"Sustaining the Aesthetic of Ancient Japan"
San Oizumi

by Andy Couturier (C) 1999
Mizunami, Gifu

 
 
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)
  
     
 
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  "I don't expect to have a particularly long life," San Oizumi tells me; "there are too many dangerous things going on in the world." Given the quiet, protected feeling of the room in which we are sitting, it seems a rather incongruous statement.  
  I'm speaking with the philosopher-potter in the resonant chamber of the circular tea room he has dug out of a thick clay bank of the mountainside behind his house. The walls are coated with a white plaster type substance, and the small, bell-shaped room gives a soft echo to our voices. The light is low and the gentle aroma of hand-ground green tea powder combines with the womb-like feeling to produce a sense of great peace and relaxation. I can feel the deep aesthetic sensibility brought to the creation of such a space, as well as the gentleness and warmth of the man who created it.  
   
  "Dangerous in what way?" I ask.  
  "Well..." he says in his standard half-quizzical, half-testing tone, "Can you tell the pattern in the wood here?" He points to the floorboards and then to the door, raising his eyebrows and tilting his head. "Can you see the connection to Chernobyl?"  
  I admit to him that I can't.  
  "Look at the pegs here," as he points out the wooden nails that he used to fasten the boards together. "See the groupings? Four-Two-Six: April twenty sixth, the day of the meltdown of the reactor core."  
  Oizumi uses the four-two-six theme in much of his work in ceramics as well. The large clay lantern which illuminates the cave/tea room has been patterned with holes in hundreds of such groupings, and the light of the candle inside offers a nuanced and shifting illumination to the small fragile flowers, the tea bowls and the other instruments of a traditional tea ceremony. "You see, it seems beautiful," he continues, "but we can't forget that all of this beauty is sitting right on top of a tremendous amount of danger."  
  I might have taken such talk as a tad apocalyptic if I had not just attended the lecture on nuclear waste disposal with Oizumi the previous evening.  
  Mizunami City in Gifu Prefecture, where Oizumi lives, is a research site for the possible disposal of high-level radioactive wastes from the nation's 51 nuclear reactors. Oizumi is one of the leaders of a citizens group which invited Dr. Edward Lyman, PhD., a nuclear physicist with the U.S. Nuclear Control Institute, to talk about the issues involved in underground dumping. During the lecture Oizumi looked on silently from the back of the audience of over two hundred local residents as Lyman spoke of canisters corroding and leaking, cancerous substances leaching into the water table, potentials for bomb-capable material being hijacked during transport, cost-cutting by the nuclear industry, and lax regulatory oversight by government agencies.  
  "You see," Oizumi explains to me now as we sit in the quiet tea room grotto, "nuclear power is inconsistent with the Way of Tea. The Way of Tea is a path of humility and poetic sentiments, not of grandiosity and gorgeousness. The ideal behind nuclear energy, on the other hand, is that of a limitless amount of free electricity lighting up every corner of the planet." "Furthermore, the tea room is a place of peace. One must never bring weapons inside, or anything that might be used as a weapon. This is, as you know, not the case with nuclear fuel--or even with nuclear waste."  
  Then with an absolutely deadpan look on his face he adds, "Although I've often thought that the size of the cockpit of a tank would probably be just perfect for a tea ceremony room. After all, we shouldn't be using them for war, and we ought to put all these purposeless things to good use. And they're even movable!"  
  Such simultaneously playful and sobering comparisons--he likens, for example, the Japanese political system to a bicycle with no brakes--are a hallmark of Oizumi's conversation.  
  But though his ideas are often iconoclastic, his presence is quite peaceful. Listening to the languorous cadence and warm vibrato of his voice, I can almost feel all the years he has spent working with materials from the earth.  
  He doesn't make much of it, but he is in fact an internationally-known potter. As I examine his work inside the huge wood-burning hillside kiln constructed of mud and clay, I am moved by the rich textured patina of many of the pieces. There are plates and bowls of subdued yet lustrous earth tones--russet browns and tans, beiges and smoky ambers--as well as cups with hues of pumpkin orange and glossy eggshell white. I also discover a series of tall sculptural pieces that display a matte black surface, almost the texture of cast iron. When I ask him, however, how he achieves such subtle coloration, he answers disarmingly, "I don't know how that happens; you'll have to ask the kiln."  
  I am lucky enough to be invited to spend the night in the rambling old farm house in which Oizumi lives. The two of us stay up late talking about the values we hold and exchanging ideas about the proper way to live life. Occasionally I look around at the rough mud walls and the massive hand-hewn timber rafters above me, and I get a palpable feeling of the rustic life and aesthetic of old rural Japan--an aesthetic which he has preserved lovingly over the years.  
  Oizumi has spent considerable time in Korea exchanging ideas and techniques with Korean potters, many of whom have visited his home; and this year he was invited to speak at the Korea-Japan Pottery Exchange Symposium. His long interchange with this country has influenced his daughter to major in Korean language and history at her university. "I'm just so in love with Korea," she tells me with great enthusiasm.  
  I admit to her that, sadly, it's not a sentiment that I have heard very often in my years in Japan.  
  Just as Oizumi is passing on his unconventional thinking to his children, he was himself influenced by the long (but little known) tradition of Japanese non-conformism, one of the practitioners of which was his own father.  
  "Dad was a poet and woodblock print artist. You can't make much money writing poems," Oizumi says with a laugh. "so we were very poor for a while. I spent much of my childhood in a slum in a big city and I saw the underside of society very clearly as a young boy--you know: prostitution, robbery, even murders. I learned then what the real foundation of the society we live in is. But I also realized that even if I have very little money, I can still live and survive and have an interesting life anyway."  
  Oizumi then relates the story of a local potter who came by to visit him recently. "He was telling me that when he has a lot of time on his hands, he feels ill at ease, full of anxiety and fear. While I can of course understand that on one level--if he's not busy he doesn't make much money--I myself start to worry and become afraid of the situation when I'm working too much. Not only might I forget important things, or perhaps have a accident working with my kiln, but I might miss some tremendously beautiful thing in this world, such as a very unusual mushroom. Who knows when I might see such an amazing thing again?"  
  "But," I ask, "surely you need money too, don't you?"  
  "Of course there's some necessity for money, but I think that the more money you have, the less the environment forces you to think for yourself. You can solve any problems by simply buying a product that does whatever needs to get done. This is also true if you are a member of a large group or organization: you can let the group do the thinking for you. The opportunity to think for yourself is, in my opinion, too valuable to be wasted that way."  
  "And, as I said, who knows how long we will be here in this dangerous world? We've got to treasure the time we have."  
  This kind of life-affirming philosophy, drawn as it were from the jaws of the chaos of the world seems to me to be perhaps the defining characteristic of this serious yet remarkably hope-inspiring person.  
  As I leave his homestead on the mountainside, we say to each other, "Let's meet again some day soon," even though neither of us know what may happen in our futures. I am thankful, however, to have been reminded of the uncertainties of life. Perhaps it's one of the reasons my time here has been so intimate and enriching. I'm grateful that I didn't squander my chance to talk and learn from this exceptional human being. As I drive down the road out of the mountains, I hope I can always be so wise.  
 
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