Being still a little jet lagged and not paying much attention to the date, I neglected to note that yesterday – April 8th, was the historical Buddha’s birthday. That was, until we encountered the masses of people at Senso-ji temple, close to the Amuse Museum, our destination.

My favorite part of this temple complex was the beautiful sorin, or spire, on top of the pagoda. (If interested in more on pagodas, go here: http://thekyotoproject.org/english/pagodas/) The gray sky made the gilded spire stand out even more than it usually might, brilliant and uplifting.

Instead of the usual offering paid to light a single incense stick, people were buying and lighting entire packs of incense to honor the Buddha’s birth, encouraging the smoke to cover them in the auspiciousness of the event. Japanese are dedicated to these events and, I might say, they like to cover all their bases. In a survey done years ago to determine the religious demography of the country, the number of people who said they were Buddhist and the number who claimed Shintoism (the original, animistic foundation of Japanese belief) as their religious affiliation added up to more than the total population of the country. Never hurts to be fully covered, right?

Plenty to look at here but our real destination was the Amuse (pronounced A-moo-say), and its collection of boro: antique indigo clothes, quilts and sleeping kimono

Contemporary culture has popularized the concept of torn and patched clothing, and it has become something of an aesthetic for textile and fashion afficianados. And yes, the textiles were indeed beautiful. But the original impetus for these pieces was the intense cold of rural Japan in the far north, and a lack of resources, which compelled people to use every last scrap of cloth to layer and stitch into clothes and sleeping kimono.

 

The exhibition was extraordinarily moving. Layer upon layer, bits of cloth were added, turning threadbare cloth into strong and useful items again. These kimono like pieces are actually bed clothes, into which the entire family would curl up. Unlike other museums, you are welcome to touch anything here. These wraps are soft, supple, and heavy! The outside layer is a scratchy hemp, softened by age, which grows better in northern climates, and the inside is covered in a softer cotton (hard to come by in the north a hundred years ago). In between the layers hemp fiber is stuffed as insulation.

the extent to which nothing was wasted was just so moving, and yes, very stimulating on an aesthetic level.

Like an exhibition of drawings, you could see the movement and rhythm of the hands which stitched these pieces together long ago. And the pieces had a humanity and pathos to them that was quite rich.

 

It reminded me of an exhibition of old drawings (always my favorite), where the movement of the hand of the maker was brought alive by the stitcher.