I have been back from Japan for over 2 weeks now and I am still processing what an incredible country it is, and this trip barely scratched the surface!
It all got off to a shaky start... After fourteen and a half hours in the air, on a longer route than usual so we could skirt both Russia and the Middle East, we arrived in Tokyo in a jet-lagged stupor. I hadn’t looked closely enough at the photos of our room on Booking.com, which was a rookie mistake. It was so minuscule that the only place we could open our suitcases was on top of the hob. It stank of onions and socks, and because it was located beside a motorway, we couldn’t even open the window. It was probably fine for a twenty-something backpacker, but not for a middle-aged textile designer with the nose of a police sniffer dog.
We tried to nap, but the whiff tormented me. Bone-tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep, so I lay there frantically googling “Tokyo hotels available now”. By the time Alex opened his eyes, I’d made an executive decision to throw money at the problem. I bundled him and our luggage into a taxi and gave the driver the address of a luxury hotel.
Once we’d checked in, we wandered out, cross-eyed with jet lag, our senses under assault. The scale of the buildings, the lights, the sounds and the smells made London feel like a nursery school of a city. Starving, we found our way to a tiny ramen bar someone had recommended, straight out of Blade Runner, and slurped the most delicious noodles of my life. Things were looking up!
Left: The ramen bar ceiling - there were signs everywhere saying 'No Photos' which was disappointing... how am I going to write my blog I thought? Anyway I asked, and was granted permission to take a photo of the ceiling and an artwork that depicted how many sardines went into the broth of each bowl. But not of the ramen! Top secret evidently!
I’ve been pondering how to sum Tokyo up. It is teeming with people, yet everything is so highly functioning and organised, and the micro-annoyances of everyday life here in England just don't seem to exist there. The train sits exactly level with the platform, so you can wheel your case effortlessly on board. There is no phone noise pollution on public transport; passengers go about their daily commute in Zen-like silence. Helpful staff are stationed everywhere to keep queues moving and to help confused tourists buy tickets from the unintelligible machines. Tokyo is enormous... it seemed to have 10 Oxford Streets and 7 Leicester Squares.
Architecturally it’s a mishmash, with every building in a different style and seemingly no sense of uniformity or planning, and yet the city is spotless and runs like clockwork. And everyone is so polite, helpful and considerate, in a way you are hard pushed to find in London unfortunately.
I just LOVED all the school kids I saw in their neat chic uniforms. And look at all their bags!
Old and new collide all over Japan. Technology rules, and you can’t even order your supper without a smartphone. Yet in one four-storey art shop, where an entire floor was given over to brushes and another to paper, buying a single sheet meant filling in a docket and copying out around 20 Japanese characters by hand. I was desperate to buy from this shop of dreams- and was about to be defeated until a patient shop assistant who had been watching my attempts came to the rescue.
We only had 2 days in Tokyo, and I spent one of them pounding the streets looking for beautiful vintage kimonos. My search proved (too) successful!
Left: me trying on one of many kimonos in on upmarket vintage kimono boutique. I came away with 2, one of them pictured in the picture above right.
Above: watching the exquisite packaging of one my kimono purchases.
All over Japan were Kimono rental shops, where Japanese (and tourists) would hire outfits and walk around for the day taking photos of themselves. Dressing in a kimono (kitsuke) is a real skill: layering, padding, and tying the obi. Most people under about 60 were never taught it. A rental shop includes the dressing, and usually hair styling too, so you arrive in jeans and leave fully kitted out in 30–40 minutes.
Above- photos of Japanese people and tourists dressed in Kimono. I thought it would be really fun for us to rent some and take photos of us in traditional dress- but somehow Alex made sure we ran out of time.
A small selection of printed washi papers ❤️
Kawaguchiko and Mount Fuji
Even though I loved Tokyo, we breathed a sigh of relief as we boarded the bus to Kawaguchiko, a lake near Mount Fuji. Our hotel had its own onsen (hot spring) and stunning views: the perfect antidote to the craziness of Tokyo.
View from our hotel room... heaven.
The reason for visiting this area was a pilgrimage to the museum of Itchiku Kubota, a kimono artist I have been obsessed with for over 20 years. He built the museum himself to house his spectacular collection of kimonos, in a spot with a view through the forest to Mount Fuji. I had emailed before our visit, begging to be allowed to take photos, but was refused. I was so disappointed, as I’m desperate to share his extraordinary work here! So all I can do is include a photo of his book and hope you’ll google his work.
A book and postcards I bought in the museum shop showing the work of Kubota.
I was so excited about this visit that we were the first ones there arriving before the museum opened. After taking off our shoes at the entrance, we were seated in front of an old television set and, in a flashback to my school days, shown a VHS video that must have been filmed in the 90s. We watched WASPish Americans with Princess Diana hair admiring his work at the Smithsonian in Washington, and learnt all about Kubota’s life and work.
Me in front of the museum gates before it opened, and a view through the gates.
Itchiku Kubota was born in Tokyo in 1917, the son of an antique dealer. At 20, he came across a fragment of a sixteenth-century textile called tsujigahana, and that moment changed his life. No records survived to explain the technique, so he devoted himself to reviving it: it is a method of tie-dyeing that involves tiny stitches and multiple rounds of over-dyeing. Unfortunately his creative explorations were interrupted when he was drafted to the front line in the Second World War, captured and held as a prisoner of war in Siberia. There, he described watching the glowing sunsets every night, and the thought of translating them into beautiful kimonos kept him going. Once released, he devoted himself to textiles, but he didn’t create his own version of tsujigahana until he was in his sixties, when he went on to produce his main body of work. I love hearing stories of artists creating their great oeuvres late in life. There’s hope for me yet!
Left; matcha tea and pancakes with view out into the beautiful garden. Right; the gardens of the museum were serene and beautiful.
I found the whole experience extremely moving, and not being allowed to take photos turned out to be a positive experience as it forced me to really soak up his art in a way I might not have if I’d been allowed to snap away with my camera. I stood in front of the kimonos, trying to absorb them right into my heart! Looking at autumn maple leaves on silk that captured the essence of what I could see through the museum windows is exactly what I spend my life striving for in my own work. Kubota’s use of colour is on another level from us mere mortals. He uses hues I didn’t know existed! And his sense of composition, the way the mountains and landscapes are arranged across the kimonos, is the work of a genius.
I was busy scribbling notes, when one of the guides tapped me on the shoulder. He didn’t speak a word of English, so I whipped out the Claude app on my phone and learnt that his name is Sakuo Miyahara and that he had been Kubota’s trusted assistant for 30 years, right up until his death. He was full of praise for his old mentor. I tried to ask him a few questions about working with him, and managed to understand that Kubota “had an enormous heart, deeper than the blue sea and higher than the blue sky. Even though I was a complete stranger, he treated me like family.”
It turns out the 'guide' Sakuo Miyahara (above left) is in fact the Museum's director Emeritus!
That afternoon we hopped on a cable car up the mountain to see if we could get a clear view of Mount Fuji. I had heard it is hidden by cloud most of the time, and so far on this trip it had been. But the Fuji gods were smiling on us: not only did we get a textbook view, with a ring of cloud just below the peak, but we were treated to a jaw-dropping sunset. The mountains faded into the distance, pine trees framed my photos, and suddenly it all looked like the work of so many Japanese artists that I have admired for a lifetime.
Mount Fuji in all its glory.
In my next post, I will be sharing my exploration of the crafts in Kanazawa, incredible Japanese gardens and temples galore.
