A Visit to Rural Japan

A visit to the current show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, "Dressed by Nature: Textiles of Japan," may bring a wide range of thoughts to mind. At least, it did to me. The title refers to the fact that the robes, vests, shoes, jackets, hats, and ornaments on display have been fashioned making use of materials harvested from the fields and forests roundabout. Then again, silk is made by worms and derived from mulberry trees. But there are no silk garments included in the show, as near as I can recall.  This suggests that we need to emphasize the close connection between environments, communities, production, and use. It is that proximity which makes the focus of interest so attractive.

The chief draw of the show is the beauty of the garments on display. But on small video screens positioned throughout the exhibit, we can watch, for example, villagers out in the woods stripping the inner bark off of elm trees. They then scrape this "bask" with various tools to separate the finest and most delicate strands, which they then nimbly tie together into long strands. (I wouldn't want to do it.) These strands are then spun into thicker, stronger, and more uniform threads before being strung up onto the looms on which a particular fabric is woven.

Well, I guess this in the way most cloth is made, in one way or another. But the absence of heavy machinery, and the fact that the people making these clothes will be wearing them in ceremonies and also out in the fields, appeals to our atavistic, 1970s, back to the land, North Woods aesthetic.

Other mini-documentaries are devoted to the production of indigo dye, and yet another depicts a sophisticated wax-resist method of dying cloth

And did I mention the variety and beauty of the fabrics and garments on display?

Years ago, and not for the first time,  I stepped into Indigo—a shop in the warehouse district of Minneapolis that traded in folk art from Africa and Asia. At the time Nodin Press was located in the same building, right across the lobby. John and Mary owned the shop. I mostly saw Mary off taking their Airedale for a walk. John was behind the counter. They used to stock utilitarian bowls from the Machiko kiln in Japan, and we bought several; they were among the few items in the shop we could afford. (I used one of those simple but elegant bowls tonight, forty years later, to make the salmon spread we're having for dinner.)

 Maybe they still do stock those bowls, though they moved their collection to NE Minneapolis when their very attractive long-term lease (signed in the darkest days of the pre-yuppy warehouse district decline) was up. They could no longer afford the rent in that location, and besides, by that time, so many of the warehouses had been converted to high-end condos that there was no longer any free parking to be had nearby.

On that bright morning I spotted a pale blue Japanese vest on a table. It looked like a small rag rug with sleeves. I was on the verge of trying it on when John, kindly as always, spoke up from behind the counter: "Er, that's a collector piece."

I knew what he meant. Something to be hung on a wall, not worn all day in a rice paddy. And more obliquely, something I probably couldn't afford. Sure. I understand. No offence taken. Because what John had said was true. Ragstock was three blocks down the street, out near the Salvation Army and the garbage burner. But I was in Indigo.

And now here I was, standing amid a large, impressive, and well-interpreted multi-room display of such garments. It was grand.

Throughout the exhibit, I found my thoughts drifting in the direction of concepts like "pattern" and "fiber." Yes, vocabulary is destiny. The origin myths of many cultures, including the Hopi and those of the Indus valley, if I'm not mistaken, are tied up with notions of spinning and weaving. We look for fiber in our diet, but do we look for it in our conduct? In our lives?

Maybe that's why young people of my generation were so enamored of jeans. One thing the exhibit makes very clear is that as far as tie-dying is concerned, the rural Japanese surpassed the hippies by light-years. 

One garment on display that appealed  to me especially carried images of a few big carp. I thought this garment might be appropriate for me to wear when I go down to Bassett Creek to measure the water clarity. There are often a few big carp swimming around just upstream from the bridge. This presents a challenge to the researcher because when the carp sees the yellow bucket being dropped into the water from the bridge, he swishes his tail in an effort to get away, thus raising a huge cloud of debris off the creek bottom, and that skews the measurement.

Another attractive aspect of the exhibit was the emphasis on islands. Japan is a nation of more than 6,000 islands, and those pockets of isolation foster native arts and regional idiosyncracy. The Ainu of Hokkaido in the north will be wearing robes made of thick leather and sturgeon skin while the denizens of Okinawa, two thousand miles to the south, are wearing airy clothing woven of wisteria reeds.   

It was just our luck that a guided tour came by while we were at the show lead by the curator Andreas Marks. His tone was bright and his anecdotes were pithy, both of the garments themselves and the adventures of the connoisseurs who had collected them. And there is something charming, and  also strangely ennobling, about listening to a man with a German accent, in the middle of the North American continent, share his knowledge of the banana-peel cloth crafted on remote islands of Japan 

After viewing the show, Hilary and I had lunch on the terrace at the Longfellow Grill. I ordered the seared, sesame-crusted yellowtail tuna salad, with spinach, mixed greens, blistered tomatoes, cucumber, green onion, ginger wasabi dressing, peanuts, and citrus unagi. You can see why.

Later, back home, I pulled a few books off the shelf: Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan (c. 1987) and The Kimono Mind: an Informal Guide to Japan and the Japanese, by the iconoclastic architect and cultural historian Bernard Rudofsky (c. 1965). I couldn't locate our copy of  The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty by Yanagi Muneyoshi (c. 1972).

In case this all sounds a little out-of-date, well so are the folk robes of Japan. And let me assure you that in preparation for our visit, we spent several evenings watching the cutting-edge, more than slightly vulgar and outrageous, six-part Amazon Prime series James May in Japan.

