Small Miracles

The soft morning light glows gently through the shoji screens. It illuminates the porcelain electrical fittings on the dark wood ceiling above my futon in chiaroscuro. Birds twitter in the trees outside and frogs croak in the rice paddies beyond, but inside it is quiet, just the sound of my family breathing. I lay listening, watching the shadows slowly move across the ceiling, in no hurry to rise. The last few weeks have been hectic, I am trying to pace myself, but it is hard to find a rhythm. It will come. I just need to listen.




As these thoughts are passing through my mind, the town PA system rings the not quite Westminster chimes loudly down the valley, signalling “6:00 am, time to rise”, and ending in a signature click of static. I chuckle quietly to myself, as every-ones alarm clocks begin their daily chorus. Gradually the family begin to stir. I rise and Mika starts to get the children moving. Another day begins.


We all sit for breakfast together, sardines on saffron rice, a salad served in a bowl given me by Clive Bowen. We place our hands together in gratitude and chorus “Itadakimasu!” The kids chatter over breakfast, talking about their new friends, the upcoming tests, their sports clubs. They have settled in very well, their grades are good, I am very proud of them. I watch them head off for school, Sora and Canaan on their pushbikes, Rohan and Sean off to the bus stop, the sound of their dinosaur bells jangling into the distance.



It is about a year since Sora was diagnosed with fatigue fractures in her spinal column. It is caused by over training in sports, in Sora’s case basketball, and the specialist in Maebashi told us it would never heal. Our local doctor, however, had a corset made for her and gave her an exercise program anyway, with instructions to follow that program -not the program dictated by the basketball coach. After we had meetings with the school, she has been participating in the team on a restricted level, with regular checkups at the doctors. It has been a very difficult time for her, but she has been very brave. At last week’s check up, after x-rays and a thorough examination, the doctor gave her a clean bill of health! “The x-rays show the spine is straight and cleanly healed,” he said. “You don’t need to use the corset anymore, keep it as a souvenir.” It seems that the specialist was wrong, for which we thank god and the good advice of our local Doctor!



I return to the studio, which is becoming more functional with each working day. The light from the window reflects off the dark wooden decking, clean and waiting for me.




Now that it is summer we are not using the wood stoves for cooking so often. Instead, I often light a charcoal fire in the irori and cook over that. The pit is half full of ash now, and I level the ash off and rake it even each time I use it.





I have always felt that this is the true source of the stone gardens of Kyoto, though I have no proof to support that other than the beauty of these patterns that were once the heart and hearth of every home in Japan.





My work cycle begins with wedging the clay, blending two clays until they become a new homogenous body. The clay becomes marbled during the process, and like every part of the process it has an intrinsic beauty. I will wedge 300 kg or so today, in preparation for my “Hatsugama”, the first firing of exhibition work in the new kiln.





It takes time to get into a proper working cycle. In the last month I have managed to make and fire the first test firing, a rehearsal for the “hatsugama”. We need to know how the kiln will fire, with a balance of pots inside. Not work made for museums, vessels made for my family, simple and honest. We need coffee mugs, cups and saucers, green tea cups. It takes 400 pots to fill the kiln, so I make 100 of each. If they work out well, I’m sure that others will want them too.





The aesthetic of Mingei is based on the simple beauty of functional ware made for everyday use. So, too, is the art of tea, but in a much more specific way. For me, the making of pots is like a tree making leaves. I make them in order to grow; when they are finished they will nourish others, becoming a part of their lives. Each is an individual and unrepeatable expression of the beauty of nature given form through me, and the more beautiful and simple each part of the process is the more beautiful the results will be.





When I stood before the fire box, bathed in the light and heat of the wood flame, it was not by my effort alone. It was with the help and support of so many of you, and the grace of god, whatever you conceive that entity to be.





The kiln fired perfectly. It fired in ten minutes less than the estimated fourteen hours, with exactly 400kg of wood, to 1305C by the pyrometer and Seger cone 10. The reduction flame from the chimney blew red into the darkness like a phoenix rising into the night.





I opened the kiln on the morning of the third day after the firing, with Mika and the children there. It was perfect. The flame had blessed us with red and orange and gold, lustrous surfaces, Sumi-e like ash glazes and beautiful igusa straw markings. No two were the same, but each a precious crystallisation of all the elemental forces of nature that have helped form them. And yes, one of those forces is love.





I lined the pots up on boards and took them to the studio. The vessels stretched across the dark decking in elegant rows. There are no words to describe the feeling of seeing this, to have come full circle.





