Word: tatami
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is a question Japanese carver Koryu Kawaguchi asks as well. On the outskirts of Tokyo, the 70-year-old master carver sits on a tatami mat, his workbench and tools covered with a fine ivory dust. In his hands is an ivory figurine of the Merciful Mother Kannon, which he has been carving for a month. Beside him sits his son Ryusei, 37, a fourth-generation ivory carver. The elder Kawaguchi is a gentle man with a reverence for the gleaming white medium he has spent his lifetime bringing to life. His eyes are weak from the strain...
Japanese style? Japan is all about aesthetic discipline and refinement: it is a tidy place where ordinary buildings are Zen compositions, where cities fit together as ingeniously as a GoBot, a place where restraint and respect for tradition (rock gardens, ikebana, interior space denominated in tatami mats) come naturally, where advertising aspires to art, where even the landscape seems well designed...
...common fantasy of Westerners that there was once an Old Japan (samurais, geishas, moon watching from the tatami) that was destroyed after 1945 by the trauma of Westernization, so that the New Japan ceased in some basic way to be Japanese. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the Japanese do, and always have done, is much more subtle. They adapt what they need from other cultures. They seem always to be submitting-sometimes masochistically-to cultural colonizations, of which the American is only the most recent. But what they make of the acquired form is invariably Japanese...
This combination of cleverness, skill and shibusa, rather than originality, accounts for the excellence of Japanese design. Its continuity extends from the 17th century Katsura Imperial Villa, whose sparse, shoji-screened rooms influenced modern architecture, to the just completed Keio University library; from tatami mats to Sony's new Flamingo record players...
After we had set out on the tatami our quilts and pillows of buckwheat chaff and were lying and listening, there started up in the near pines an unearthly sound. Out it went, then from farther away returned a call and, from farther yet, still another, until the slopes rang with cries. I asked what bird it was that made that noise. "Can it be a real bird?" Tadashi said. "Wild monkeys also live in these mountains." The last thing he said was, "Who sleeps with such a bird going...