Tatami – The bedrock of Japanese sensitivity

This design project forced me to reassess the “culture of sitting.” You see, when I took the project on, it was because what the president of Soushinsha, Hisashi Takahashi, was trying to do really got through to me: condensing the “culture of sitting” into the idea of tatami, and I found it incredibly intriguing. I was born and raised in Japan, and have lived in America for a long time, and I think that’s made me more aware of how the act of sitting on the floor is very much a consciously executed thing. When you sit on the floor, the open space over your head increases, making more room, and your line of sight changes, too. The feeling is also completely different, depending on whether you’re on wooden flooring or tatami. Also, the act of sitting lowers your center of gravity, and helps to instill a feeling of calm after the more strenuous activities of the body and mind during the day. And when it comes to Japan, the thickness of the tatami raises the level you are sitting on a little higher, which gives it a kind of ritualistic feeling. Sitting there makes it into your own private space where you can come back to yourself. I think you can say that tatami, the symbol of the “culture of sitting,” is the bedrock of Japanese sensitivity.

The square – Based on tradition and the human body

I based this design on the traditional Japanese measurements sun and shaku, which are a human scale: they’re based on the dimensions of the human body. These measurements have long been used in gardening and landscape architecture, so they didn’t feel unnatural or foreign to me at all. 1 shaku and 1 foot are about the same length: approximately 30cm. The meter measurement that we all usually use was devised more for mathematical convenience, and its length isn’t based on the human body. The basic size of a single tatami mat is 3 x 6 shaku (90cm x 180cm), but narrowing my focus to the concept of sitting led me to a square mat design of 60cm x 60cm. A completely square tatami may seem radical at first glance, but if you look at the checkered pattern in the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, you’ll see that it’s a necessary design that has been around for ages, since combining two squares results in a rectangle, or, the size of a door panel. Likewise, the XT60 can be used singly as a square, but can also be combined to make a rectangle. I guess you could say that the square was destined to coexist with the rectangle. (laughs) The square tatami was the result of me coming to grips in no uncertain terms with the idea of sitting. In doing this, I departed a little bit from the norm, while staying within the confines of traditional Japanese culture, by creating a 45-degree diagonal surface matting design. The shadows cast by this look beautiful when the mats are lined up with others. I added edging to some of the designs, so a large number of arrangements are possible, depending on how they’re laid.

After re-thinking the “culture of sitting,” what I actually designed is only half of the story, because tatami and gardens only come into their true meaning when they’re actually made use of. Once the XT60 is actually used it may go well beyond my original design intent, and I’m looking forward to seeing that other part of the equation.

Reflections on life going forwards

In these days of the coronavirus pandemic, all around the world we’re being implored to “Slow down” and “Stay home,” and in these troubled times you’re forced to think about fundamental things. I think everyone is experiencing going back to the basics of daily living, like cooking and eating at home and sleeping. When you come to think about it, though, that kind of environment can’t be created artificially. That’s why the priests of Eiheiji Temple (Fukui Prefecture) went to all the trouble of building it deep in the mountains. Now, in the COVID age, whether you’re on the plains or in a town, you’re in the same situation as if you were at Eiheiji.

Also, if you go on a trip somewhere and spend time in a different culture, sometimes it feels like your burdens are gradually stripped away. Don’t you think that the same thing can be said to be happening during this pandemic? In other words, given a chance to self-reflect, you get to feel a lightening of extraneous burdens. But of course, the important things, the essential things are left behind. There may be a difference in degree, but I think it’s a similar thing to the monks’ pursuit of truth in the mountains at Eiheiji. Being in an environment where you’re forced to confront yourself, to take stock of what you’ve done and think about what you’re going to do. And the world most likely won’t go back to how it used to be. Just like picking up what’s left from the aftermath of a fire and making a new life, I think the next few years will consist of retrieving what’s left of yourself after having gone through the pandemic, and making a new life with the things you can truly believe in.

