A calligraphy lesson.

Another cultural activity we recently took part in was shodō, or Japanese calligraphy. An older gentleman from one of the Lutheran churches in town was our teacher. I heard later that he and his wife are both well-versed in many classical Japanese arts, so I was grateful that he took an afternoon to teach a few beginners the "way of writing" in the fellowship area of the church while his wife served us tea and sweets.

My workspace.

Thankfully I had a bit of a head start thanks to my home church's retreat last year, where one very talented member of my church taught a bit of Chinese calligraphy during free time. (My attempt at writing 恕 shù, "forgiveness," is still hanging on the wall of my room at home.) Japanese calligraphy is quite similar to Chinese, though this time our instructor didn't speak English.

"Suzuri," he said as he took an inkstone out of his bag and placed it on the table. Then he picked up the brush. "Fude." Finally he poured the ink. "Sumi."
 
Our first task was to write two kanji, or Chinese characters: 十 and 生. The first, pronounced jū, means "ten," and the second is the first character in the verb 生きる ikiru, which means "to live." Sensei explained that together the characters mean nothing; 十生 isn't a word in Japanese. But, he continued, 十 is the first character in 十字架 jūjika ("the cross of Christ") and 生 means "to live," so it was an appropriate combination of appropriately simple characters for calligraphy beginners during Lent.

He laid out felt mats on the table in front of each of us, some marked with diagrams to help properly balance whatever character we were writing. The paper we used was thin enough that the guide lines were visible underneath. He wrote out 十生 in orange ink for each of us as we watched, then instructed us to try our hand.

It is much harder than it looks. "Hiji wo agete," Sensei kept having to remind us. "Raise your elbow." "Tekubi janakute, ude wo tsukatte." "Don't use your wrist, use your arm."

Don't be fooled by my name in tiny letters
on the left; this is Sensei's beautiful work.

He came around to each of us in turn with his brush dipped in orange ink, drawing circles where we'd done well and gently redrawing parts of the characters we'd gotten wrong. Then we'd take another sheet of paper and try again. The pile of orange-marked practice papers became higher and higher. I was impressed at his patience: a man whose every brush stroke was a thing of beauty taking on teaching three beginners who had barely or never held a calligraphy brush before.

Finally all three of managed to write 十生 well enough that Sensei told us to write our names on them before he hung them up on the whiteboard. "It's important to look at what you have already written, too," he explained in Japanese. After we quietly and awkwardly admired our work for a little bit, he said, "Would you like to try writing different characters? I brought lots of paper, so please feel free."

We nodded, smiling nervously. He gave us each different characters to write. For me, he wrote 天上. "Can you read this?" he asked me. "Ten... jō?" I said tentatively. (Tenjō with slightly different characters also means "ceiling.") He smiled and nodded. "It's where God is," he explained. Ah, this tenjō means "the heavens." Though I had to confirm it with my phone's dictionary later.

We kept all our practice papers as trophies.

The characters 天上 are deceptively simple, especially the two tails on 天. It seemed I could never get the strokes right... if I made one good one, I made two other bad ones. I had just finished one I thought was far from my best when Sensei came over and picked it up, holding it out in front of me. I looked up at him, confused. He had a huge grin on his face.

"Jouzu ni dekita ne," he said. "Well done."

There's a certain je ne sais quois about Chinese and Japanese calligraphy that I've never been quite able to capture, that "I know it when I see it" kind of thing. I saw it in Sensei's every brush stroke... not so much in mine, though the adorable older church ladies who occasionally came through and saw our finished pieces gasped, clapped their hands, and declared them "Jouzu, jouzu, jouzu!" ("Excellent, excellent, excellent!")

From left to right: Caroline's, mine, Morgan's.
山川: yamakawa, "mountains and rivers"
春: haru, "spring" (the season)

When he finally deemed one of each of our attempts at calligraphy acceptable, he had us write our names on the left before he took them and hung them on the whiteboard below each of our previous "十生." "Now let us look at what we've written while drinking tea, shall we?" he said.

I did very much enjoy my calligraphy lesson. It's a precise art, and it's all too easy to make mistakes, but it's also somewhat therapeutic and serene, too. Something about the brush sliding across the paper, the way the ink spreads, the flow of the character. It was raining that afternoon, too, which helped the meditative atmosphere.

Watashi wa budou no ki
Anatagata wa sono eda dearu.

Before we left, Sensei gave us all ribbon bookmarks with his own beautiful calligraphy on them, things like John 3:16 and "God is love." I chose a blue one with the first part of John 15:1: "I am the vine, you are the branches." It goes well with a certain other beautiful handmade John 15:1-themed piece of décor I received as a gift from a member of my home church before I left America last October.

In a Japanese in-flight movie I watched on the way over here all those months ago, the main character would write her goals in calligraphy and hang them on the wall to make them more likely to come to fruition. I wonder if I couldn't go down to the hyakuen (dollar) store and pick up some (cheap) supplies of my own to write Japanese Bible verses or prayers or the like to hang around my permanent apartment when I move there. (It's coming up soon!)

Let love and faithfulness never leave you;
bind them around your neck,
write them on the tablet of your heart.
Proverbs 3:3 (NIV)