My road to Japan

This will be in my next firing.

In 1986 I took my first trip outside of the U.S. Basically a ten week trip through parts of Europe. I met a lot of travelers who were on one or two year trips  taking them around the world. I discovered the traveling community is small. You run into the same people over and over. On a subsequent trip through South East Asia I ran into a Dutch man 4 times, all in different countries, all unplanned. The most surprising time being in Varanasi when I was getting into and then hopping out of a rickshaw when the driver would up the price, this going on for 10 or more minutes. Just as I was tiring of the game around the corner walked my  Dutch friend. I think I asked him what took him so long.

Getting back from Europe I then set about saving money to go on a one year trip. At the time I was enrolled in college and doing land surveying as my way of making a living. Yes, land surveying is kind of an unusual job to do when pursuing a degree in the arts but it fit my model of challenging work that left me a lot of time to get on with my studies.

I finished saving in a little over a year and headed off to South East Asia. Indonesia for two months, Thailand for two months, Burma for one month, Nepal for two, India for six, Sri Lanka for one, on to Europe for 3 weeks and finally to New York and Washington D.C. where I would bought a bicycle and rode it out to California and back to college.

Mission accomplished. I was picked up at Union Station in Los Angeles by a  friend from high school and headed off to California State Long Beach, bypassing UCLA which I see in hindsight I should have selected.

I finished up my BFA in drawing and painting with a focus on multimedia, still doing land surveying to make a living, and saving for another one year trip in  celebration of my degree. I actually focused on performance art, working a lot with Rachel Rosenthal or workshops such as Performance Rooted in Ceremony and Ritual in Humbolt. I have some great videos of work from that time. I will post them as soon as I get them transferred from VHS to digital.

At the time of finishing my degree I was living with my girlfriend, Ozula Sioux Moreno, ne Tammy Sioux Moreno. She was given her name by Nora Wynne in Humboldt. The story is Nora and I were talking as Ozula was taking a nap in the next room. Nora said she doesn’t look like a Tammy, I said ‘Well, what does she look like?’ and without thinking she had a new name, adopted as Tammy magically appeared in the door to adopt it.

Tammy and I headed out on a trip with a  remarkably similar itinerary to my first trip although with different destinations within the different countries.

Two months in Indonesia, two in Thailand, six in India, and then six or so in Africa. Or so the plan went. In Thailand, on to India everything went according to plan but I had to make a detour back to Thailand to finish teaching a class in performance in Chaing Mai. Ozula decided to study Tibetian Buddihism, first in Swayabudnath or here in Nepal and then in Dharamsala in Northern India.

Me, back to Chang Mai. Two months and not a word from Ozula. I finished doing what I had to do in Thailand and headed to the airport to head over to India for a rendezvous with Ozula although I hadn’t heard from her for over two months and had no idea where she was. I  put out feelers to some contacts I had in Dharamsala but none had seen the woman with the unusual name. This was in the days before it was possible to hyperlink names in a story like this. Finding someone was more a matter of checking mailboxes, calling back to the States, etc.
At the airport in Bangkok, on my way back to India, I first caught sight of Yukiko, my wife. It is cliche to say things like love at first sight and what not but in my case, walking as I was in front of her, for some unknown reason glancing behind me and seeing her, my first thought was “Now, that is a woman I could marry.” I had the same thought as I sat staring at her in the waiting area before boarding the plane. A little conversation on the plane, a shared taxi to Paharganj with another Japanese, making it a three way split on the bill and fifteen years of marriage later I can say it was a good thing to listen to the thought.

I never found Ozula although I tried and have tried to  on  a number of occasions since. Pre-Internet searching was different.  I was on a trip recently and was surprised at how much time travelers spend on line. Back in the day when you got on the plane that was the end of contact except by letter for the duration of your trip. I ended up on my landing in Delhi going to our planned meeting place,   Hotel Namaskar,  she not being there, calling Dharamsala and Swayabudnath, not finding her. I ended up checking back-up meeting places in Bombay and Calcutta but not finding any trail. I decided to head to Sikkim to ask the “trees, rivers and the wind” if I should head over to Japan before heading off to Kenya as I had a plan to do. Yukiko had long since headed back to Japan. We had only shared the taxi ride from the airport and a couple of meals in Delhi before parting ways. My trip to Sikkim convinced me to go to Japan till I saw fit and then head on to Kenya. I booked a cheap trip to Tokyo via Bangladesh, getting stuck in the airport for a number of days in Dhaka. Don’t get stuck in the Dhaka airport with the cats if you can help it. The only entertainment was watching the British Airways passengers that had had their seats taken on what was supposed to be a refueling stop scream at the disinterested Bangladeshi employees. A study in two worlds colliding.

I had an interest in Japan ever since seeing this video on Ankoku no Butoh in Japanese Art History taught by Dr. Ingrid All’s  at CSULB. I have been here since 1994, a ticket to Nairobi somewhere in my attic. I did do some performance and worked with a few people here, Katsura Kan or here being one of them. I quickly discovered the Butoh I knew from videos and my exposure was very different than the Butoh going on here. After about one year I gave up performance all together, leaving me without an “art” for the first time in almost 10 years. I spent the next year only working for money, an odd thing I thought. I was not happy at all. I explored going back to school, starting an art center, etc. All that time I was going around to galleries looking at different kinds of art. I finally decided to either do calligraphy or ceramics as they were the most exciting to me. I immediately bought a kiln, wheel and started making things. I further decided there were three people I would like to study with if I were to study. Shigeyoshi Morioka, Shiro Tsujimura or Naoki Kawabuchi.  I met Mr. Morioka and Mr. Kawabuchi and got a chance to study with Mr. Kawabuchi through a chance meeting.  I spent two years shuttling back and forth between his studio and my house, working and studying. It was very difficult for a number of reasons, not the least of which being my personality. After two years I found land to buy and build a house and kiln.  It did take two full years of looking because I had a number of requirements. Some of the obvious criteria were enough land to build both a house and kiln, off in the country so the smoke didn’t bother anyone. Some of the more demanding criteria were I insisted on buying the land, having the title in my name, and perhaps the most difficult of all, I had absolutely no money. I had to find land that the owner would be willing to sell to me, transfer the title so we could get a loan to build a house and accept payment later.  No mountain is too high. No valley too deep.

Here I am, 15 years later in the house we had built.

After glazing, before firing.

Tags: Humbolt, Japan, Naoki Kawabuchi, performance rooted in ceremony and ritual, Rachel Rosenthal, Shigeyoshi Morioka, Shiro Tsujimura