This has been a long journey; I thank you for sharing it. Now I stand at the beginning of a new journey; or perhaps a continuation, I cannot tell. Every step is always the first. Shimaoka sensei said to me once, “I have no secrets, but if you don’t ask, I won’t tell you.” I have no secrets, but I have learnt a great deal on this journey. I will continue to share what I have learnt with you as I can, perhaps a little more regularly as we settle down into our new lives. I am blessed. I owe a debt of gratitude to so many, for all of these small miracles.

Thank you.

One Year, One Day, One Moment

The fire glows dull gold through the opening at the bottom of the wood stove in the predawn darkness. The sound of the flame within roars a muted bass note to the soprano singing of the metal expanding with the heat. The kettle joins the ensemble and, if I listen very closely, I can hear the steady rise and fall of my family breathing in their futons on the tatami floor in the washitsu beyond. The fragrances of wood smoke and heating metal join those of tatami and coffee. I pick up my yunomi, it's surface hot against my fingers, the subtle texture of the chattered hip counterpointing the smoothness of the shoulder. Taking a mouthful of coffee, it's complex flavours flowing hotly round my tongue, I can feel it's passage as I swallow, it's warmth soaking into my chest.

None of this is extraordinary, at least not in the common understanding, but every moment of every day, every experience that touches my senses, every feeling that moves my soul is precious. I have always known this, that is why I chose to become a potter, why I live the life I do. I have not made pots for several months now, instead I have been a carpenter or a plumber or a myriad of other roles that a man must be in order to ensure the welfare and safety of his family. I have been a father, and a husband, and a friend, as best I could, for these are occupations which take precedence over all others.

Soon, I will be a potter again. My studio awaits me beyond the shoji screens, free now of the timber for the kiln shed. We have finally finished cutting the joints in the preloved posts and beams, and though they are not the work of a professional, they will do. Yesterday's snow will melt in a few days and I can begin the task of building the kiln shed, and then the kiln. But that is not today.

Today is for my family. A year ago today our lives were changed by the great earthquake. We were spared, and I am grateful for that blessing. So many have suffered so much loss, and my heart still goes out to them. It has been a long and twisted road this far, but we have not walked it alone and I am grateful for that blessing too. Thank you.

The road goes on, one step at a time, and we are moving forward. We have come a long way, and looking back it is a miracle that we have come this far in just one year. We have a long way to go, and though the way forward is unclear sometimes, we know it will open for us if we remain faithful and resolute. It is important not to forget the here and now, though, by dwelling on the past or longing for the future. Today is good and blessed, full of love and beauty.

The sun has risen from beyond the mountains, beams of golden light spear across the room to the dark wooden panels of the room beside me where my loved ones sleep. As these rays of light pass, the steam from the kettle on the wood stove dances with them and motes of dust sparkle in the eddies roiling above the hot stove. I will cook breakfast soon, and spend today quietly with my family, in gratitude. We will mourn for those who have been lost, pray for the relief of those still suffering and be thankful for our blessings. Thank you all for sharing this journey. The simple beauty and joy of an ordinary day is the most precious gift of all.

     

Home for Christmas

We are home. The snow has covered the world in a white blanket, the wind wuthers around the eaves, but we are home at last, warm and safe. The children sleep soundly in the washitsu, and Mika wraps presents at the kitchen table, as I write while I wait for the christmas pudding to steam on the wood stove.
This last month has been a whirlwind, and I am eternally grateful to all my friends who rallied together to get us into this house before winter. The first task was to clean the house free of dust and mold, remove the piles of accumulated trash and give ourselves a clean and healthy start. My friends travelled from all points and gathered for a working bee, working at fever pitch. Steve, who organised the event, made a video which is here on youtube. The upstairs floor was a single layer of boards with gaps between, warped with age a loosened by rusty nails. Any dust from upstairs would sift down to the rooms below, and any attempt at heating would leak up through the gaps and vanish into the rafters. Gennevieve, Debbie, Julie, Bill; Thank You.

Separating into four main groups, we tackled each challenge. One group was dedicated to the continuing clean up operation, cutting up the scrap timber from upstairs and stacking it around the old shed for winter. It is their efforts that are warming the house now. Giichi, Laura, Heather; Thank you.

Another group cleaned the mold, dust and soot from the downstairs walls and ceilings, and the children sleep soundly in that room right now. Jane, Jo; Thank you.

A third group tackled the kitchen, ripping up the old floor, laying damp proof sheeting, relaying the floor, putting in new studs and insulation, then laying a new floor on top of that. This evening the children helped me mix the christmas pudding, each making a wish as they stirred. We sat at the kitchen table for dinner and laughed and joked...Thank you.

The fourth group screwed down the ricketty floor/ceiling boards upstairs, layed new studs and insulation, then a new floor on top of that. With funds from donations from friends around the world we managed to buy enough materials to repair and insulate three rooms downstairs and the studio work space. With the cieling insulated and sealed, I can now keep the living and working space warm...Steve, Brendan, Takashi, Aja; Thank you.