Hunt Hill Audubon Sanctuary

Our recent midweek visit to Hunt Hill Audubon Camp, an old farm that's been turned into a nature preserve twenty minutes east of Shell Lake, Wisconsin, was chock full of low-key events, which was just what we were looking for. The farm was purchased by a wealthy Minneapolis grain merchant a hundred years ago as a family getaway, and they built two modest cabins in the woods that you can now rent through AirBnB. The sanctuary today includes nearly 600 acres of woods and restored prairie, 13 miles of hiking trails, a few small ponds connected by a stream, and  a residential campus for environmental learning programs.  

The cabins are situated in deep woods at the top of a ridge, and from the small front yard of the lower cabin you can see only a hint of blue water far below through the trees. I can easily imagine someone checking in, oohing and aahing at the big stone fireplace and the wrought iron door hinges,  looking around for a few minutes, and saying, "Well, what are we supposed to DO here?"

One thing you can do is sit in a chair and look up at the trees, admiring their branching structure, while listening to the birds sing. It's getting late in the summer for that kind of thing, but throughout our stay we heard eastern wood pewees, red-eyed vireos, yellow-throated vireos, and chickadees, spiced up on occasion by sandhill cranes passing low overhead, a distant loon, or a lonely barred owl.

Of course you could read a book. I had brought along a book about the pre-Socratics, but the subject seemed out of place in such a verdant environment. (The North Shore would be better.)  I turned briefly to the Tang poet Du Fu and was soon inspired to write something of my own—the shy can try:

Wind rustling through the trees.

It's the loveliest sound on earth

on a hot August evening. Or can be.

Rising and falling. Here. Now there.

We wait for it to send that cool

air down to us.

And a pewee calls from the forest,

high-pitched and hopeful.

Nesting is over.

What is he yearning for?

Once we'd been settled in for a while, I said, "Let's go down to the lake." I'm sure Hilary was delighted to hear that, because I was nursing a sore leg and she had no idea how much hiking I would be able to do.

 

As we wandered down the leaf-covered path, we passed interrupted ferns, sensitive ferns, ostrich ferns, maidenhair ferns, and a diminutive species with delicate, almost feathery fronds that we named "delicate fern." At the waterfront there was a small sandy opening, not worthy of being called a beach, with a mass of purple pickerel weed growing nearby. Continuing down the trail, we reached a point along the shoreline from which we could see the quaint wooden bridge, but it was still a few hundred yards away.

 "I don't want to walk that far," I said. "Maybe tomorrow."

Hilary managed to pick four blueberries during our hike, about the size of BBs, which she shared with me. Were they good? Not really. But they were blueberries.

And to our surprise, as we stood looking away from Big Devil Lake into the marsh, we spotted two immature warblers—a yellow and a chestnut-sided.

The next morning we ate breakfast with some friends at their nearby cabin. After he retired Jim built a gorgeous wooden rowboat in his garage in St. Paul, and we went out in it together briefly. (Starting to contemplate my next book, maybe halfway between  "The Old Man and the Sea" and "Three Men in a Boat.")

We sat around chatting for a while, then we all returned to our place so we could show them the cabin interior.

In the afternoon a woman arrived to stay at the second cabin, which sits mostly out of sight farther up the hill. I spotted her through the window, and when we saw her again in the parking lot down at the main camp I said, "Aren't you the one staying at the log cabin?" We introduced ourselves and soon learned that we live not more than half a mile apart here in Golden Valley. She had a collapsible kayak in her trunk and was looking for the waterfront. We were headed that way, too, and she came along.

A few hours later she stopped by our cabin; we'd offered to show her the interior. "I kayaked the stream all the way up to the bridge," she said. When we went inside, she said, "Wow, this is spacious. It would be a good rental for a family." 

Pause. "But my kids aren't much into the outdoors."

"How about your husband?" I said.

"Him neither." Yet she had a fold-up kayak in her trunk. She wasn't complaining; she was exploring.

The next morning after breakfast—a reheated plate of rainbow trout and potatoes from the previous evening— we headed out early along a trail running between woods and field. It had rained during the night, with ear-splitting thunder, and in the glancing sunlight everything looked moist and gorgeous. At one point on the trail, as it knifed through some thick underbrush above a swamp, we flushed a mid-sized bird.

I knew immediately that it wasn't a grouse. The BRRRRRing sound it made as it flew up was only half the weight that a grouse would make.

"How about a baby grouse?" you say. No. I've flushed lots of baby grouse over the years, and they're always in large groups, football sized, with mama somewhere nearby.

Besides, I saw the bird's long, narrow beak during the instant that it was visible, flying off directly ahead of us along the trail before ducking for cover again.

I knew instantly it was a woodcock. A look at the bird guide back at the cabin later only confirmed the i.d. "Uncommon and inconspicuous on damp ground under dense cover within woods...Secretive and solitary; rarely seen in daylight...Wings produce a sharp twittering on takeoff."

The trail we were on led to a second bridge, but once again, we didn't quite get there. The trail was closed due to erosion. But you can see what an enchanting place this is to wander around in, like a Chinese painting come to life.( In fact, there's something appealing about those picturesque bridges you never quite get to.)

We spent some time out in the sunny fields, admiring the cone flowers and the pearly everlasting. And back in the parking lot we ran into a member of the staff.

"I love this place," he told us. "I retired from my regular job a few years ago, but I said to my wife, 'If a part-time maintenance job turns up at Hunt Hill, I think I'd take it.'"

Before heading for home we took one final trip down through the woods in front of the cabin to the big lake, and this time that bridge didn't seem so far away. When we got there, we even took off our shoes and wadded up the sandy-bottomed stream to get a better look at the pickerel weed.