Japan - Part 1
Author's note: In February of 1998 — twenty-five years ago this month — I had the opportunity to travel to Japan for the purpose of studying bonsai. This qualifies as a "once in a lifetime" event because I have never been there since and have no plans to return in the foreseeable future. But it was a unique experience in other regards as well. The way the adventure came to be was fairly unusual, and what I learned from it was something other than what most bonsai enthusiasts would likely have derived from a similar experience. My time in Japan is worth examination because it had lasting effect on all that followed in my bonsai career, even if that effect was not necessarily what would have been expected.
Shortly after the Japan trip I wrote the following essay about it, which was published in "International BONSAI" magazine. This piece of writing offers a good overview, written at a time when the experience was still fresh in my mind, and so it is republished here as a means of introducing the topic. I have chosen to present the essay just as it was written twenty-five years ago. No attempt has been made to update the information, so certain parts of it clearly pertain to conditions that have subsequently changed. For example, I describe the Arboretum as being "an up-and-coming new public garden," which it was in 1998, although today that description fits no better than a child's shirt would fit a young adult. The Takagi Museum in Tokyo no longer exists. Sadly, many of the people I refer to in the present tense in the essay are no longer living today, including Dr. Creech, Mr. Kato and Mr. Nakamura. Republishing it in its original form allows this writing to function as a sort of time capsule, even as it provides the essential outline of events as they transpired.
A Bonsai Trip to Japan
For years the question had dogged me. In any conversation I had concerning my work as curator of the bonsai collection at the North Carolina Arboretum, the person with whom I was speaking would ask, “Have you ever been to Japan? Have you ever seen the bonsai in Japan?”
Somehow in the minds of most people, a visit to the land of the rising sun was a prerequisite of my profession.
As the title of this article has already revealed, I finally had the opportunity to visit Japan. What’s more, my visit was hosted by the Nippon Bonsai Association and the sole reason for my being there was to be immersed into the culture of Japanese bonsai. My one-month stay coincided with the renowned Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition, the premier bonsai show in Japan held annually at the Tokyo Art Museum. I also visited Omiya, the famous bonsai village, as well as the Takagi Bonsai Museum in the heart of Tokyo. Best of all, however, was the honor of studying one-on-one with Mr. Susumu Nakamura, a director of the Nippon Bonsai Association and one of the leading bonsai authorities in Japan. In short, it was a bonsai lover’s dream come true and the experience of a lifetime.
Background
None of this happened overnight, and it couldn’t have happened at all without the intervention of one of the true heroes of American bonsai, Dr. John L. Creech. As Director of the United States National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., it was Dr. Creech, more than any other person, who was responsible for securing the donation of fifty-two magnificent bonsai from the Nippon Bonsai Association to the people of the United States in the mid-1970s. This gift formed the basis of what is now the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum.
When Dr. Creech eventually retired to North Carolina, he became involved as a member of the board of directors of the North Carolina Arboretum, an up-and-coming new public garden that is part of the University of North Carolina system. During that time, an opportunity arose for the North Carolina Arboretum to house a bonsai collection and I was given the job of caring for it. Dr. Creech took an immediate and personal interest. Through the years, as I studied at the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum and with some of the outstanding bonsai artists in America, Dr. Creech would always say, “You’re doing great… but you’ll never really understand bonsai until you go to Japan.”
Finally, when the time came that he thought I was ready to make the most of the experience, Dr. Creech contacted his old friend, Mr. Saburo Kato, Chairman of the Nippon Bonsai Association. Backed with letters of support from Arboretum Executive Director George Briggs and several American bonsai luminaries, Dr. Creech petitioned Mr. Kato to have the Nippon Bonsai Association accept me as an official student from the United States. After a half-year deliberation, Mr. Kato consented and arrangements were made. Fundraising began, orchestrated by Dr. Creech. The response from individuals and bonsai organizations in the region was generous and humbling.
Introduction to Japanese Bonsai
On February 2, 1998, this exciting international exploration began when the jet landed at Narita International Airport in Japan. My first look at genuine Japanese bonsai was in the town of Omiya, famous as the home of many of the finest bonsai nurseries in the world.
Mr. Nakamura was my guide here and our time was limited, so we visited only two of the nurseries. The first belonged to Mr. Hiroshi Takeyama, whose excellent work has long been featured in International BONSAI magazine. The other was the nursery of Mr. Saburo Kato, the venerable Chairman of the Nippon Bonsai Association, best known for his large group plantings, particularly of collected Ezo spruce.
Garden display outside the residence and nursery of Mr. Takeyama.
Display area at Mr. Kato’s bonsai nursery.
