Cultural connections

MIRIAM HILL

The three Japanese people touring Nunavut Arctic College’s Arts and Crafts Centre in Iqaluit smile and, through their interpreter, ask questions of students.

As they walk by the centre’s kitchen, a man calls to them and asks for some help.

“We’ve been trying to figure out what this means,” he says, gesturing to a framed piece of art on the wall depicting an array of oriental symbols. Through the interpreter, the eldest of the group, Shigeru Ozaki, 82, explains that the symbols are Chinese, but they do understand the general meaning of many of them.

“It’s good paper,” Ozaki says, staring intently at the piece. “But it doesn’t last as long as Japanese paper.”

He is an expert.

Ozaki, his daughter Fumiko, 51, and her daughter Akari, 24, represent three generations of a papermaking family from a remote region of southern Japan on the Island of Shikoku.

They come from a village of about 20 families located on a mountain-top, far from the pollution and bluster of Japan’s big cities. It’s this pristine setting that’s required to make the high quality of paper they produce.

The Ozaki family grows its own fibre, he explains, special shrubs that are hand-harvested by family members. The plants are steamed and the bark peeled off and scraped, then left to dry for up to a year.

The stores are cooked with lime, washed with pure mountain water and dried again in the sun. Fragments of plants are picked by hand from the material and the fibre is then pounded and placed in a water bath called Tororaoi that makes the liquid thick. A screen is dragged through the slush to form sheets and then dried in the sun.

Cape Dorset artists have been using the Ozaki family’s paper for years to print their world-renowned images and the elder Ozaki wanted to visit both Cape Dorset and Iqaluit to see how the paper is being used.

Accompanying the family is Nancy Jacobi of Toronto, who runs The Japanese Paper Place, an importer-retailer of many types of paper. She’s visited the family in their village three times before this trip.

Jacobi praises the quality of the family’s paper, speaking of its malleability and how light shines through it. The paper is not only printed on, it can be sewn and modeled into other shapes.

“It has qualities Canadians don’t always understand,” she said. But the Ozaki family’s trip, financed partially by her business and the Japan Foundation, was more about showing the craftspeople how far their paper reaches and about making cultural connections.

“I wanted to encourage the family there’s life for the paper outside of Japan,” she said. Papermaking as the Ozakis do it is a craft that has been in existence since the 1400s, but it’s dying out because the young aren’t interested in learning.

Akari explains that in the old days almost all the households in her village were making paper. Now they’re the last ones.

“I feel I must take it over,” she says in Japanese, “because it will disappear and I don’t want the tradition to end, because it’s important.”

While visiting Cape Dorset, the family received a print by Kenojuak Ashevak on their paper, and in the capital city were given a bound book of small prints done by Artic College students on Ozaki paper.

The northern artists who met the family say they were pleased to have the chance to share ideas and cultures, but Fumiko, the middle generation Ozaki, says it has motivated her in a different way.

“I’m really going to try hard and make the best paper I can after seeing these artists’ work on it,” she says, smiling.