(interview & editing: Chinatsu Shimizu, English translation: Richard Halberstadt)

 

In Pursuit of a New Form of Tatami Together with a Landscape Architect Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA) Part 1 of 3

In Pursuit of a New Form of Tatami Together with a Landscape Architect Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA) Part 2 of 3

In Pursuit of a New Form of Tatami Together with a Landscape Architect Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA) Part 3 of 3

Revamping the “culture of sitting” with XT60 – Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA)

 

Sadafumi Uchiyama – landscaper, gardener & garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden
Born 1955 in Fukuoka Prefecture, Kyushu Island, Japan, his family had been professional gardeners since the early 1900s, allowing him to study professional techniques from an early age. After participating in developmental cooperation projects in Tanzania and Yemen, he moved to the USA in 1988, gaining a degree and masters in landscape architecture from the University of Illinois, allowing him to combine aspects of Japanese gardening techniques with western landscape architecture principles. Active in a wide variety of private and public landscape projects, his representative achievements include gardens at Jackson Park, Chicago, Denver Botanic Gardens, Colorado & the Duke University, North Carolina. He is one of the founders of the North American Japanese Garden Association (NAJGA). Since 2010 he has been active all over America, working on private properties and commercial facilities, sometimes in collaboration with the famed Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. His publishing and speaking activities are centered in the USA, and he also teaches landscape design and practical application in universities and public Japanese gardens. In 2018 he was awarded the Garden Society of Japan Prize at the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Garden Society of Japan.

・Portland Japanese Garden
https://japanesegarden.org/

Modern day society tends to prioritize the elimination of natural world elements in favor of a safe living environment. We enlisted the help of renowned gardening expert and landscape architect Sadafumi Uchiyama to look into the creation of a living space that is both beautiful and pleasing through the use of nature, particularly straw tatami matting. Explore with us the tradition and beauty of the XT tatami experience.

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Gardens & tatami: the infrastructure of life

When I saw Soushinsha’s tatami, I knew that they were the genuine article. Their destiny is to stay around and not die out. In that sense, both tatami and Japanese gardens are part of the infrastructure of society. To take it further, people can’t live without them. Human beings don’t just rely on the physical side, they need the spiritual part, too. It’s possible to be physically alive but spiritually dead. I think societal infrastructure should be thought about using those parameters. The survival of the physical side depends on things like food, water and air, but when it comes to survival of the soul, then you think of arts and beauty, or, gardens and tatami. That’s the reason why these things have continued to exist, should continue to exist, and will continue to do so.
The Portland Japanese Garden gets 500,000 visitors a year, and some of those people come every week. If you ask them why they keep coming, they say “I like it,” and what we have to do is figure out what, exactly, that “I like it” means. “I like it” is just one way of putting it, and I want to find where that feeling is coming from – its source. And, after thinking about that for 20 years, I’ve come to understand some things.
One is the Japanese gardens built in internment camps. During the Second World War, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in America were incarcerated in 10 internment camps that had been built in desert areas, and several Japanese gardens have been discovered in the remains of these camps. Now of course the logical course of action would be to make use of the limited land to grow carrots and onions to supplement your diet, but despite being in that terrible situation, they built Japanese gardens instead. It’s not as if there were any professional gardeners there, but they felt the need to build a garden that was a true reflection of what was in their hearts, and I think that in a way that connects to human dignity.
The second thing is Ashikaga Yoshimasa, the 8th shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate in the Muromachi Period in the 15th century. At a time when the very existence of the shogunate was in peril, he was building gardens and doing the tea ceremony. Now, I really don’t think you can just conclude that he was fiddling while Rome burned. Rather, I think you could say that he had to do that precisely because of the precarious situation he was in.
These two things feel like the same idea to me. There is a reason why they felt they had to do things like that. The feeling of it being a necessity to have some kind of infrastructure at the spiritual level to help you go on living is a fundamental point that we find everywhere, wherever you are geographically, and whatever time period you live in. Those kinds of things have really been speaking to me as a common theme recently.

