Japan: Facing Fear

Trying to turn the Rokkaku-Kyozo wheel at Kongobuji Head Temple, Koyasan, Japan

What compelled me to travel to Japan for two weeks? I’ve come back from this trip tired but excited, with a notebook of ideas. It was a drastic solution to a problem that a lot of artists face. I had lost artistic inspiration. It had been lacking for months, even a year or so and the worst was I couldn’t find my own way back to being in flow. In a word: failure.

At the beginning of 2023 I felt flat, but thought that going to the UK to do my Masters would give me a structure and purpose for making art. It did, but within an academic framework. When it was finished, I fell deeper into a hole. Not a pleasant place to be in.

I couldn’t create my own working structure again. I had all but given up my daily practice as I felt it was becoming rote and formulaic. I wasn’t enjoying myself anymore and didn’t know what to do.

I kept asking myself “what is my purpose?” Which is ironic as it is what I have asked many of the artists I have mentored in the past. What is your why? I felt like I had buried mine somewhere under a pile of worries.

I started applying for residencies again, thinking that might help to banish that dull, flat feeling. I got excited about the possibility of doing a one month funded residency in Japan where everything was organized, but I also knew that funded residencies receive astonishing amounts of submission entries. So I was not very confident I would receive it.

However Japan started to interest me. Once I began looking at Japan on the net, all my social feeds popped up with images of Japan. Then Jetstar had a one day sale on. Fly to Japan and come home free. It was the clincher. I still had a credit voucher from the 2020 trip I had booked for Japan for the IAPMA papermakers congress which of course, didn’t happen.  

I looked at the dates. It had to be soon or I would become even more depressed and chicken out. It was late at night when I pressed the button. SOLD!

The next day I woke up and thought what have I done? I’ve committed to something that was way out of my league. Not brave, but foolhardy. I questioned what I was doing and why. Japan was right out of my comfort zone. The language, the crazy skyscraper cities, the trains, the food. Everything about it seemed too confrontational.

That weekend another email popped up from a papermaker I had done an online course with in 2020. She was advertising a washi (kozo) papermaking workshop for a friend who was running it in Japan.

Seriously? I clicked on the link and saw it was a one and a half day workshop which started the day after I arrived in Japan. I thought what are the chances of this all coinciding together?

After nearly two years of no papermaking, I thought I had given up on making paper. However papermaking hadn’t given up on me. I booked the workshop not knowing that I would end up being the only one to take it, so I would get personalized tuition.

I then organized my trip around it. A trip up north to the remote papermaking village followed by a few nights in Kyoto, then off to the art island of Naoshima and finishing with three nights in a Buddhist monastery in Koyasan, sleeping on the floor with prayers at 6.30am. I was looking for re-inspiration and I found it.

Two days before I was due to catch the night flight home, I went to visit Kongobuji, the main temple complex in Koyasan. I watched people filming themselves rotating this big wooden wheel. It looked easy but when I attempted to turn the wheel it was really, really hard. I had seen them do it effortlessly so I thought there must be something I was not doing right.

I leaned hard into the wooden strut and pushed with all my might. It moved slightly. I kept pushing. It started to move easier, then the momentum really kicked in and the wheel began turning. There were a couple more slower bits where I had to push hard again, but before I knew it, I was back to where I started from. I did it!

It was a lightbulb moment. Everything feels really hard at first. Once you break through the initial resistance and put effort in, momentum starts the flow.

It felt like a metaphor for my trip. I faced my fears and doubts. I put myself in confronting situations where I had to surrender and trust that the train I got on would take me to the right place. That my knees would hold up when I missed the bus and had to walk two kilometers uphill with my backpack on to reach my accommodation.

That it would all be worth it. And it was.

Photos to inspire me. A lantern glowing in Okunoin, the cemetery in Koyasan.