The bonsai at both of these places were stunning. Even after years of pouring through books and magazines studying countless pictures of the great aged bonsai from Japan, nothing could have prepared me for the marvel of standing before the living trees themselves. All of them were apparently in perfect health, meticulously groomed, planted in exquisite containers, and everything I saw looked old.
At both nurseries there was a garden display area near the owner’s residence, and adjacent to that a growing area with trees lined out on benches and an enclosed work area. There I saw workers and apprentices laboring with great purpose at the endless task of maintaining the many wonderful trees.
At each site, Mr. Nakamura and I were invited into a visiting room to sit on low seats before a tastefully arranged tokonoma, drink green tea, and eat curious Japanese pastries while enjoying pleasant conversation with our host. Unfortunately, my understanding of the Japanese language is limited to the words for good morning, thank you and I’m sorry, excuse me, so Mr. Nakamura, who speaks English very well, was kind enough to act as my interpreter.
Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition
Advertising poster for the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition.
It’s probably a good thing that I went to Omiya early on and overcame the shock of seeing living Japanese bonsai for the first time before attending the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition. This annual extravaganza, organized and presented by the Nippon Bonsai Association, is billed as an “amateur” show, although that is misleading.
Many of the trees have been designed by leading Japanese bonsai artists and are boarded at professional nurseries, but they are owned by non-professionals and so qualify for the show. The Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition is a juried exhibition and the competition for admission is intense, despite the large entry fee required before a tree is even considered and the additional fee that is paid if the tree is actually selected. Having a bonsai displayed at the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition is more than just a great honor, however. It can dramatically increase the market value of a tree, and winning one of the coveted Koku-Fu prizes looks very good indeed on any bonsai’s resume.
Japanese winterberry (Ilex serrata) on display at Koku-Fu. The two signs in front of the tree indicated that the specimen is a previous Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition award winner, and is also an officially recognized cultural treasure of Japan.
Given all this, the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition is widely regarded as the most important bonsai show in Japan, and the quality of the work presented is outstanding. As a guest of the Nippon Bonsai Association, I had the rare privilege of witnessing the show being set up, watching as the proud and anxious owners arrived with their trees and fussed endlessly with arranging their displays. Each entry was given the same amount of space with a covered table and a plain off-white backdrop. All the bonsai were displayed on finely-crafted wooden stands, works of art in their own right, and most displays featured accent plantings in addition to the main tree. The range of plant species featured was surprisingly varied, although pine and maples predominated. Japanese five-needle pine, Pinus parviflora, was by far the most prevalent. There was also a strong showing of Japanese flowering apricot, Prunus mume, due to the fact that the show took place during their flowering period.
Bonsai exhibits being set up at the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition. The people handling the trees are apprentices.
An overview of one section of the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition (photo taken before doors opened to the general public.)
A Japanese five-needle pine (Pinus parviflora) on display.
The Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition runs for ten days. I was there all day for every one of them. Though it certainly was a pleasure, I also had work to do there as part of my formal training with Mr. Nakamura. Aware that my educational background was in art, Mr. Nakamura had directed me to use the exhibit as a life drawing class and to sketch as many of the trees as possible. He felt that this exercise would challenge me to study each tree more closely, to observe its design and composition, and to see more clearly each tree’s strengths and weaknesses.
The conditions for carrying out this assignment were less than ideal. One problem was that the height at which the trees were displayed was not conducive to proper viewing by a person who stands 6’ 2” tall, so I was obliged to bend or squat down to get the correct perspective. On top of that, I had to deal with the thousands and thousands of people who came each day to see the exhibition. At times it was so crowded that there was literally no choice but to be swept up in the orderly shuffling movement of the crowd through the show.
I wound up sketching sixty-eight of the two-hundred-sixty-five trees. And as Mr. Nakamura predicted, I learned a great deal about the art of bonsai in the process.
A young Westerner sketching bonsai at Koku-Fu (the armband indicating that the wearer had official authorization to be doing the activity.)
As a director of the Nippon Bonsai Association, Mr. Nakamura’s personal involvement in the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition is considerable. In addition to helping to plan and organize the event, he also writes descriptions of the trees for the catalog that commemorates the exhibition and serves as one of the judges in the selection process for both entry into the show and the awarding of prizes for excellence. In this capacity, he is known as the most critical and demanding judge of bonsai quality. Another important responsibility for Mr. Nakamura is his role as official ambassador for the Nippon Bonsai Association to all Western visitors who come to the exhibition. In my time there, I met people from Italy, Russia, Great Britain, Hawaii, California and Chicago. There were people from many other states and nations in attendance, each graciously received and taken through the exhibition by Mr. Nakamura.
