The Spirit of Mike Blanton.

I did not know Mike well at all and I really should not be the person to write about him. I only met him once. Briefly. We met him for a minute at Brussel’s sale. But we got to talk some on Facebook. He used to post pictures of a different tree he worked on every couple of days and I was getting jealous about how good his life must be working on bonsai every day. Then I learned that he had stage 4 lung cancer and it all looked very differently. At some point I started wondering if that is what it is going to take for me to start doing what I love doing and I decided to take more time to spend with my family and my trees. If I got a better perspective, in part, it is due to him and his spirit.

I got to think about Mike today because of a present I got in the mail from a friend, Jeremiah Lee, whom I know through Peter Tea and Facebook. But first the back story.

In March 2013 I was fortunate to spend my 40th birthday at Aichi-en. It was repotting season and we got to go work on clients’ collections. One of those clients was the owner of Shinpukuji Temple who happens to be a big fan of Bunzan pots. We spent two days in Shinpukuji and the first day I spent putting drainage screens in many Bunzan pots. Here are some pictures

When I got back I was able to get a Bunzan pot from … Boon. I always thought it was a funny combination – Boon bringing me a Bunzan pot. When Mike was getting weaker I decided to send him that Bunzan pot as part of a care package. I guess I thought maybe bright colors would brighten his day a little. I hope it did.

So today, when I got a package from Jeremiah and found two Bunzan pots in it I thought of Mike again. I am very thankful to Jeremiah for his generous present, which is a thank you gift for a tiny favor I did for him. And also for helping me to spend an evening thinking about Mike. I don’t know where we go after we die. I hope he is having fun working on bonsai wherever he is now.

Old man’s quince

Another post about another Chinese quince. This is the second oldest tree produced at Aichi-en. I saw the pictures of this tree posted by Juan Andrade. He sent ne the pictures below, and a friend of mine translated the story. This tree is at least 120 years old and was grown from seed.

Old man’s quince

This old quince tree has an impressive thickness at the root, measured to be 36cm. At a first glance, it looks like the tree was either taken from a mountain or raised by root grafting. However, this tree was raised from seed. Quince is relatively easy to take care of, but still, this tree clearly shows many years of dedicated care.

Specifically, it is said that 85 years old Mr. Sukijiro Tanaka planted a seed when he was an elementally school student and raised the tree. Thus, the tree is at least 70 years old. Mr. Tanaka was a gardener residing in Nagoya city, raising many needle junipers and black pines, but he was especially proud of this quince being very special. Later on, the tree was under the care of a Bonsai enthusiast Mr. Adachi in Chukyo (Aichi prefecture area) until one day Mr. Kyoji Kawakami of Daihoen in Tokyo discovered the tree by chance when Mr. Kawakami went to Chukyo area to purchase bonsai trees. He then fell in love with the quince and took it home back to Tokyo.

Today, I own the tree. Mr. Kawakami once said when the arrangement was made for him to inherit the tree from Mr. Tanaka in exchange for some money, Mr. Tanaka was in tears and could not receive the money. One can only imagine Mr. Tanaka’s grief for parting with the tree he had raised for many years.

From Small Episodes of Bonsai Suiseki by Teisuke Takahashi (published Dec., 1962)

Here are a couple more links. You can read more about the history of Aichi-en here and here is the link to the movie Juan made at the last Gomangoku (Daiju-en family annual show).

Early morning in Tokyo

First trip out of the hotel was a resounding success. I was hoping to find a convenience store for an obligatory onigiri and… I did! I should also mention that it is 4am. I have been up for about an hour and had to adjust to an early change of plans. The original plan was to make it to the Tsukiji fish market for the tuna auction and then find a place to watch the semifinal world cup game between Brazil and Portugal. However, at about 3:15 am as I was writing down walking directions I found out that the fish market is close today. So I had to adapt and decided to try to go to sleep. And try I did, but sleep I did not. Around 4am I realized that since I am not going to try walking 4 miles to Footnik (English Pub) to watch the game, I should load up on provisions for the game.

Tokyo at 4am is a treat. There are very few people out. Mainly taxi drivers sleeping (crap, Germany just scored!) in their cars. I think I came across a little homeless camp, which was very clean and orderly as one would expect from the Japanese homeless. It was raining earlier so the city felt very fresh and clean. I started exploring by taking the first right turn and found nothing open on the first lap. But I did get a can from the 8th vending machine, of what turned out to be a cold sweet coffee. So after the first loop I extended my search area and after passing the homeless camp found the motherload – Lawson! It is a convenience store where you can buy anything you might need to watch a 5am soccer game in Japan. It is like a gas station store, but more Japanesy. So I got just the staples: Onigiri (125 yen), a bottle of green tea (120 yen) and a mystery snack which was as fishy and crunchy as I could only hope for. Onigiri is a rice triangle, usually wrapped in seaweed, and sometimes has a filling. Since I cannot read Japanese it is always a surprise. What I love most about it is that they put a layer of plastic between the rice and the seaweed to keep seaweed crunchy. As I learned later I got the best kind with salmon filling. But on the way back to the hotel I was given the biggest gift of all – an all day and night open noodle shop. I even thought about sitting down right there and then for a breakfast of some ramen, but it was getting close to the start of the game so I decided to postpone.

