"Harvesting the world's profusion"
Gufudo Watanabe

by Andy Couturier (C) 1999
Kamikatsu, Tokushima, Japan

  
 
Articles from the Japan Times series "Alternative Luxuries"
(each article will be rewritten into a book chapter in the forthcoming: A Different Kind of Luxury)
  
     
 
Previous Article | Table of Contents | Next Article
  
  "In Japanese, we call that shrub an asebi," says botanist and potter Gufudo Watanabe. Without a pause, the sinewy man with the graying goatee tells me the two other common names in Japanese, the Latin name, (pieris japonica) and the English common name (Japanese Andromeda).  
  Watanabe is like a walking encyclopedia of not only plant lore, but also of Western and Eastern philosophical terminology, Indian culinary spices, ancient history, art theory and word etymologies.  
   
  He can also read and write both Hindi and Nepali, and can give you the Japanese for such arcane philosophy terms as "phenomenology" or "existentialism." Usually, however, he's just pottering around in the garden.  
  "What I really am is a collector," says Watanabe. "Currently I'm focusing on fragrant plants: flowers, herbs and spices. I'm fascinated by all plants--weeds, cacti, fruit trees--but I tend to concentrate on things with an aroma."  
   
  Visitors to Watanabe's place in the mountains are often invited around his extensive tangled gardens that fall away in steep terraces from his house on the ridge top.  
  "This is a relative of the morning glory," he tells me pointing out a large white flower on a vine emitting a thick, beguiling fragrance. "It's quite rare outside of Japan, and it blooms only in the evening."  
   
  "Over here is a strawberry guava tree. It's a tropical plant, but I have had some success with it here in the mountains because we're only at 1,000 feet of elevation."  
  Watanabe has taken me through his garden more than a dozen times by now, but I am almost never introduced to the same plant twice. There are heirloom varieties of Indian turmeric, aromatic bushes of lemon verbena, purple spikes of lavender, over 14 varieties of camellia and long, thick sponge gourds hanging pendulously from bamboo trellises.  
   
  The profusion of exotic plants in their idiosyncratic irregularity speak, I think, of Watanabe's bemused and endless curiosity.  
  "Each kind of plant," says Watanabe, "has its own personality: height, taste, shape, color of flowers, the way it bears fruit and changes through the seasons. Human beings can never create variety like that."  
  Watanabe's wife Atsuko laughs, "Gufudo doesn't like to grow many normal plants here--things that our family might be able to eat on a regular basis. I have to grow all those myself."  
  Of all his many fascinations, perhaps his greatest is with the chili pepper, capiscum frutescens. He can tell you the various characteristics and growing conditions of Habaneros and Chipotles, the uses and relative spiciness of the Jalapeno and the Louisiana Hot.  
   
  He can often be seen at dinner grinning and wincing as he chomps on a single dried pepper held between thumb and forefinger, the muscles in his face contorting into virtual Himalayas of pain.  
  Every autumn he prepares his yearly supply of achar, a spicy citrus pickle, using a south Indian method he learned on his travels in the sub continent. In his recipe, he uses local yuko, a thick skinned lime-grapefruit, and adds fenugreek, mustard, turmeric and, of course, ground chili paste.  
  During his travels in India, Watanabe took painstaking notes in his Indian schoolboy-type notebooks on the various dishes and delicacies that were set before him.  
   
  "Sometimes before I finished drawing and coloring the pictures," Watanabe relates, "the plates of food would have gotten completely cold. But that was OK with me, because I could always make them again later once I had them down."  
  After we have come in from the garden I ask if I may look again at these travel journals. Then, at the dining room table in the dark, wood-paneled room resonant with the smell of cedar, I sit under the single light bulb and pour over these meticulously illustrated masterpieces. Each one reveals his boundless capacity to be interested in everything.  
  Between the pages on which he has glued receipts for bed bug-ridden accommodations and inter-city bus transfers, I find finely sketched details from temple stone carvings, panoramas of Indian village life, peasants drawing well water, hand-made cooking implements, intricate brass pitchers and oxen-powered farm machinery. Each is labeled in Japanese and Hindi, and contains extensive explanations.  
  It is as if he is harvesting the world of all its amazing variety, amassing thousands of bits and pieces and storing them, either in his sketch book, in his garden or in his mind.  
  Watanabe draws much of his inspiration for his pottery from the art of Asian tribal minorities.  
  "There's an odd humor to it, a strangeness" he says. "It's as if the art itself doesn't care a damn about you. It's not trying to attach itself to you, to say 'Please buy me and take me home.'  
  "Many craftspeople in Japan can achieve works of incredible refinement, but I find much of it uninteresting. I want to make things that are artless, with rough, strange, childlike lines. That's why I'm trying to train myself to be without technique, to be talentless. But I find it almost impossible to do."  
  Watanabe is particularly inspired by the totemic animal figures and religious items of tribal peoples of Persia and the Dekkan Plateau in South India. "Their art doesn't reek of human interpretation," he says. "Somehow it's distanced from the human character, impersonal. Their figures are almost expressionless, but not quite. I find that very fascinating."  
  Whether it's pursuing his interest in plants, the history of the Japanese language, currents in aesthetics, or studying Heideger into the wee hours of the night, the key for Watanabe is freedom.  
  "That's why I chose this life in the mountains, to be around nature and to be free."  
  "Before I went to India, I had this idea that I could be totally free and live with almost no money. But when I was traveling with the Sadhus in India, walking everywhere, sleeping at night on temple floors, I came to understand that I could do it."  
  Isn't it different however, I ask him, being poor by choice, and being forced into poverty by circumstances?  
  "In India, contrary to the common perception, there are plenty of people consciously choosing a life of little money," Watanabe explains. "They put more emphasis on having a lot of time, or being in nature, or pursuing spiritual things.  
  "Of course there are also a lot of people suffering from impoverishment. But an awful lot of them are enjoying their lives without money. Many of those think that if they just had money they could have even more fun.  
  "But I have grown up here in Japan, seeing the life of money (not that I've ever lived it myself!), and it's quite easy to see that it doesn't necessarily lead to more pleasure.  
  "For myself, I'm not interested in working in a city, competing with other people or giving up my own way of thinking and way of doing things. If I chased after money, I wouldn't have my freedom anymore. It wouldn't be worth it. I enjoy my life too much just as it is."  
  And, walking outside into the sharp, invigorating air, seeing the densely forested ridges, the stonework terraces covered with moss and the deep folding valleys under the crisp evening sky, I can understand exactly why.  
     
 
Previous Article | Table of Contents | Next Article
  
  It is OK to copy, print and forward these articles for non-commercial purposes BUT please just send me a brief email at andy@theopening.org along the lines of "I have copied/printed/forwarded this article" to let me know that you have done so. Thanks.