The courage to be run-of-the-mill / designing something that was bound to be

When I got involved with the XT tatami design, I thought, using cars as an example, that it shouldn’t be a prototype model that can’t run on regular roads, but a fully functional car that can run on them with no problem, and regular roads have obstacles such as traffic signals and crosswalks. In other words, the XT has to be designed taking various conditions and constraints into account. Also, wanting to design something to one’s own satisfaction is quite dangerous, and is a very easy trap for craft professions to fall into.
So, I don’t think the XT that I design will be particularly unusual or surprising. Rather than something that I’ve decided on, it’ll be more like something that came into being, or that felt like this was the only design that it could be, based on the various conditions I’m working under. After all the trial and error, to come up with something that isn’t innovative or unconventional, but more run-of-the-mill, takes some courage and can be quite daunting. Because the people who get presented with the run-of-the-mill design usually have something to say about it in no uncertain words! (laughs) But speaking as a creator, that courage and determination is absolutely essential. I’m not a miracle worker. My designs only come into being because they were bound to in the first place.

(interview & editing: Chinatsu Shimizu, English translation: Richard Halberstadt)

 

In Pursuit of a New Form of Tatami Together with a Landscape Architect Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA) Part 1 of 3

In Pursuit of a New Form of Tatami Together with a Landscape Architect Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA) Part 2 of 3

In Pursuit of a New Form of Tatami Together with a Landscape Architect Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA) Part 3 of 3

Revamping the “culture of sitting” with XT60 – Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA)

・Portland Japanese Garden
https://japanesegarden.org/

Modern day society tends to prioritize the elimination of natural world elements in favor of a safe living environment. We enlisted the help of renowned gardening expert and landscape architect Sadafumi Uchiyama to look into the creation of a living space that is both beautiful and pleasing through the use of nature, particularly straw tatami matting. Explore with us the tradition and beauty of the XT tatami experience.

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The importance of keeping things as they are / hunkering down to keep tradition going

The Portland Japanese Garden is now in its 55th year. I wasn’t involved with its inception, but the job I’m entrusted with now is to build on those 55 years of history and put it on a good path to the future. I feel my mission with this garden is not to give it a new direction, but rather to make the best use of its valuable 55 years of existence. Of course, the garden will live on past my own lifespan, so my job is merely to pass its traditions on to future generations. My philosophy is not to change something that is unchangeable in its nature. When I was appointed to this post of curator, so many people had expectations of me, and wondered what kind of person had got the job, and whenever I was interviewed about it, I would inevitably be asked what I wanted my legacy to be. And when I talked about not changing things, they would all go away thinking “That guy’s not gonna do anything.” (laughs) And, to not change things, to keep them as they are and respect the long tradition and history of the Japanese garden is more difficult than you would think. The world tends to always prefer new things and change, because that generates interest and consumption, but I don’t think it’s right to just do whatever you want without taking into account the historical achievements of all the other curators of the garden that have gone before you. This garden is going to continue to be handed down through further generations, so I want to be the link that keeps that tradition going.
I have a friend in Kyoto who comes from a long line of professional gardeners, and he’s the 16th generation of that family business. I’m just the 4th generation in my family, so I’m quite the newbie. I know of a business in our profession that has been going for 21 generations, back to the 15th century. People in this kind of work that’s been handed down for generations end up knowing themselves and their place. I can’t go back in time in a time machine and alter history, and I shouldn’t even if I could. That’s what it means to know yourself and your place as the successor to the long tradition of Japanese gardens.
In the case of both gardens and tatami, there are times where you really have to just scrape by, like flying at the lowest possible altitude. If you try to do too much, you crash and burn. But as long as those people succeed in scraping by, it means they can hand things on to the next generation. They may not be stars of the profession, but you could say that they understood their role and what needed to be done, because they have provided the opportunity for the next generation to make their mark, however close to the line it may have been for them. We tend to misunderstand this, but traditional culture is not always a high-flying kind of thing. I think hunkering down just to keep going is one part of keeping traditions alive.

