Find the Face ~ Gaijin Kid

I may have started off my weekend with a visit to Akiba Electricity Town, the otaku mecca of Japan, brimming with lights and video game scores and maid cafes—a whole other world, so to speak—but what ended up inspiring and energizing me was instead a quiet visit to a bonsai museum. There I walked through a peaceful and traditional Japanese house in my socks, viewed hundreds of years old trees in stunning art installations, sipped green tea, walked through paths of bonsai after bonsai, and watched koi through plum blossom branches. Yes, I’ve been in Japan for six months already—but this is the most Japanese thing I’ve done since I walked through Tokyo with a massive suitcase and stumbled through crowds in the station.

And it was beautiful.

That, folks, is a bonsai that is something like four hundred years old. It is being sold for no less than one million dollars—I checked, and yes, the tour guide meant dollars not yen. The second one is not quite so old or expensive, but it's just as gorgeous. Parts of the tree are already dead, the white parts, and still it perseveres. (So it’s cliché, so what). The new grows with and around the dead, and only then does it become a tree so valuable. What is most remarkable about bonsais is that they take time. No amount of artistry or genius or college degrees change that; these trees are beyond us. It’ll be three years before we can remove the wiring from our own bonsais and see the new tree beneath—if we can manage to have them live that long.

But I’m hopeful, because after the museum tour, Yuu and I sat down to learn hands on about bonsais and started our very own potential million dollar trees. (Yeah, great-great-grandkids, you can thank me with a memorial or a scholarship fund for public school students). And the experience, a little frustrating, a little confusing, and a little messy, was incredibly invigorating.

Jillian's bonsai before.

Yuu's bonsai before.

It started with the basics of course. (After we struggled with how to write my name in roman letters—I should start going by J or Jin). You have to find the face of your bonsai, which is a little bit like struggling to write its name in foreign letters. You look for its character; find the movement in its branches and trunk that are beautiful and interesting. Then after you’ve found its character, you create a balance throughout the branches. Branches shoot off in twos, and then twos, and twos again. You have to cut away the odd ones; pull out shoots that are too tall, too short; make tables of branches, that will grow and grow and be full. And then, you find elegance and settle into your bonsai with the craft and help of your sensei (ours was one of eight apprentices of Kunio Kobayashi—who I glimpsed giving personal tours to what looked like very important Japanese men, religious leaders is Yuu’s theory).

What all of that means, really, is when you’re starting out with a new, fresh bonsai, you’re getting to know it just like anyone else. And, just like in people, you want to look into its face and uncover the truth of it. Or, if you’re not looking for truth, the beauty and artistry of it will do. And I guess I like that. So below are our face-full bonsai trees after our lesson, which will wait still years until we craft them again, and several other beautiful examples from the museum and the artists there.