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that it was not really the first trip out since I did go out last night for dinner, but I really did not pay attention where we were going. I got into Tokyo the night before. Landed in Narita at 4:30. Convinced the customs agent that there was nothing weird about bringing two huge and mostly empty suitcases for a ten day trip (I told him that there were items waiting for me in Nagoya, which made him suspicious even more, but when he saw my bonsai tools he knew I was legit), exchanged a bunch of greenbacks for a bigger bunch of (crap, Germany just scored again – I might be eating noodles earlier than I thought), took a bus to Tokyo station (stand in line 2 ten minutes before the bus arrives, but move to line 1 after 5 minutes), took a taxi to the hotel, check in to the hotel and was ready to meet Wil at 7PM (This is messed up – the Germans just scored for the third time and it has only been 25 minutes).

Wil has been living in Japan for 15 years. (you cannot be serious – 4th goal for Germany! They just showed a 5 year old kid in the stands crying into a cup followed by a very pretty lady crying into her hand). A friend put me in touch with him and he very graciously agreed to arrange for me to have daiza made for some of my stones. He knows one of the most renowned daiza carvers, Mr. Suzuki. So I shipped him the stones and he brought them to my hotel. (ok, this is disgusting – goal 5 for Germany. I don’t know what the Brazilians were doing last night, but this is disgusting). Not only he agreed to take my stones to Mr. Suzuki and pick them up later when the daiza were made, he also was willing to schlep all the way across town after work to deliver them, and even to sit down for dinner with me. We found a “cheap and cheerful” salary-men restaurant which was heavy on nutritional information and light on flavor. It turned out to be an Athlete Restaurant. But what the food was missing in flavor the company made up for. Wil told me about how he ended up in Japan and got into Suiseki. I did not know that he is a director of the Nippon Suiseki society. We had a great talk about this and that and I am extremely thankful to him for his time and help.

Sometimes you need to learn from the great masters and just ... cut it all off

I have heard this story several times and it fascinated me. So when I got the details from Boon I could not keep it to myself and decided to post it. Both Juan Andrade and Ryan Bell helped with putting this together, so here goes a story of a Chinese Quince after it won a Kokufu prize in 1986 (Kokufu 60) the way Boon put it:

“Triple trunk Karin. It received Kokufu prize at Kokufu 60. Mitsuya was the artist who worked on it. It was sold. Several years later it was sold at the auction in 1997. My teacher's client bought it. In Feb 1997, my teacher, Mr Kihachiro Kamiya repotted it. In March, I assisted him. He cut every branch off leaving stubs to regrow new branches. About seven years later, it was shown again at Kokufu. It looked bigger and more compact. It has been a great experience to see the progress. I still visit and work on it several times after my teacher passed away in 2004.”

1986

2004

bonsai ceramics

Bonsai ceramics is a topic I have been learning about more and more recently. I remember buying my first tokoname pot back in Indiana and paying, what at the time seamed like an exorbitant amount of money. Back then I did not have any suitable trees, but for some reason I really wanted that particular pot. Maybe because it would have been the first bonsai related thing I would own that was made in Japan. The sad thing is that this particular pot later broke during a workshop with Owen Reich, and turns out I don't even have a picture of it. But, I am now an official pot collector, or maybe pot hoarder.

There is a lot of information you can find on the web about bonsai pots. My favorite sources are http://japanesebonsaipots.net/ and http://samedge.wordpress.com/. Those two blogs are full of amazing information. And, btw, not all of this information is about the pots I will never have, don't have at this time, or are too expensive for us mortals. Here is an example http://japanesebonsaipots.net/2013/03/07/hokido/ (and I have a couple of the pots by Hokido! and they are not too expensive.)

Most of my education happened in conversations with Peter Tea and Ryan Bell (the owner of http://japanesebonsaipots.net/). Ryan has been great with helping to identify different pot makers from the chops and signatures as well - you can contact him on facebook. Mr. Tanaka, the owner of Aichi-en in Nagoya, and the man I (undeservedly for me) refer to as Oyakata, taught me a bunch as well. Over the last two years I have learned a lot and amassed a large (for my standards) collection of inexpensive pots, mainly Japanese, most from Tokoname region, which is close to Nagoya.