We shared the work, and went where the help was needed. At breaks we would drink starbucks coffee essence (Thank you Startbucks!) while Bill played his guitar and sang...the children all helped, I gave them each a hammer, and in years to come they will be able to point and say,"That is where we fixed the floor" or " This is where I bent a nail...". This is their home, they have helped to make it real, it belongs to them.

Since then our young friend Raku has been helping, finishing the floor, filling gaps, sticking bubble wrap to windows...As I walked home from seeing the children off the school the other morning, the sound of his cello hummed across the snow, and as I entered the house it's music thrummed through the new floor, the whole house becoming a sound board.

I have made a door above the stairwell from an old sliding door, and it keeps the warm air downstairs where we need it. I hope that the upstairs will become a gallery in the future, but not this winter. It will take a lot more work to achieve that goal, this year I have more important things to do...

We moved in on the 15th of December, nine months to the day since we evacuated from Ichikai. A good time to start a new life. I bought a small fir tree that day, and this morning we set it in one of my large bowls in the washitsu and decorated it. The christmas tree from Ichikai I planted in the garden there when I returned to pack our bellongings, it belongs there. This is our new christmas tree, and I hope that it will grow along with the children. We sang carols as we strung the tinsil on the tree, hung baubles on the boughs and as I set the star on the top most point of the tree. Our home is already full of love and music and laughter, friends become family, a house becomes a home.

The work is far from finished, but that's OK. Tomorrow is christmas eve, and we will move the last of our belongings here in the morning. Because of you, who have sent us help when we needed it, we are home. Now we are truly safe, and I have what I have wished for...a home for christmas. Thank you.

God Bless, and Merry Christmas to you all.

Close to home

The typhoons of last month seem to have washed the colour from the mountains, revealing the sepia study beneath. The first snow has streaked the tip of Tanigawa Dake with white, three weeks earlier than usual. Summer has gone, Autumn has come and Winter is close upon her heels.

Much has happened since last we spoke, and plans never quite work out the way we expect. The time spent at Laura's pottery in Nagano was very productive, and I am eternally grateful to her and Giichi for their support. It did, however put a great deal of pressure on Mika and the children, fending for themselves in this new environment. My role, first and foremost, is to protect my family, and it became increasingly clear that I could not do so from a distance. We have come through so much this year, but there are other dangers much closer to home. I need to be here, with my family.

After seeing the children off to school I set off on foot up the hill towards Takumi no Sato. Our plans to build a new studio on the edge of the craft village there were put on hold while I was away. It seems that fate had a hand in this as well, for in mid Summer one of Mika's distant relatives came to offer us another option. The house and land where Mika's grandmother was born was vacant and derelict, and the inheritor who lives an hour away had no interest in it, would we like to buy it? By instalments of course, no hurry, we're family....


And so we went to see this house. It stands 3.6 kilometers from Mika's parents house, in the west precincts of Takumi no Sato. I approach it now, walking past the mulberry orchard and onto the cobbled driveway. The mulberry leaves were used to feed silk worms back in the days when the family bred them commercially, and the upper floor of the farmhouse was dedicated to the business of raising the caterpillars till they spun cocoons, then trading them to the silk mills in other parts of Gunma. Here, it seems, was the start of the silk road.

To the left of the driveway is a stone walled channel, and beside it a rice paddy farmed by another relative. To the right, behind the mulberries, are vegetable patches, untended and overgrown, and a persimmon tree laden with fruit and bare of leaves. The drive breaks through the hedge, bracketted by cedar trees, and there is the house. Built in the fifth year of the Meiji era, 1873, the year Japan adopted the gregorian calendar, it is a traditional farmhouse of pillar and post construction, with plastered wattle and daub on a bamboo framework for the walls. In many ways it reminds me of Tudor architecture, strange how different cultures find common solutions.

The cats come running towards me from the old shed to the left in the front yard, mewling for attention and, more importantly, food. Stomach love. I ruffle their heads and give them a feed in their new home. In the shed are old barrels and, yes, even a saddle. We brought our four cats from Mashiko after the earthquake, and now we have seven....life is a precious thing.

Around the house are logs and beams and miscellaneous odds and sods. The old man who lived here last, Mika's great uncle, had been a bit of a hoarder. Not a bad thing in moderation. He had also paved around the house with concrete slabs and rocks and old roof tiles and roofing iron and...as a result the drainage around the house wasn't all that good.

