Reflections on 2024
Somehow 2024 has galloped by and I haven’t given you a single update. My apologies. But perhaps standing at the edge of 2025 I am better able to reflect upon the year as a whole, telling you what I have been doing with more patience and a little more perspective.
I began 2024 in Japan, but soon headed to America, where I turned my mother’s basement into a studio and experimented with door-sized ink brush paintings. My attempts were quite clumsy, but I loved the immediacy and flexibility of the medium. I tested brushes my dad saved from his father, ink my mother brought back from Japan, acrylic, tempera, printmaking ink, house paint, and even dirt.
During this time, my mother and I visited K-san twice, seeing more photos and documents, hearing more stories, and meeting her family. I was especially glad to read her mother’s memoir about her childhood in Ichiyama, her journey to California where she began raising her family, and her return to Japan. I have read accounts of H-bomb survivors before, but Mitsu-san’s story about cajoling her daughter (K-san’s younger sister, Mineko) to go to school that morning, touched me on an extremely personal level. She gave Mineko a special peach from their neighbor, promising it would be the last day she would have to go to school. Mineko never came home. Perhaps it is because I have seen so many photos of her and her children that I feel like I am a caretaker of her family’s memories, and their stories have blended into the stories of my own family.
When I returned to Japan it was still quite cold, but the giant plum tree in the backyard of Ichi Oku House was covered in pale pink blossoms. I began organizing my notes from my visits with K-san, editing audio that I recorded when I visited her, and beginning to write a series of essays. I also began building a forced-perspective paper room inside of one of the rooms in the house. I tinkered with sliding mechanisms for miniature doors decorated with ink brush paintings based on my experiments in America.
All the while I was pouring through books and photo albums, as well as cabinets and chests of drawers in the house. There was and is no end to the cleaning and yard work that could be done. While I got a rough draft of my paper room-within-a-room to a point where I was able to slide the doors open and closed, I did not feel like it was harmonizing with the writing that I was doing about the history of the house. Feeling frustrated, I decided to set it aside for the moment and I made a collage using the contents of a single cabinet. There was something incredibly pleasing about having the chaos contained within two tatami mats. However, my second attempt using clothes from a chest of drawers felt less successful.
Numerous friends and family from Japan, America, and Germany came to visit throughout the year, and it has been a pleasure introducing the house to them. My mom and her friends had so much fun digging through the treasures and giving me insights, marvelling at what the house must have been when they were children. During her visit, my mom and I spent several pleasant days re-papering some of the more badly ripped shoji screens that were allowing bugs to freely enter and exit the house. I think we both enjoy feeling some borrowed ownership of the house, without the weight of actual responsibility.
Friends in my generation who came to visit delighted in the nostalgia of the house, imagining the lives of the former occupants. Exploring it feels like a treasure hunt. Our youngest visitors are convinced they might find something of great value, unrecognized by the antique dealer who has already combed through the house’s contents. But certainly the most special visitors to come to the house were K-san’s daughter, Linda, and her family. While Linda came once many years ago, before the kitchen and bathroom were renovated, this was the first time her sons and husband had come to Japan. Snowy weather shortened their trip to Ichiyama, but it still felt like a gift to re-tie this connection from the present to the past that might have loosened and unraveled over time.
Surprising but unwelcome visitors to the house this year were the three giant bamboo shoots that pushed the wooden flooring and tatami up into the air. Our American friends were horrified and frightened. Our Japanese friends asked us if we ate the bamboo shoots after we cut them. We did not.
I shifted focus at the end of the summer to two local art exhibitions I had been asked to do in October. For the Light and Shadow exhibition at the Hamada Children’s Museum I designed and built a shadow puppet stage, puppets, and boxes that projected a giant interlocking shadow cityscape of windows, doors, and roofs. It was important to me that kids could see the different ways you can create shadows, and also that this is something they could do easily at home. When the show opened, it was wonderful to see adults and children creating their own shadow performances and having fun.
While the work that I did for the Hamada Children’s Museum was not directly related to my Ichi Oku House Project, I wanted my Ichi Oku Doors exhibition at the Sekishu Washi Museum to have more of a connection. Inspired by the doors in the house in Ichiyama and the history embedded in the layers of paper, fading, and stains, I wanted to create an installation about the life cycles of objects and houses, and the ways in which our communities evolve over time in ways we can’t always control. I collaged together old doors from another akiya in the area that Andy and I bought this year with photos that I printed onto local washi paper. I wanted to take advantage of the translucency of the paper and the way that it changes with light by layering the paper and distressing it in different ways. The photos that I used were copies of photos from albums I found in Ichi Oku House and K-san’s collection in America. I also used photos of the house where I grew up in America, and photos of the site where my grandfather’s house once stood about two hours away, but where nothing but trees remain.
Thanks to a generous grant from the Asian Cultural Council, this fall and winter I have had the opportunity to form new connections, do more research, and learn more about the history of Ichiyama and the greater Iwami region. This has included participating in the harvesting and painstaking process of cutting, steaming, and stripping the bark off of the kouzo plants that are used to make the washi paper that is so famous in this area, and Ichiyama in particular.
Makoto Sasaki-san at Kachiji Banshi (pictured above) is a sixth generation paper-maker and a wealth of information. He takes great pride in the connection between his current process and that of his ancestors. It has been equally interesting to work with the Kubota family (pictured below) in Misumi, and to see the differences and similarities in their methods.
Working with these artists is deepening the writing that I have been doing on cultural memory for my Ichi Oku House project. I am looking forward to the time that I have been given at MacDowell in New Hampshire in February to hone these ideas even more.
In 2025 I hope to welcome even more of you to Ichi Oku House. We look forward to your visit and wish you all a very Happy New Year!