during early morning practice.

Mr. and Mrs. Yoshimoto,  he 85, she 76, styley fellow travellers on the OEdo subway line I take from Kiyosumi Shirakawa to Azabu Juban home of  Blue & White.

Naniwaya Sweet Shop and café, the most famous landmark in Azabu Juban.  People come from throughout the land to taste their Tai Yaki, fish shaped waffles filled with hand brewed and mashed sweet red beans.

Azabu Juban Patio, scene of 1^st Saturday of the month flea markets, Azabu Juban Matsuri in August, and pottery and vegetable  markets throughout the year.

Colorful fruits and veggies at Bikkuriya vegetable shop around the corner from Blue & White.

Blue & White where good things come together and  connect  Azabu Juban with all who come from Yokohama or from Singapore, from London or Boston to catch the vibes.

Featuring the best of Japan for 36 years, with one of a kind displays of  windows and grasses and flowers plucked from the side of the road and arranged by Sayoko Hayasawa, the charismatic manager who is a force in herself and  always has time to welcome all visitors and hear their stories, laugh a bit, share a hug and sometimes a tear.

Tenugui, hand-dyed towels featuring dogs and cats and other things of daily life.

Whichever, wherever is home, one smiling lady is there to make me (and you) feel welcome.   Her headquarters is at Blue & White where she appears in uncountable forms.   Otafuku’s bright faces tells us we belong right where we are.

This once in a lifetime, original Otafuku sponge cake was the from scratch creation of dazzling granddaughter Ruby Momo Kaminsky, the artist of the doorway welcome on the first page.  Like Otafuku, Ruby welcomes all who come to play with her.  She knows what life is about and where home is.

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.