Suburbs convenient

I went to Hushimi-momoyama station yesterday for the first time. I live in the center of Kyoto city. I realized that there are high quality towns in these kind of suburban. There are a lot of shops and cafes near the station compactly. It might be more convenient than city.

Elementary schools start teaching programming

I heard that Japanese elementary schools will start teaching computer programming from 2020. Everyone might think that some children must be unsuitable to programing. However, I have been involved to programing then I have felt that some of my clients don't admire about my efforts at all because of no idea of programing. I hope the education would make understanding to programmers better.

70s' cultic UFO trends in Japan

I didn't have any leisure this GW. I got some UFO books published in 1970s at an annual secondhand book fair near by. Yukio Mishima's UFO story "Beautiful Star" was made into a movie and will be released soon. The 70s' cultic UFO trends is as interesting as the novel.

A priest of my parent's home

I went a wake yesterday. The priest of my parents' home who was in his only forties died suddenly in myocardial infarction. I'm wondering if the former old priest, his father, who has been retired five years ago returns and manages their job. It was supposed to be hard.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has great collections.

I went to Tokyo two weeks ago for seeing the exhibition in Tokyo National Museum. They exhibit Japanese Classical art collection, which the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has.

In Meiji Era, about a hundred years ago, Japan was changing dynamically by the influence of western culture, and many Japanese old artworks and crafts were sold out. Additionally, Japanese government took a policy to avoid Buddhism culture to improve Shinto religious, which worship Japan’s original deities. It made many Buddhism statues destroyed mandatorily by Japanese themselves.

In that situation, Fenollosa and Bigelow bought variety kind of arts crafts, and Buddhism statues, and they took all of them home U.S.A. Fortunately, they respected these Japanese artworks, and tried to preserve them. After they died, they were donated to the museum. That’s why the museum has high quality and worthwhile Japanese old traditional art.

I was looking forward to meeting them when I hard that they come back to Japan in 2012, because I had been to the museum in Boston in 2008 to see Japanese art. However, I couldn’t see all of them because they didn’t always show all of them (especially valuable works) there and they were renovating some parts of their building just at that time.

When I went to the exhibition in Tokyo, I was surprised that those old classical works had very good condition. I realized that they were mended and maintained with respect by their enormous effort for a long term. I felt really thankfulness for the foreign people who deal with them regardless they were created in the far eastern little country.

I had some other surprised points. I am strongly interested in Rimpa art. Rimpa is a kind of way of art in Edo era. Ogata Korin is representative of Rimpa artist. The museum has one of his artwork, ‘Waves at Matsushima’. I have seen a lot of his artworks at many museums, but I have never seen more unique than it. It just shows some small stone island in wild wave. The artist used colors of orange, green and navy blue to these islands. This navy blue was very devastating expression for me. It was my discovery of Ogata Korin.

Second thing was Kano Tannyu’s artwork. Kano Tannyu was an painter in Edo era. ‘Kano-ha’ was a group of artists that began in fifteen’s century. They had very traditional way and techniques of art. However, I think that Kano Tannyu was a unique artist in their group, because I think that his screen structure was very simple and modernized. It was as the way of Rimpa as not Kano-ha. The museum showed one of his artworks in the exhibition. It was very small size of work, but I felt that it showed his unique aspect more strongly than his other works.

I found many new things for me in the exhibition. I’d like to go there again and I must do so.

Artworks of Sakai Houitsu

I went to Himeji city museum of art last month. They exhibited the work of Sakai Houitsu, Japanese Painter in the 18th century. This year is the 250th anniversary of his birth, and many museums held exhibitions of his work which were selected from Japanese collectors' collections.

He was the second son of the family of old Himeji's Daimyo, the feudal lord, so this museum made a big exhibition series at the month. Himeji is in the west part of Japan, but he was actually growing up in Edo, which was in the east part of Japan and the actual capital city at that period. At that period, families of some Daimyo had to live in Edo city, because the governor called it them to prevent from riot. Sakai Houitsu created his work there, the biggest city in Japan. In addition, the job of family as Daimyo was taken charge by his elder brother. It made him enable to spend a lot of time for art and make connections with many artists and poets in Edo.

At the beginning, he preferred to paint beautiful women as known as Ukiyo-e style painting or ordinal Japanese painting such as flowers, landscapes. After that, he found the artwork by Ogata Korin, who was a Japanese painter in 17th century. Houitsu was strongly impressed by Korin, the creator 100 years before for him.

Korin’s way of art was different from Japanese traditional way of painting. For example, they laid weigh on the construction of things, flowers, trees and creatures on a screen, with their own intention. They sometimes used even abstracted shape of creatures. It was like a modern graphic design. Houitsu learned a lot of things from these old art and improved them by his own sense of art.

I’m very interested in this process. My profession is digital creation, making digital animations, designing web site and developing software. I think I can learn something for it from the past art and how Houetsu created art with his background. Off Couse, I also enjoy the beauty of his artwork.

The source of modern art of Japan

A large closed up moon appears in the center of the first scene. The moon emits silver light. There are some flowers and leaves of bush clover left under the moon. The scene scrolls to right, then some bunch of bush clover are showed one after another making lines like waves and reflect the silver moonlight. The bunch of bush clover changes vain as the scene is scrolling, and leaves of vain are closed up, took far and close up again like beating out a rhythm.

In another creation, you are in a bamboo forest and you look at some golden bamboos as closely as you can see their joints. The scene scrolls to right, then you look a plum tree and blossoms. Two long branches have grown leftward like guiding you. You walk left over turf and find some bunch of azalea on the ground. Azalea’s flowers look like bowing you. You go ahead and find the golden vine leaves hang down from above the scene. You go the leaves closely, and the leaves occupy the full of scene.

There could be these kinds of expression in modern artistic movies. Actually, these are my explanation of the Japanese old picture scrolls. They were created by Tawaraya Sotatsu and Hon-ami Koetsu in the 16 century in Japan. Koetsu wrote some quotations of Japanese old poems with his calligraphy and Sotatsu painted what I explained above under these poems on the scrolls. They made the same kind of artwork as a series. Japanese deers or cranes are used as motif in other artworks. These motifs were painted more abstractly than realistically, and it effects the expression of poetic space in the scrolls.

I was impressed that the creations created in the 16th century have had the exactly modernized feeling, so I considered that they could create them by a kind of their predictive or future-minded ability. However, I changed my opinion recently. I think that the modern feeling that we are calling has already begun in this period. We can find one of sources of our modern art creation feeling in their artwork.