My friend and macha teacher, Tabusa-sensei, invited me to join her in a trip to Omishima, the fourth island in the Seto Sea group north of Imabari. The islands are joined to Honshu and Shikoku with the Shimenami Kaido, a road system comprised of a freeway and multiple bridges, so we could drive there. The normally expensive highway tolls on all Japanese freeways were being relaxed for Golden Week (the first week in May, when everyone travels), so the trip would be much cheaper.
Tabusa wanted to see a collection of sumi-e, black and white paintings made on paper with calligraphy ink. They were being shown at the Omishima Museum of Modern Art, in the town of Omishima just opposite Oyamazumi-jinja. These paintings were mounted on fusuma, sliding paper doors used in traditional buildings in Japan. There is a long tradition here, of painting on fusuma.
These were comissioned by a large buddhist temple in Kyoto, called Chishakuin, and would be installed there later in the month.
Minami, my landlady, and another friend, Kazu, also came along, so Sunday at nine we jumped in Tabusa’s car and headed off to the islands.
The sumi-e show was quite wonderful, large 4 to six panel scenes with landscapes depicted in the four seasons. One featured a weeping cherry tree, another bamboo grass(?), a third a meadow at a misty sunrise. The artist Toshio Tabushi has spent five years creating a series of 60 panels, landscapes with a seasonal theme, on the sliding paper doors called fusuma, used in traditional Japanese houses and temples. These are masterworks by this artist, the culmination of a 40 year career.
He applied the ink, then removed it selectively to create delicate layers of grays. There is a wonderful crossover between drawing (line, edge) and painting (the liquid flow of the ink) and, surprising, the atmospherics, the air, created by the removal and smudging. The landscapes really do breathe.
There is also somehow a photographic property to these images; they call out to the negative, to silver. This is created partly, I think by the use of both addition and removal of the ink. At times the paper appears to become saturated and greys out, contrast is lost, there is no white, and no black. This begins to look remarkably like something that happens with a photographic process called solarization, when the image sometimes goes both negative and positive.
This photographic aspect is also reflected in how he places the images on the panels: he makes drawings from photos, then projects those by overhead projector onto the panels, and paints the projections onto the panels.
Photography was not allowed in the exhibit, and I could find nothing about this show online, so I’ve taken a couple of pictures of foldouts from the catalog:
A landscape featuring a weeping cherry tree. 
A meadow at sunrise. We spent perhaps an hour viewing these quite wonderful paintings, then walked across the street to Oyamazumi-jinja to take a look at the 2,600 year old Camphor tree (!).
Local comentary has it that this tree, which has lost it’s higher canopy many times over it’s long life, was shortened to about 20 meters by bomb blast during the second world war. Apocryphal, probably. 
South on the local coastal road about ten minutes or so is the Tokoro Museum Omishima, a mid size gallery with Japanese and international modern art in it. Before we went in we had some coffee, and Kazu tried to show me how to make a whistle from one of the small mame (bean) plants we found growing there.
It was hopeless; I couldn’t make any sound at all, though Kazu could make his whistle! Ah well. The gallery is a concrete structure which stairsteps in about 6 floors down the hillside, facing onto the strait. It’s an interesting structure; stairs run down the outside in a gallery and inside of it…and there, a nice Japanese installation made completely of, I think, Japanese cedar, of a…it seems to be a life size street kiosk, selling magazines and books and stuff, all made of…cedar.
Around back there’s a post box and phone booths. Cool piece! Artist: Yamemoto Hideyoki.
Also a nice wall piece of figures made of twirled tissue paper. A Dantean world of ghosts. Didn’t get the artist’s name.
And a wonderful sculpture, quite small, perhaps 20 inches high, of a seated bishop, mounted on a little shelf, high up on a concrete wall, with a view of the beautiful strait in front of the bottom floor of the gallery. Italian.
After returning to Imabari, we stopped in northern Imabari for lunch, at a place called Kane Tani (Golden Valley). A traditional Japanese luncheon, including a tempura-ed fish backbone (!), which was a surprising, crispy treat. A very nice meal at 1500 yen. Later I found out from Yumi that this restaurant was owned by the same family as a well known fish shop nearby.
