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Nisei Week in Little Tokyo

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Japanese Tea Ceremony

This morning, Martine and I took the E-Train downtown to Little Tokyo. It was the beginning of Nisei Week, and there were some interesting events and exhibits to experience.

We had not attended Nisei Week since before the Covid-19 lockdown, so we were surprised by the smaller crowds and the obvious cutbacks. There were no events in the large Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC) courtyard. Some dozen years or so ago, I remember fondly seeing a program of five films starring Raizo Ichikawa at the center’s Aratani Theatre. This year, there were no film programs, no musical programs.

On the plus side, there was a fascinating Japanese tea ceremony. Martine did not know what she was missing when she decided not to attend. The forty-five minute program included a re-enactment of the tea ceremony in a little wooden tea house on the ground floor of the JACCC. There is something about the ritual and multiple exchange of bows that is somehow close to the very soul of the Japanese. And, at the end of the ceremony, we were given some excellent matcha tea and a Japanese sweet.

On the ground floor of the center, we saw a beautiful flower arrangement exhibit. I could kick myself for forgetting to bring my camera, because some of the arrangements were highly artistic; and there was even enough light in the room to make good pictures without flash.

On the fifth floor, we also saw an exhibit of Japanese dolls (not my cup of tea) and ceramics.

After the JACCC events, we trudged to Weller Court and had a so-so Chinese meal until such time as the karate event at the Terasaki Budokan gymnasium on Los Angeles Street was to start. Most of the event was like watching people do calisthenics, except for the team match-ups where there was something that looked like real fighting. There were teams from Japan, the United States, France, and Canada—and that was the order in which they finished.

Some of the Japanese participants were really fierce and fun to watch.

Will we go again next year? Probably not, but we’ll check first to see what they’ll have to offer.

Serendipity: Flowers and Bugs

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In Order for Flowers to Exist …

Lately, I hav been reading two old books by naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch: The Forgotten Peninsula, about Baja California, and The Voice of the Desert. I found this interesting paragraph in the latter. I sure do like his writings!

Gardeners usually hate “bugs,” but if the evolutionists are reight, there never would have been any flowers if it had not been for those same bugs. The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air, or for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when no one except a human being is here to smell it. It is for the bugs and for a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents. And it is lucky for us that we either happen to like or have become “conditioned” to liking the colors and the odors which most insects and some birds like also. What a calamity for us if insects had been color blind, as all mammals below the primates are! Or if, worse yet, we had our present taste in smells while all the insects preferred, as a few of them do, that odor of rotten meat which certain flowers dependent on them abundantly provide. Would we ever have been able to discover thoughts too deep for tears in a gray flower which exhaled a terrific stench? Or would we have learned by now to consider it exquisite?

 

 

“The Earth Laughs in Flowers”

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Flower from the Tropical Greenhouse at the L.A. Arboretum

Flower from the Tropical Greenhouse at the L.A. Arboretum

The sentiment is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, as is the following: “Flowers … are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty overvalues all the utilities of the world.”

When I was a child, I was always surprised that my parents expended so much effort surrounding their house with elegant (and hard to care for) tree roses and other flowers. Perhaps I was slightly jaundiced in my opinion because my brother and I had to keep the blossoms and leaves free of voracious Japanese Beetles.

Now that my parents are gone, I begin to appreciate how they felt. One of the things that I noticed was that they could always tell if a Hungarian family lived in a particular house based on the flowers they planted. I guess it’s partially a genetic thing. Although Martine and I do not raise flowers—after all, we live in an apartment—we go out of our way to visit Huntington Gardens, Descanso Gardens, the Los Angeles Arboretum, and other places where one could walk in floral beauty.

It seems that the Japanese Beetles never made it out to California. Perhaps the intervening deserts and mountains deterred them. One result is that the flower gardens out here in Southern California are particularly beautiful.

The orchid illustrated above is from the L.A. Arboretum’s tropical greenhouse, which contains a treasure of such exotic blossoms.