Good things never die

We’re living in a time when while new Japanese gardens are being built in other countries, there are hardly any new ones appearing inside Japan. Because of lifestyle changes, the same thing is happening with tatami, where you don’t see them being used in newly built houses and apartments.
What I’m aiming for is to get more Japanese gardens and tatami used in public spaces. I mean, even if Japanese gardens and tatami aren’t adopted in private housing, as long as they’re viewed as something indispensable, they have to be used somewhere. And I think that’s where public spaces can come into their own. As time goes by, both gardens and tatami go through phases of being popular and unpopular, sometimes out of fashion, but I think that things that have something inherently good are destined never to die out. So, something considered by human beings to be good or necessary will never vanish completely, even if things like their form or their color change a little. I really think that’s true for tatami. However your lifestyle or living environment changes, if tatami really are something that people feel is a necessity, then they are destined to never disappear, even if their numbers are reduced.
Also, both tatami and gardens don’t have a reason to be unless there are people around to use them. It’s the same as Japanese drama forms kabuki and noh, which can’t be said to be complete without people to watch them. In that sense, a thing doesn’t intrinsically have value. The value comes out of it existing and also being part of an interconnected society. So if you look at it like that, kabuki is the same as a stone, in terms of it not having intrinsic value.
This is kind of beside the point, but while there is a Living National Treasure designation for kabuki performers and maki-e (Japanese lacquerware decorated with gold and silver) craftsmen, there isn’t one for tatami craftsmen or gardeners. And because of that, we sometimes hear opinions from within the gardening profession that we have to improve the field to make it worthy of having its own Living National Treasure designation. But I actually think it’s quite the opposite. The moment a gardener is made a Living National Treasure will signal the beginning of the end for Japanese gardens. In other words, something that can’t survive by itself ends up with special protection, or is put in a museum. Things that are put in a museum may be well protected, but are also basically extinct, because they can’t cope by themselves. So my feeling is that you have to be something that can survive without external aid, however close to the bone you end up being. Crafts only come into their true value by actually being used in daily life, in the same way that kabuki can only find true meaning when there are people watching it.

In Pursuit of a New Form of Tatami Together with a Landscape Architect Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA) Part 3 of 3

 

Sadafumi Uchiyama – landscaper, gardener & garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden
Born 1955 in Fukuoka Prefecture, Kyushu Island, Japan, his family had been professional gardeners since the early 1900s, allowing him to study professional techniques from an early age. After participating in developmental cooperation projects in Tanzania and Yemen, he moved to the USA in 1988, gaining a degree and masters in landscape architecture from the University of Illinois, allowing him to combine aspects of Japanese gardening techniques with western landscape architecture principles. Active in a wide variety of private and public landscape projects, his representative achievements include gardens at Jackson Park, Chicago, Denver Botanic Gardens, Colorado & the Duke University, North Carolina. He is one of the founders of the North American Japanese Garden Association (NAJGA). Since 2010 he has been active all over America, working on private properties and commercial facilities, sometimes in collaboration with the famed Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. His publishing and speaking activities are centered in the USA, and he also teaches landscape design and practical application in universities and public Japanese gardens. In 2018 he was awarded the Garden Society of Japan Prize at the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Garden Society of Japan.

In Pursuit of a New Form of Tatami Together with a Landscape Architect
Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA)

Modern day society tends to prioritize the elimination of natural world elements in favor of a safe living environment. We enlisted the help of renowned gardening expert and landscape architect Sadafumi Uchiyama to look into the creation of a living space that is both beautiful and pleasing through the use of nature, particularly straw tatami matting. Explore with us the tradition and beauty of the XT tatami experience.

The Garden – A job that takes both time and effort

I have, basically, two jobs. One is managing the Japanese garden in Portland as its curator, and the other is working as a landscape architect. One thing that landscaping has in common with making objects is that the creator always feels the need to create, which is one of the reasons that in addition to curating the Portland garden I also take on other jobs, designing gardens of many different kinds, for private individuals all over the US and also for public facilities. I always take the gardens I design to fruition, doing everything myself, so there’s no way I would design a garden that I couldn’t build myself. It’s easy to just say “build a garden” and it starts with just putting things in place, but it can take tens of years to bring it to completion, so I would say my job really does take time and effort.