My description of the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition would be incomplete without a mention of the vendors’ area. Not in the Art Museum with the tree displays, it was located nearby in a separate building, with a shuttle service providing transportation between the two. It was unbelievable to me to see how much was available for sale, and how good the quality of it was. There were finished bonsai of every size, some of which looked as if they could have just as well been on display in the exhibition. These highly refined old specimens were priced for hundreds of thousands of yen. Also, training plants, pots, slabs, viewing stones, stands, fertilizer, tools and accent statuary filled three stories of a large building, as well as a vast outdoor area. It was an amazing reminder that in Japan bonsai is a viable, albeit specialized, commercial industry.
Takagi Bonsai Museum
While in Tokyo for the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition, I took the opportunity to visit the Takagi Bonsai Museum, a neat and interesting place located on the upper floors of a corporate skyscraper in a very busy part of the city. The museum houses a private collection of bonsai owned by a wealthy businessman and is open to the public for viewing. On the roof of the skyscraper is a unique viewing area where visitors may sit and contemplate a very large old five-needle pine and several smaller bonsai, displayed in a Zen-like garden setting, complete with a shallow reflecting pool and a living screen of bamboo around the perimeter, with the tops of other tall buildings peeking from behind. Out of sight, on a lower rooftop of the same building, is a growing area where many fine specimen trees are lined out on benches. These trees are rotated out to be displayed in the main exhibit area inside the building the floor below the rooftop, then returned to the growing area after several days. In this way, the exhibit inside is constantly changing.
The design of the main exhibit area is clean and open, tastefully done. In addition to the bonsai on display there is also intricately carved antique furniture, displays of great old calligraphy and artwork on scrolls, and ancient manuscripts in glass cases. One flight down is another large exhibit area; this one for special non-permanent displays. When I was there, an impressive collection of bonsai containers was featured, including some startlingly modern designs. Some of these were such a radical departure from the traditional dignified subtlety of bonsai pots that I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of tree one would plant in them. As far as I know, there is no other public display of bonsai like the Takagi Bonsai Museum to be found in Japan.
Lessons from Mr. Susumu Nakamura
The experiences of Japan thus far – visiting Omiya and the Takagi Bonsai Museum, roaming through the Koku-Fu Bonsai Exhibition for days on end – would by themselves have made an exciting and useful adventure. The best, however, was still to come. The last ten days of my stay were spent in intense study with Mr. Nakamura at his Shonan School of Bonsai
The view outside Mr. Nakamura’s Shonan School of Bonsai, which was adjacent to his home in Yokohama.
The rooftop nursery at Mr. Nakamura’s nursery and school.
Another growing area at Mr. Nakamura’s nursery and school.
Unlike most of the important bonsai authorities in Japan, who are all centered in Omiya, Mr. Nakamura’s garden and school are located in Yokohama, a large port city to the southeast of Tokyo. Again, unlike most of his peers, Mr. Nakamura’s main focus is on teaching and not on sales. He does buy and sell bonsai, and tools and pots as well, but this seems to be done as an adjunct to his work as a teacher. He offers classes several times a week at his school and also travels to nearby cities for classes there, but demand for him as a teacher has taken Mr. Nakamura to places all over the world. He has taught in India, Australia, New Zealand, all over Europe, and many places in the United States, a country he has visited every year for the last two decades.
As I previously noted, Mr. Nakamura is known as a strict judge of bonsai quality, and I can now testify to his being a stern and demanding teacher as well. During all my time with him prior to stepping into the classroom, Mr. Nakamura and I had enjoyed relaxed and cordial relations. Once I became an official student, however, it seemed to me that he became more formal, more professional and more critical. He was still the same pleasant and generous host, but as a teacher Mr. Nakamura was all business and no nonsense. He told me, “My other students do bonsai as a pastime, so it is okay if they have fun. You are an official United States student to the Nippon Bonsai Association, so I push you hard. There is little time”
Mr. Susumu Nakamura demonstrating group planting technique for students at his school.
My first day of instruction illustrates the point. Upon arriving, Mr. Nakamura presented me with a tree from his nursery. The small Japanese five-needle pine, old and somewhat out of shape, was certainly not one of the many finer trees in his collection. He told me to draw a design for this tree’s future development, so I sketched two different concepts. He reviewed these and then proposed his idea which was considerably different, using his own drawing talent to illustrate what he saw. He then told me to begin working and left the room. For all the time I’ve spent doing bonsai work (it is my profession after all), it was curious how tentative and uncertain I felt about doing anything to that simple little tree. Starting slowly and then gaining in confidence, I proceeded to execute his design to the best of my ability. There was ample pruning required, but the bulk of the job lay in the wiring, which took in excess of four hours to complete.
