Wabi-Sabi. Making Beauty from Broken Pottery
Annie, my friend from Taos and traveling companion, spent the afternoon in a kintsugi workshop in the Aoyama neighborhood of Tokyo. Kintsugi is the process of mending broken pottery and lining the cracks with a combination of a special glue and filling them with 24k gold powder. Wabi-Sabi is the philosophy of making something whole […]
Katazome Stencil Dyeing in Tokyo
We spent the day with our guide Kit who has been living in Tokyo for over forty years. She met her Japanese husband in London where he was a student and she was a resident advisor for Brown University study abroad. Kit has. PhD in English literature and is fluent in Japanese of course. It […]
Welcome to Tokyo: The Amazing Japanese Breakfast
We checked in to the Hotel Metropolitan last night after landing at Narita. It was an almost 11 hour flight during which I dozed some. It took over four hours to go through customs, immigration, get yen from the ATM, figure out directions to get from the airport to Tokyo Station and the hotel in […]
In Japan, Searching for Blue Indigo (Ai-zome)
My quest for Japanese indigo fabrics and clothing took us to remote villages and high-end designer boutiques. I searched old kimono stacked in department store corners and flea market stalls. In the old Geisha district of Gion, two vintage textile shops offer 100+ year-old pieces in varying condition. I traveled from Tokyo to Kyoto to […]