Kyoto - Kawai Kankiro

Kyoto - Kawai Kankiro

(c) Jon Donlon 2007
Kyoto, established more that a 1000 years ago as capital of the Japanese archipelago, remains a thriving commercial center, humming with activity. This still beautiful urban center was established as "Heian-kyo" in the year 794.

For us, the place was a city of sights: we wanted to see Gion and its narrow lanes, we wanted to wander down traditional Pontocho dori with its many fine restaurants and the food market with that fantastic knife store – do I have a $1000 to buy cutlery for the $3000 stove I want? Maybe in my dreams, along with the “tea house” configured as a guest cottage—the one with the deep soak tub covered in mosaics I’ve been wanting to commission my Louisiana mosaic artist friend to do. Hummm…will it fit in the “tea house” or the rehabbed airstream I keep bugging Jolly would be suitable for us to snuggle up in?

Anyway, we wanted to see about a small piece of bricky red Kyoto ware, wanted to ramble around the “used” kimono fairs, and to visit the traditional house of Kawai Kankiro, “father” of the mingei craft movement. Proprietors of Wortman Potters, the increasingly trendy and collectable outfit on the Gulf Coast had carefully explained Bernard Leach’s connection, and our English/Welsh pals had taken us to Cornwall to show us the Japan-England pottery connection.

Kawai Kankiro’s place, now a living museum, is just south of the Gion. Ryoan-ji, with its 15 well placed stones, was way out in another section of the city – that was a day itself to take photographs, gander, and sketch images into my notebook. Indeed, the entire orbit of Zen gardens exerts a strong pull on us, though we are hardly aficionados.

Of course Gion, and of the book, “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthor Golden and the resulting, disappointing movie of the same name, as well as Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country,” which presents geisha life from a different, if not too different, perspective, informed our curiosity about Kyoto.

Now, a bit out of the blue, I recalled our painful feelings of elaborate romance when we visited Seville years ago, where the general architecture is much more beguiling than that in Kyoto --- which features only islands of the extraordinary. What is it that calls to the human spirit or soul? Anthrony Trollop, having complained that his Spanish was poor since he’d been with “Maria” for but two months, hardly time enough for loving let along language lessons as he ably put it, adventures in Seville.

He wrote in “John Bull on the Guadalquivir,” wondering: “So felt I then, pining for something to make me unhappy. Ah, me! Iknow all about it now, and am content. But I wish that some learned pundit would give us a good definition of romance, would describe in words that feeling with which our hearts are so pestered when we are young, which makes us sigh for we know not what, and forbids us to be contented with what God sends us. We invest female beauty with impossible attributes, and are angry because our women have not the spiritualized souls of angels, anxious as we are that they should also be human in the flesh. A man looks at her he would love as at a distant landscape in a mountainous land. The peaks are glorious with more than the beauty of earth and rock and vegetation. He dreams of some mysterious grandeur of design which tempts him on under the hot sun, and over the sharp rock, till he has reached the mountain goal which he had set before him. But when there, he finds that the beauty is well-nigh gone, and as for that delicious mystery on which his soul had fed, it has vanished for ever.” (Trollop).

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