Steeped in Tradition
As unique as it is indefinable, Japanese culture is known by its arts and traditions. The Members who take up those mantles share how life-changing their experiences can be.
Every day, it strikes me more and more how little I shall ever know of the Japanese,” Lafcadio Hearn confessed to a colleague three years after his 1890 arrival in the country. “We only guess at each other without understanding, and it is only a very keen guesser, indeed of large experience, who can ever guess correctly.”
Hearn was right to be daunted by the task of understanding the ways and means of a people not his own. Over 14 years, the author and teacher threw himself into the task. His transcriptions of folk tales and his travel notes of the last preindustrial years of Meiji-era Japan remain intimate examples of frank cultural curiosity exceedingly rare for the age.
Despite Hearn’s understandable misgivings about comprehending the Japanese way of life, his oeuvre proves his efforts weren’t without success. Hearn died in 1904 as a naturalized citizen. His gravestone in Tokyo’s Zoshigaya Cemetery is inscribed with his adopted name: Koizumi Yakumo.
Perhaps cultures don’t fully reveal themselves to outsiders, but if one approaches with well-intentioned, humble steps, few today would claim that Japan’s arts and traditions are beyond the comprehension of any person willing to learn.
Given the myriad ways Members engage with their adopted home, their embrace of Japan’s oldest and most traditional pastimes reflects Hearn’s own intent more than a century ago.
“What I wish to do [is] to settle, if possible, in this country,” Hearn wrote to a confidant just after his arrival, “among a people who seem to me the most lovable in the world.”
On Target
Of course, not all journeys into Japanese culture begin on the country’s soil.
Jérôme Chouchan was a grad student in his native France when he happened upon Zen in the Art of Archery, a philosophical manual of the Japanese martial art of kyudo. Born out of Japan’s martial past, kyudo saw a transformation into a practice of physical and spiritual fortification in the 1600s when firearms replaced the bow on the battlefield.
As Chouchan read, he was captivated not by the descriptions of yumi bows and arrows, but rather the metaphysics underpinning each shot.
“What struck me was the relationship between the target—the objective you want to achieve—and the archer,” says Chouchan, 58. “There was a kind of paradox between aiming and not aiming. If you want something too much, you will not hit [your target].”
That emphasis on process and form over end results stayed with Chouchan as he began his business career in Japan in the mid-1980s. Though he hadn’t yet picked up a bow himself, the stress of corporate life eventually nudged him toward the archery range as a means of escape.
“That’s when I first started [kyudo], in 1989 in a public dojo in Toshima Ward,” Chouchan recalls.
Today, Chouchan is a fifth-dan kyudo practitioner. He is qualified as a renshi instructor, a rare certification for any kyudoka, let alone a foreigner. Kyudo’s ritualized eight steps, from the ashibumi stance to the hanare shot, are second nature to Chouchan after nearly 30 years of practice.
Rather than the rank he’s achieved, Chouchan describes the inner refinement required by kyudo as his true achievement.
“That’s something people often misunderstand,” he explains. “With these martial arts, it keeps giving you back all your weaknesses, all your bad points, all the things you have to polish.”
Once a week, Chouchan trains at a dojo in southwestern Tokyo for his sixth-dan examination. He readily admits that there was a time when he obsessed over these tests, full-day affairs held across Japan. Archers have only two arrows to showcase their form, accuracy and heijoshin, or composure, before a panel of kyudo masters.
After the frustrations of so many exams, including 20 over the decade it took Chouchan to rise from fourth to fifth dan, he found himself anticipating the process of assessment far more than the result.
“You’re used to a busy, hectic life,” says Chouchan. “Then you leave Tokyo with your bow and it really brings you to another world. That’s something I enjoy a lot.”
Chouchan’s current professional life allows him less time in the dojo than it once did. Some mornings before he’s due in the office, he’ll have his breakfast and don his suit, then head out into the yard, bow in hand. He’ll breathe, take aim at the training target and release.
“My inner garden,” he says.
Branching Out
The beauty of embracing Japanese culture as a foreigner is that everyone to some extent is a novice.
Born in Istanbul and raised from 9 years old in the United States, Irma Shepard knew next to nothing about ikebana flower arranging when she signed up for her first class at the Club.
“You’re wondering if it’s something you can do some justice to,” says Shepard, 50. “I just wished I could do it well enough.”