While I was so engaged, Mr. Nakamura returned to the room and began working on another of his trees, sitting silently with his back toward me. I reached a point where I felt he ought to review what I had done and I asked him to do so. “Are you finished?” he asked. I knew better than that, so I repeated that I thought it would be good for him to look at what I had done. “Tell me when you’re finished,” he replied, without turning or looking up from his work. I took ten more minutes to double check everything and made a few adjustments, then I told him, “Okay, I’m finished.” In my mind I was pretty well prepared for what came next.
I had wired just about every branch on the tree and taken care to do a neat job, because I knew it was going to be scrutinized very closely. Still Mr. Nakamura found fault with the wiring and, moreover, the styling, pointing out that where I was attempting a windswept style design the tree looked more like a slanting style bonsai. He gave some advice about the correct form for windswept, made suggestions for improvement, then cut a bunch of wires and told me to do it again. This was what I had expected, but even so I had to bite my tongue as I redid the work, incorporating the changes as directed. Once again, I told him I was finished, and this time when he reviewed my efforts he let them pass. The tree looked a lot better after I had done things Mr. Nakamura’s way. I suppose that’s why he was the teacher and I was the student.
My sessions with Mr. Nakamura continued in more or less this same manner throughout my time with him, although he did relax a little bit after the first few days. I worked on other trees in his collection, following his instructions and then having him review the finished work with his critical eye for detail. I was very impressed with how well-trained his eye is, how quickly he can see into a given tree and find what is best about it and bring it out in the design; how quickly he comes up with solutions for any problems a tree presents. He returned repeatedly to my drawing ability as a tool of understanding bonsai design and composition.
Mr. Nakamura, making his point using bonsai images in books and show catalogues, during my study period at his school.
In one exercise, Mr. Nakamura brought out a stack of books, catalogs of important exhibits of great Japanese bonsai, and told me to select trees that I thought could be made better and then had me draw out my ideas for an improved design. These drawings, as well as the original bonsai they were based upon, were then reviewed in detail, providing Mr. Nakamura with a springboard for discussion of his views on styling and design.
During our many hours together I was also able to glean a wealth of technical information, specifically concerning species that are represented in the North Carolina Arboretum’s collection. One very interesting technique, which I had never heard or read about before, concerned the pruning of beech buds. The commonly prescribed method for pruning beech in springtime, when the goal is promoting back-budding on established branches, entails trimming the newly emerging shoot back to just one or two leaves. The time is somewhat critical with this, because if the shoot is allowed to elongate and harden off, pruning back to one or two leaves at that time will not produce the desired effect. In the method Mr. Nakamura shared with me, the unopened bud itself is pruned back by one-half to two-thirds, depending upon its placement and vigor. This pruning is done in March (in the Yokohama area) when the buds become swollen and elongated, just prior to breaking open. I tried this new method on several American beech, Fagus grandifolia, I have growing at the Arboretum, and the results have been good.
Mr. Nakamura also delved into his own personal philosophy of bonsai, and gave me a paper he had written on the subject. He cited the traditional Japanese terms often associated with bonsai, Wabi and Sabi, which denote feelings of calmness, humility, simplicity, loneliness and antiquity. To this he added the Chinese concept of Ga, referring to a sense of elegance and grace — never loud, showy or coarse. “Therefore,” he wrote, “in my opinion, even if a bonsai is powerful, dazzling or intricate, if it does not have Ga then I cannot say it is a good bonsai.” He went on to advise me that one who seeks to be a bonsai artist must be forever renewing his or her knowledge, striving to keep a free and open mind while approaching each tree with a fresh view toward using the plant’s natural characteristics. His final words of encouragement to me were these: Work hard!
Return to the States
In the four months since my return from Japan I have spent many hours reflecting on all I saw and learned. In this essay, I have barely scratched the surface of what I experienced. Before the trip, I had some vague idea that its effect on me would be like that of a lightning strike – blinding and immediate, dramatically changing everything. In reality, the effect was much more subtle than that, but it has definitely altered the way I see and think about bonsai. It is a peculiar and wondrous thing, this practice of cultivating miniaturized trees and landscapes in decorative containers.
Now that the question of whether I have visited Japan has been satisfied, a bigger question in my mind is this: Does a person have to be Japanese, or at least attempt to think like a Japanese, in order to get to the core essence of bonsai? Or is there enough substance to bonsai as an art form, with real connections to the human psyche that it can stand independent of cultural identification and become truly universal? Can we who are outside of Japan ever hope to produce work that is as artful and accomplished without being imitative? Can we find our own voice in this? What I learned serves as a springboard to further thought and discussion about this topic.