Page 14 - BSAM 2017 Q3

Top left; Mr. Taiga Urushibata from Japan worked on a Taxus cuspidata, jin and shari being a prominent feature of the tree.
Top right;The nished Taxus cuspidata bonsai.
Middle left; Juan Andrade (Costa Rica) from Aichen Bonsai Nursery, worked on a ve-needle pine involving branch bending and wiring. The nal tree looked good.
Bottom; Werner Busch (Germany) worked on a ve- needle pine which involved a fair bit of wiring.
One entire wall was lled with about 1000 bonsai made by school children. is belies the notion that Bonsai in Japan is a dying art. It is evident that great e orts are being made to bring the art to youngsters.
Also impressive was the sale or vendor area which had a great collection of ready bonsai, some of them of exhibition quality, tools, containers and other ac- cessories.
Demonstrations:
Demonstrations were conducted mainly in three areas of the Saitama Super Arena, the Shisho-ten stage where most of the international headliners had their demonstrations, the Exhibition Hall stage and the Toiro studio. Many of the demonstrations overlapped and so it was impossible to cover all of them. e material for the demonstrations were excellent pieces of pre-worked trees which were then le to grow. e demo trees for the international headliners mainly came from Mr. Kimura’s bonsai garden. He personally took care to see that all the masters were satis ed with their material.
The director for the demonstrations was Mr. Masahiko Kimura who supervised the preparations and introduced the demonstrators on stage. The material being worked on were mostly pines and junipers. All demonstrators showed their skills in designing, styling, wiring and transformed the trees into potential masterpieces. In addition to pines and junipers a few deciduous trees were also worked upon such as a massive Satsuki Azalea by Mr. Shigeo Isobe (Japan) and a Wisteria by Mr. Michael Siow Chee Long from Malaysia. Additionally a beautiful Saikei of Japanese black pine trees with beautiful rocks was created by Jyoti and Nikunj Parekh from India. Mr. Quinquan Zhao of China created a penjing with ve white pines and rocks he had got from China. Another wonderful and informative demonstration was presented by Mr. Hiroshi Takeyama (Japan) who created a forest containing about 45 trident maples all defoliated. e placement of trees to create depth
12 | BCI |
July/August/September 2017