The free-form Sogetsu school, formed in 1927 as a reaction to the stiff proscriptions of the centuries-old styles that came before it, ascribes to the axiom that ikebana can be done “anytime, anywhere, by anyone.”
For Shepard, first-time nerves quickly receded as she embraced the process of creating an arrangement, from selecting the greenery and flowers to trimming, positioning and repositioning.
“It takes a lot of thought, a lot of patience,” she says. “I was just amazed as I learned how precise you have to be. The main stem has to be a certain angle, and all the heights are based on the container you’re using.”
An active Women’s Group member, Shepard has found ways to parlay her time in ikebana class into connections with fellow Members. Uninterested in becoming the next Sogetsu grandmaster and with no fixed plans to stay in Japan for life, Shepard is content to use ikebana as her vehicle to explore Japanese culture in the limited time she has.
“What I told myself was, ‘I’m going to say yes to everything, no matter whether some things were easier to say yes to,’” she says. “I’ve met some great friends and had experiences I otherwise would’ve shied away from.”
In class at the Club, Shepard’s teacher selects all the pieces from which students then arrange. One October morning, Shepard decided it was time to take the next step. With her ikebana textbook in hand, she consulted with a local florist, purchased her “raw ingredients” and set to work at her dining room table. An autumnal arrangement of red-green leaves and canary-yellow blossoms emerged.
“There’s ikebana experts and here’s me,” Shepard reflects. “Do I have my angles right? Is it going to stay? It does take a while, but I’m a very patient person.”
Leading Edge
Artistic or athletic, traditions morph over time. Just as ikebana was once the gentler pastime of Japan’s samurai class, the pursuit of iaido swordsmanship no longer carries mortal connotations.
Member Al Taher grew up fascinated with the history of warring samurai clans. After a friend recommended that he take a “samurai experience class” during a 2015 trip to Tokyo, Taher began taking his lay passion more seriously.
Now, two years of brandishing his own katana have granted him an appreciation for the cerebral side of the samurai arts.
“The discipline, how they controlled themselves and their minds,” says Taher, 32. “They were people who trained every day for a single purpose to perfect whatever they wanted.”
With roots as old as the katana in Japanese warfare, the principles of iaido were only codified from classical teachings beginning in the late 20th century. For the swordsman, the goal is to draw and wield the blade with fine control, cleanly slicing targets of rolled and stiffened straw tatami at perfect 45-degree angles (anything else reduces the effectiveness of the blade).
Two or three times a week, at a dojo in western Tokyo, Taher trains in the Toyama school of swordsmanship. With its emphasis on smooth movements above all else, iaido and its execution are far removed from the fitness classes he takes at the Club.
“Power plays a minimal role [in iaido],” he explains. “It might sometimes be a disadvantage because you can get used to cutting the wrong way just because you’re strong, but the angle is always wrong.”
A first-dan, Taher’s name is written on a wooden nafuda tablet on the dojo’s wall, an indication of his perseverance through the early days of practice when his angles were off, his cutting imprecise and his swordsmanship so lacking that he cut his own hand when sheathing the blade.
All natural—and necessary—parts of training, says Taher.
“This teaches you that you’re going to fail 99 times out of 100,” Taher explains. “But you should always learn from failure and try to improve yourself. Especially now, people get things so easily that they really cannot tolerate any failure with themselves.”
At a national competition for Toyama school students last May, Taher entered the dotan executioner’s cut event. Tatami rolls were stacked on top of one another to mimic a rival warrior. The victor would be the student who cleaved the most in one swing.
“I’m focusing 100 percent of my mind and my body into this one cut,” Taher says. “With social media and these things, your mind is scattered everywhere. It’s nice to be somewhere you have a single purpose with your whole being.”
A step, a swing and some slashed tatami later, Taher took home the top prize.
Taher and his family may not stay in Japan forever, but he’ll be taking his katana and all the self-possession required to wield it wherever the future leads them.
Committed to refining his iaido technique while he remains here, Taher urges anyone with even a passing interest in Japanese martial arts or culture to grasp any opportunity to pursue that passion.
“There’s no point to do something halfway,” he says. “When you want to do something, go authentic.”
Explore the Women’s Group’s wide range of art, cultural, language and lifestyle enrichment classes.
Words: Owen Ziegler
Images: Yuuki Ide
