Page 37 - BSAM 2015 Q1

The staffs of the foreign embassies especially wanted to experience a form of Japan’s cultural arts. Toshio recruited Tom Yamamoto, a Hawaii native and part of the U.S. Army occupational forces who had retired in Japan, as his English-speaking instructor. At the end of the workshops after keepsake photos were taken, the saikei were carefully taken apart and the components cleaned and put away for future classes. The trees had their roots “balled and burlapped” and sunk into sand beds for easy maintenance.
In the late 1960s Toshio Kawamoto and Tom Yamamoto gave several presentations in Honolulu and I was a part of a team that assisted them in the preparations. I had already studied their book and had made several saikei. They were generous in their critiques of my efforts. In 1991 on a Hawaiian vacation, Tom Yamamoto did two major demonstrations at the Kona Fuku-Bonsai Center.
Rock plantings are popular in Hawaii and saikei is considered an advanced rock planting activity. In the past two years, Fuku-Bonsai and the Mid-Pacific Bonsai Foundation partnered to publish the monthly e-mail Journal of Tropical & True Indoor Bonsai on the www.fukubonsai.com website and there have been a number of rock-planting articles.
Contributing editor John “Jay” Boryczko of Farmington Hills, Michigan has especially been interested in saikei and has submitted reports and articles of his efforts. To teach Jay, I had been working on building a set of sculptured rocks and moving trees into shallow containers as part of the refinement
FIRST DAY, SAIKEI WORKSHOP:
Arrangements with 8-inch rocks
A. The first trial arrangement featured two 8-inch tall rocks with a few other smaller rocks. The rocks had been extended 4.5 inches and 5.5 inches with plastic pipes and no effort was made to hide the pipe base. Using a round plywood disc, the bases of the two tallest
rocks were taped to nails in the wood base to hold them in position. The initial design was created while explaining that my
basic designs places the first three
rocks into ideal positions; and that the rocks suggest placement of the trees. Having a tray of Java Moss handy gave a nice look quickly.
process to get smaller more attractive trees. When Jay made plans to visit us, preparations for a saikei class intensified and the innovations created are the subject of this article.
NEW CONCEPTS AND CRITERIA
Unlike most saikei, I urged Jay to put together groups of pre-selected rocks and trees that would allow him to first create a full range of designs that could become increasingly complex. I made such a set to address the challenge of creating a tall complex saikei that I had envisioned for many years. Jay’s workshop would teach him the primary saikei principles as well as have him as a partner to address the tall complex challenge.
I utilized Oregon pumice which is highly carvable and which holds a lot of details. A number of individual stones had been carved. In Michigan, Jay also began carving a set and his frequent photo reports produced increasingly better components. The objective was to create a sufficiently large set so a full range of saikei arrangements could be created. The arrangement could be continually assembled and modified from time to time to improve and explore variations.
His younger trees were still in the growing-on stage and did not produce the desired effect. I sent him trees with older extended roots that were moving into refinement and the more detailed trees greatly improved his initial results. So, when he decided to visit and take workshops here, saikei was the priority and it gave me an opportunity to teach and field test recent innovations that were in progress.
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