Getting back into Japanese gardens after a long journey

Leaving the family home for Tanzania and Yemen

Artisans are people who have been trained to make things. I was born in a family of professional gardeners, and used to help out with the family business from an early age. By the time I was 10, I didn’t even have Sundays off, and at around 18 I realized that I had unwittingly received training to a professional level, which was pretty astounding! (laughs) However, I had a strong urge to spend some time away from the family business, so at 22 I joined the JICA volunteers and spent 3 years in Tanzania. What I learned there was that death is scarier than anything else around. That’s how dangerous it was in terms of both law & order and health & hygiene. I caught malaria 4 or 5 times, which gave me several brushes with death. I wanted to stay longer, but ended up going back to Japan for health reasons, but even after all that, I was a glutton for punishment and continued working with JICA for another 2 years in Yemen. That’s where I learned that you shouldn’t be constrained by preconceptions. I discovered that my own preconceptions made me look at things through a Japanese lens, and out of that I was able to learn determination. I also learned that misunderstandings can be their own particular kind of knowledge. So, living in a different culture from my own removed preconceptions from my mindset. Ever since then, if I ran into something radically different, I didn’t approach it from my own mindset, thinking “Why isn’t it like this?” but tried to understand it from the other point of view, thinking “What made it like this?” Now that I think about it, it was my time in Tanzania and Yemen that taught me how to think like that. I guess those 5 years really knocked me into shape. (laughs)
This was also a time when I started to take a fresh look at jobs related, in a wide sense, with nature, such as landscaping and tree-planting & greening, since for those 5 years I had seen so many wastelands where all the trees had been cut down for firewood. My experience of large-scale greening in those two countries engendered in me a desire to work on a really big garden area like Central Park, so I decided to study landscape architecture in America.

My time in the USA, reassessing Japan from afar

I arrived in America a blank slate, everything that I had absorbed in Japan nullified by my experiences in Tanzania and Yemen. And the world that waited for me there was one of extreme communication. Lectures in American universities are geared towards Q & A and debate, so communicative ability is a must. I was able to make and build things, but couldn’t explain it using words. For example, if you said to me “Lay those stones,” I could do it in an instant, but if you said “Why did you lay them like that?” I just couldn’t answer. Everything I had done up till then was based on practical experience, so I was forced to inspect everything I had learned practically, analyze it and practice how to express it all verbally. One thing I did notice while doing this was that the contents of my experience included the history and tradition of Japanese gardens. I wasn’t ignorant. It was all there inside my head, but I just didn’t know how to access it.
It’s really easy to just say “It can’t be explained in words,” or “I can’t say it exactly,” but I think there are many things like that that should be talked about, so we should never give up trying to put them into words and conveying them to other people. Expressing things like this verbally is an important part of what I do, and will probably continue until I die. The act of expressing Japanese things and their cultural background verbally to people who don’t share the same mindset, or translating these ideas into something they can understand, in some ways is equivalent to reassessing Japanese culture while being geographically far removed from it.
While I was in America, there was another thing that changed my way of thinking. At the University of Illinois, I studied cultural geography, which looks at geography from a cultural aspect. It’s an academic field which specializes in the background and process of how landscapes are formed under cultural influences. During that time, I discovered D.W. Meinig’s “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene,” a short essay. Gardens are usually viewed only as arts, crafts or part of the dwelling environment, but this essay took a wider approach to landscaping, stating that “Landscaping is art, politics, economics, society, an ecosystem…” That made me aware that I myself had always had an overly narrow view of what landscaping entailed, and it really brought me to a surprisingly more progressive and open view of gardening and landscaping. For example, some people may look at the Portland Japanese Garden and think, “An example of Oriental beauty and rarity,” appreciating its cultural and beautiful aspects, whereas others may look at it from the point of view of investment and monetary ideas, thinking “What financial value has it returned in its 55 years?” And both of those are valid. Ever since then, my idea of a Japanese garden became something different to what it originally was. I was descended from a long line of professional gardeners, but I guess you could say that my perceptions of what a Japanese garden was changed in America.
I think if I have even the slightest ability to look at things objectively, it’s because it’s not so much an inborn ability, as using my various experiences as a basis to discard the things I can’t use when I look at things. I got rid of preconceived ideas and being bound by convention. I may have discarded lots of things, but there also plenty of ideas that are left, and those become strengths. That’s what makes the basis of what I am now.

 

In Pursuit of a New Form of Tatami Together with a Landscape Architect Sadafumi Uchiyama (garden curator at Portland Japanese Garden, Oregon, USA) Part 2 of 3