So here is what I learned. Pots are important. After all bonsai is a tree in a pot and harmony is important not just for the tree but the tree AND the pot. An old tree in a new pot looks out of place. A feminine tree in a ragged pot looks strange and unbalanced. The basics of aesthetics that apply to trees apply to pots. The way to communicate those aesthetics is a little different. For example, the age of trees is communicated via bark for pines and dead wood for junipers, but patina for pots. Patina is a residue resulting from years of use that accumulates on the surface of the pots. Here is an example of patina

This pot used to be completely white and shiny. A tree in an old pot looks older, even if it is being completely redeveloped like this trident maple is.

The basics of pot selection for trees are very simple. Use unglazed pots for conifers and glazed for deciduous or broad leaf evergreens. Use masculine pots for masculine trees, heavy pots for heavy trees, rough looking pots for rough looking trees, etc. But the more comfortable you feel with the subject the more tricky it gets. I have seen combinations that at first sight should not work together at all, but would blow you away. For example, a literati (bunjin) trident maple in an unglazed bunjin pot!

My simple classification of shapes is as follows. Ovals are the softest, and shapes get harder as you add angles and corners. Round pots, however, are usually reserved to literati or bunjin trees. So rectangular pot with soft corners is next to oval. Then rectangular and square. The hard pots are the ones that have sharp corners like this one (notice how strong the tree is - it belongs to Boon).

Another topic is quality and age. For a while I thought that Tokoname is as good as it gets, while Chinese pots are low quality. It gets harder. The basic rules are, well, I am not sure there are many. There more I know there more I don't know and the only advice I can give people is to get as much information as they can and decide for themselves. Recently Chinese pots are getting better and are not as likely to break when frozen. At the same time there is a wide variety of Tokoname pots and hand made pots are considered higher quality than machine made pots. I like thinner pots all other things held equal, because they are lighter. I have two pots that look almost identical, one is Chinese and the other is from Yamafusa maker in Tokoname (probably machine made even though it is sighned) and the Yamafusa is much lighter.

Quality of materials used is also very important. Quality of clay as well as quality of glaze. My favorite glazed pots are the once that have multiple colors or glazes that change color when fired. Here is an example of a Koyo made Namako (or see cucumber) pot that was gifted to me by a dear friend (thank you). Note the differences in color all coming from the same glaze.

One of the questions I was once asked by a bonsai professional in Japan was "Why Americans like Yamaki pots so much?" Yamaki is one of the tokoname pot makers. And my answer was that they make good quality inexpensive pots and you can sometimes find those with reasonable age and patina without having to pay a thousand dollars. But that question lead me to think that there are many levels of quality out there and Yamaki is just one of them. Here is two examples of Yamaki pots.

I am sure I have left out many if not most topics, but I am hoping that whoever reads this blog will want to learn more, seek out the information and then share it with the rest of us.

First big bend

I have been itching to try and make a big bend on a tree for a while, but since my trees were not ready for it I had to wait. And I HATE wait, but bonsai is good for teaching one patience.

So today I decided it is the time to start. One of my Virginia Pines is the subject. Here are the pictures before and after.

But, in between there was a lot of work. Unfortunately, I was doing it by myself so I had to figure out how to bend and tighten wires alone. Here is the "process pictures".

I should explain the first picture. I did not have a piece of ribar long anough to do the bends so I use a broom stick which did the job. Also, before I did anything I tied the tree to a piece of 2x6 with stainless steel wire. Two reasons for it. First, I needed to tie the tree down better. Second, I did not want to damage the pot (it is a sign Yamaki pot) so the pressure is on the wood instead of the pot.

Then I set a guy wire (stainless steel is much stronger than copper and can take a lot of abuse. After I set it up I realized that I cannot push down on the tree and tighten the wire on my own so I decided to use the jack. You can see how I set up two loops from the same guy wire. It took three steps of closing the jack and resetting it until I got to the end. At some point the anchor wire started opening up so I had to close it and I added another one to make sure it did not snap. Working with stainless steel wire is hard - I used a couple of cheap pliers because wire eats up the teeth on the pliers fast.

After the bending was done I replaced the stainless steel wire with copper since it does not take as much strength to hold it in place. Also, I added a couple of guy wires to reinforce the weak points on the trunk so that the bend is distributed over the length of the trunk.

Finally, I need to thank Peter Tea for talking to me about how to make those bends and for posting about them. Also for convincing me to buy the stainless steel wire when I was visiting him in Japan. You can learn a ton from Peter's blog. Go to Post Index and read everything on Bending Technique. In addition, I need to the Juan Andrade, who is apprenticing at Aichi-en now, for all his posts on facebook and the inspiration.

Repotting Imperial Pine

Since my last post was about repotting here is the first repotting experience that I have been fortunate to be part of. I think it all took place in April 2009, but I don't have the exact date anymore. Here is the link to the article I wrote about it all.

There is so much beauty in this world. I have been very fortunate to see some of it and even more fortunate to create some of it as well. Tomorrow I am going to travel back to CA to see Bristlecone Pines. And today I worked on this image.