I’ve been living and making my living in this 650 year old mountain hamlet and 150 year old silk farming house for over 25 years now. I didn’t think much about it and basically enjoyed the time and seasons go by. 

The house, the village and I have aged and changed. The ancient ghosts on the paths and near the streams are much the same. It just took me many years to simply acknowledge them by diverting my eyes when we meet so not to offend. 

I suppose I am the type of person who is relatively fine with uncertainty. (Unlike others who gulp for oxygen if the washing machine eats a sock or two.) 

Showing up in Japan on my 25th birthday with a backpack and a single five-word-sentence from a conversation with my bestie Ingrid Mclainewhen I told her I was going to try to set up a life in Japan. 

Decades ago the backpack was given away but the one syllable laugh, a double nostril expulsion of air propelling my head back with a slight eye roll.

“Yeah…something will work out.”

The sentence is still at hand and just as sustaining as it has been all this time. 

I never did figure out which one of us actually said it. Probably Ingrid. 

Remembering vividly the first time I was inside a Japanese farmhouse. It was truth. 

When we see or hear or read a truth we nod our heads and say…yeah…that is the truth. 

Years later I got me own old farmhouse and looking back someone might have confused the Canadian for Megan Sussex on the moving day in to the dump. 

A self-satisfied smirking Cheshire Cat…. might have even had a green shirt on… different shade of course. 

I digress.

Walter Gropius the founder of Bauhaus wrote an introduction to a book on Japanese domestic architecture in the 1950s :

In revealing the meaningful cultural aims and the high craftsmanship of the Japanese domestic architecture as it evolved through the centuries and in laying bare the compelling motives that directed its development …. 

The Japanese example of the dedication of a whole nation to the task of giving form and substance to recognized spiritual values comes here as an eye opener to all those who doubted that such a unity of purpose could ever exist. 

The design conception had started from the very bones of the building and not merely at its skin as a cosmetic play. Spiritual and practical requirements of living had been coordinated into an artistic approach that represents one of the most valuable contributions to a universal philosophy of architecture. 

I have another old beaten up picture book I found on a garbage can in the rain many years ago. It is a local history book. Watanabe Kahei san from a neighboring hamlet spent fifteen years on two hundred paintings depicting life in these mountains from his youth the early 1920s to 1935. Another local man, Kawaoka Takeharu wrote the descriptions under each picture in the book. 

The original set of pictures for the book started with thirty paintings of the sericulture and weaving culture that appeared in this area where life was so rough that, ‘Five houses share the rare flat land where there should have only been one.’ 

I usually leaf through the disintegrating picture book with my newly arrived workshop guests on their first day here. 

The images of life are worth much more than words. 

I translated the last few lines of the forward without an ounce of elegance.

Nothing has left behind a richer imagery than the unpretentious pictures of life here.
This book, ‘Life in the Mountain Village’ is an outstanding work representing the lives in that period of time expressed through paintings. Now we should honestly go back and deal with these things. I think we can find the basic roots and sources of our lives in the world depicted in these paintings. Even if this evaluation of traditional culture happens, it probably won’t lead to better times…..will it?

I have started to translate the entire book. As I go along I will think about how to use the translation to get across something I found that was important to me. Like Walter Gropius’ insight to Japanese architecture I found a seamless connection between the material and spiritual aspirations of the people. He saw it in architecture and I see it in the life and textiles made in these dark, hidden valleys.

This old house was filled with not only silk farming equipment but silk reeling equipment and loom parts. They were a broken tangle of sooty chaos under the rafters and in hidden corners of this old house and out buildings. Unused for fifty years. It took me years to fix them or replace them and replicate the processes from breeding silk moths to weaving kimono. 

It took me as many years to look at these old timers around me, twenty-five years of working with them and drinking tea with them to get an idea of what their lives had been like. With trepidation I have not introduced myself but simply worked cutting grass around the graveyards behind the houses and keeping the paths clear of overgrowth and getting to know the gods and ghosts that sit around in their old impoverished work kimono. 

My eggs hatch in a few days. The fresh mulberry leaf in the early days of the rainy season await to be picked and fed to the honorable silkworms.

I was down at the river this morning washing the spun silk I have made the past few years and get it ready to be woven. The colors are an attempt to replicate these dark and earthy mountain forests. Lots of indigo and tree barks. Tea harvest is finished for another year. Very little rain this spring so it was more quality that quantity this time. Thank you to the helpers. I finished weaving this madder dyed spun silk a few days ago. It had been on the loom for ages. It was a slow slog weave. And what is a rambling post without a cute cat picture? Whiteboots is eyeing the goldfish in the lily pots while he takes a drink at the front door. The second indigo vat is not in use so plants have moved in.