RAKU CHA RYU

Some notes before I go to Awaji island. Since at least Napoleon III in France and the Jesuit missions, Japan has attracted the westerners’ eyes. It is also a country that likes to be looked at. One rarely meets a German that always say « Now that is very German ! ». Meanwhile, there is always some Japanese person (or a « Japafan ») that keeps on saying stuffs like « That is very Japanese, this is the real / true Japan ! ». To all these adepts of the land of the rising sun, one should not only learn Japanese, but also learn Japan . The myth of a knowledgable Japan In What is called thinking ? , Martin Heidegger wrote :  «  What does it mean to learn ? It means that what we are doing and not doing is the echo of the revelation each time of the essential. We learn thinking by noticing what needs to be kept in the thought.  »  (fair warning : it’s my super rough translation form French here.) Long story shor...

A mountain, a tea-bowl and thousands of pictures Few days ago, I was looking at one of Sasaki Kyoshitsu's  chawan  as I was making my own tea bowls in his workshop. Mt Fuji's shape was arising in bone white color on its shiny black side. It felt like it had appeared before me before a dark stary night. It gave quite a contrast with the gentle breeze of the early June and its almost shadowless sunshine. So I started to wonder : why is Mt Fuji so fascinating ? Mt Fuji is certainly a landscape in itself. No need to draw anything around it nor to detail which face of it you are painting. Its shape is enough to make it recognizable on prints and advertisements. During my first trip to Japan, I could not see Mt Fuji and, at that time, I did not understood why the Japanese fancied this mountain so much since it is not so high nor peculiar. I then thought that the Japanese loved their unique "big" mountain like some villages in France love their only church.  ...

Japanese Pendulum Almost any westerner that wishes to write about Japan is in search of a "definition" of Japan. Most of the times, this definition cannot escape the opposition between the "authentic" Japan of untouched beauty that was  and that is not exactly anymore and the Japan of rush hours, nervous music and the thousand colors of synthetic clothes. Is there a way, a dialectic, to make peace between these two Japan- s ? After all, it is the same history that includes the zen temples and the poormen's casinos named pachinkos . But, maybe, trying to do that would equal to being too philosophical about it and not enough Japanese. To desperately want a simple coherence in history is sometimes not the best choice. A Japanese potter (and a famous artist) once wrote : Swinging like a pendulum I proceed, Never lingering in one place, Let wandering be the true state of being — Raku Kichizaemon XV As Kichizaemon suggests, we ...