Appreciating the Art of Shodo

By Chris Santiago
Assistant Language Teacher
Akita 1999-2000

My English class had been canceled. It was a bright autumn day in Northern Japan, with a warm breeze bending the grass along the country roads, and I was tempted to duck out of school and play hooky.

But the Vice Principal of Toshima Elementary School, Harata-sensei, invited me to the fourth grade shodo class. The students, he said, were excellent calligraphers, and it would be well worth my time.

I’m not much of an artist and I’ve always preferred the piano to the paintbrush. But I not only tried shodo – the “art of writing” – I fell in love with it.

The students, bright and serious, eagerly showed me how to fold my paper, which was glaze-thin and almost transparent, into fourths. They showed me how much water to mix with the jet black ink. They chided me for using my left hand; begrudgingly, I used my right. (Weeks later, I saw a shodo master on a talk show using his left. I told Harata-sensei about it; he shrugged and said, “When you become a master, you can use your left hand, too.”)

Harata-sensei fixed his paper to the board, and showed us – with slow, elegant strokes – how to draw the characters KAN and SEI, which together meant “completion.”

The students went to work.

I watched. They wrote the two characters, one above the other, over and over again. Their concentration was so intense it bordered on meditation. They critiqued each other’s work – fairly, with maturity, honesty, and dashes of encouragement.

I gave it a shot. I painted slowly, painstakingly. I held my KANSEI up to the light: it was runny and wan. But Harata-sensei and his students were quick to praise its finer points. They lauded the thickness of my horizontal lines; they admired the balance of my composition.

“Not bad,” Hara-sensei concluded. “Try it again.”

I did. I won’t pretend that each attempt was better than the last. They got worse, actually. They were just two characters, KAN and SEI, but they were frustratingly difficult to get right.

I’d been surrounded by Chinese characters from the moment I got off the plane at Narita Airport. A major part of my daily routine had been deciphering kanji: reading street signs, train schedules, contracts, packaging, prices of scrumptious-looking wax entrees in the window displays of restaurants.

But it wasn’t until I tried to write the characters that I saw them: the just perceptible wrist-flick in a right angle; the release of pressure as the brush lifted off the page, leaving a feathery little hook.

That week, I joined a shodo class at a local community center. As a beginner, KAN and SEI had been out of my league. Now I was starting at the beginning, with ICHI, or “one,” a single line running from left to right, and drew it over and over again.

Shodo, I was learning, was a lot like jazz – you can play the same song a hundred times, and it will be different every time.