Entering the "Genkan" entry hall there is the fragrance of damp earth. I call out "Tadaima!" to the empty house, the customary Japanese "I'm home!", and slide the door closed behind me. To the right is the wood furnace for the bath, then the bathroom and pit toilet beyond. To the left is the kitchen and living space. In front of me is the new studio, half earth floor, half wooden deck. This was the work space for the farm. In the back corner are the old stables, partly filled with rotting firewood. Shimaoka sensei's studio smelt like this, a musty aroma, the fragrance of a freshly opened bag of clay. This room smells like a pottery. A dirt floor maintains an even humidity, allowing pots to dry evenly, and prevents dust from gathering thus averting the danger of silicosis. It is also easier to stand on for long working periods than a concrete floor.

The wooden deck was rotten, as were the floors throughout the rest of the house. But I could see the potential. I also needed to make pots, to make a living for my family. At first I repaired a bare minimum, I needed a wedging table and a throwing space. In one of the old stables I built a wedging table, using stone from the ruins of our old house and wood from repairs to the floor of this house. It seems to fit.

One corner of the decking was badly broken, so I rebuilt that first, making room for two wheels. I had brought my old electric wheel from Mashiko, but I also had Hamada sensei's wheel to restore. The bearings were rusty and the wood dry and cracking from thirty years of dissuse. With the help of the local garage we removed the bearings and derusted them. So many people told me to just get new bearings....blasphemy! We restored it with the original bearings and nails, oiled the wood and it shone like new.

With this basic work space I was able to get the order of cups finished, fired in Nagano and delivered to Utsunomiya by the skin of my teeth.

The rest of the house, however is still unlivable...yet. Debi and Julie came up to help me rip up the studio floor and restump the foundations. Since then I have reframed it and built a raised throwing bench to accomodate the Hamada wheel. I suppose my legs must be longer than his were, it will take some adjustment!

The loft is full of "stuff", timber, bamboo, old silk worm equipment. There were also frames from old "Kotatsu" tables which made perfect frames for the wheel wells. The covers from the storage boxes, number coded with kanji calligraphy made ideal covers, and the one to cover Hamada's wheel even says "六ろ" (Roku Ro or "6R"), a phonetic pun for the japanese word for potters wheel, "Rokuro". It is as if it was waiting for me. Or perhaps my whole life has been preparing me for this...

It has, however, become imperative that we move out of our temporary residence and into this house as soon as can be. Mika and ,more importantly, the children need a safe and stable environment. My task now is to get this house livable, just the minimum will do, before the winter comes. I have put a temporary wood stove into the living room, replaced the sink in the kitchen, got the bath furnace in working order. There is a room which we can use for sleeping, but we must clean out the loft and relay the floor/ceiling so that ancient dust and mold doesn't filter through the gaps in the single layer of boards onto the sleeping children. We need to insulate and stop up gaps to keep out the bitter cold of the mountain winter. We need to heat the studio and living space.

My task today to finish the deck so that it is safe to climb the stairs, and to lay the stones into the "irori" charcoal brazier to maintain the studio temperature. I have saved as many of the original flooring boards as I can, jigsawing them together to keep the spirit of the original architecture. The stones for the irori are from the shed in Ichikai, the one that was supposed to be the studio there, which burnt down the day the lease became valid in December 1999. They are Ashinuma stone, from which Mashiko "Kaki" glaze is made. I carefully chisel them into shape and fit them into the frame I have left in the floor.

It is time to go and get the children. Sean from the preschool, Rohan and Canaan have walked back to Mika's brothers house from primary school. I go to get Sora from basketball practice. She is allowed to practice again now, though the crack in her spinal column will never mend, a constant reminder of how I failed to protect her from an over zealous basketball coach. If only I had been here, if only I my request for more off days had been listened to...fatigue fracture it's called, apparently, but hard to diagnose and once the bone has started to set it cannot be cured. The muscle and sinew supports it now, so she must maintain her muscle tone for the rest of her life. She smiles at me cheerfully as she gets in the car. I drive back to our farmhouse, and the children do their homework as I cook curry on the wood stove.

Mika brings "Bachan" (Grandma) to have dinner with us here. Tomorrow "Jichan" "Grand dad" returns from hospital after his stroke. That will be a celebration! We enjoy our meal in the warmth of the wood stove, and then I light the bath fire and also the charcoal in the irori for the first time. Bachan sits beside the fire and tells a few stories about the family history of this house.

The boys and I have a bath, but then we must return to Mikas brothers house to sleep. Soon we will not be living patchwork lives. My friends are gathering over thanksgiving for one last push before the snow, and we hope to be in the house by then. I hope to have the kiln built by Christmas and I have great hope for the new year. We could not have come this far save for the help and support of all our friends throughout the world, all of you. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. We are are not quite there yet, but we are getting very close to home.

If you are coming our way, you are welcome. Our new address is;

121 Higashimine, Minakami-machi,
Tone-gun, Gunma-ken,
Japan 379-1418

T/F 0278-25-3982