Word: washiness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Christo, whose island-fringing project in Miami's Biscayne Bay-as Japanese as a Monet, blooms of pink on the still water-caused great excitement on the other side of the Pacific. It is possible to find current work of real merit, like the exquisite objects of washi (handmade paper) with tones and twigs embedded in them, by the Kyoto artist Shoichi Ida. Yet the resignation with which artists accept their secondary role is almost as troubling as its opposite, the gross commercial ambitions of the American art world...
...pronoun I is a basic starting point: ego, je, ich, io, ya. In Japanese, where nothing is that simple, the word has two dozen or more forms, depending on who is talking, and to whom, and the social relationship between them. An elderly man might refer to himself as washi, but his wife would say watashi, or, for that matter, atakushi, or atashi; their daughter might say atai and their son boku. Then there is temae, which means both you and I. But the Japanese often evade these social difficulties by dropping all pronouns entirely...
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