KANAAMI TSUJI - MorningCalm AUGUST 2018

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BURNING BRIGHT

Kanaami Tsuji weaves wire kitchen utensils designed to serve Kyoto cuisine. But far beyond their utility, these handmade products display an awe-inspiring symmetry that awakens our most primal fascination with nature.

For a thousand years, since the start of Japan’s Heian period (794-1185), Kyoto was the country’s capital. Its political power was inseparable from its holiness, and while today it’s no longer the administrative seat of the country, Kyoto’s thousands of shrines and temples still cast stately shadows. The city has watched more than a millennium pass — yet it doesn’t feel right to simply call it old. The spirit of the past connects vividly to the present, blurring the delineation between eras.

Near the Kodaiji Temple, in Higashiyama Ward, there’s a small shop on Ichinenzaka Street called Kanaami Tsuji. On the second floor of this building, Tsuji Toru’s deft fingers rapidly cross and twist thin wires over a round wooden base. The art of kanaami, or Japanese wire weaving, is almost as ancient as Kyoto. As Tsuji continues to weave, the gleaming wires crystallize into a bewildering network of hexagons that forms a tea strainer. Elsewhere in the store there are tofu servers, coffee drippers, trays, baskets and grills.

“The reason why kanaami has a long history in Kyoto is because there are many restaurants and traditional sweets shops here,” says Tsuji. Kyoto cuisine is especially famous for the quality and variety of its tofu dishes, and kanaami tofu servers are used to gently scoop out tofu from the pot intact. Kanaami kitchen utensils are also used to serve hot pot ingredients, tempura and sashimi, providing an elegant tray for both hot and cold food.

Tsuji’s father, Kenichi, founded Kanaami Tsuji in 1985. The company has a workshop in Kitayama, and the Ichinenzaka shop was opened in 2005. Tsuji learned the craft from his father, who had learned from his father, who had learned from his. After a full day of weaving, Tsuji’s back, fingers, shoulders and neck feel stiff. He used to tire more easily, but after nearly two decades of weaving, he’s grown accustomed to the rhythms and demands of his craft. He can make about eight to 12 tofu servers a day, though it’s not really about the numbers. Most of the products are made of copper, stainless steel and brass, and they’re a functional part of life here. But the items inside the shop are strangely arresting. Staring at the patterns, you can fall under a kind of hypnosis.

Symmetry is found everywhere in the natural world, whether in flowers, honeycombs, snowflakes or tiger stripes. Maybe it’s not exactly right to say that we find it so much as that we look for it, discovering symmetrical human faces even in clouds and on rocks. Most of Kanaami Tsuji’s products are woven into two patterns that pay homage to nature’s sense of balance: kiku-dashi (a chrysanthemum pattern) and kikko-ami (a tortoise shell pattern). Their designs reveal lessons in Japanese semiotics. The hexagon, evoking a tortoise shell, brings good luck and a long life. The chrysanthemum is a flower of deep national meaning, as it forms the imperial seal.

The patterns also tell a personal narrative of the Tsuji family. In 2015, Tsuji and his father created a lamp decorated with a pattern they named oyako-ami — oyako means “parent and child” in Japanese. Unlike kiku-dashi or kikko-ami, oyako-ami creates a more varied arrangement of hexagons of different proportions. Larger hexagons (the parents) surround the smaller ones (the children), together forming larger shapes. It’s hard to decide where one ends and another begins.

Architecture shows abundantly the cross-cultural fascination with symmetry, often on an immense scale. The complicated symmetry of the nave of the Sagrada Família, for example, is not just beautiful — it’s sublime. The aesthetic concept of the sublime describes a kind of awe-inspiring allure that can’t be fully understood. In William Blake’s poem The Tyger, the sublime is expressed through the image of a tiger’s “fearful symmetry,” a beauty that’s in part derived from its intimidating mystery.

Kanaami Tsuji’s kitchen utensils are not grand in scale, and they’re not deliberate symbols of the metaphysical. But in taking ideas of balance and proportion from the natural world, Tsuji’s kanaami can’t help but evoke a measure of the same enigma that has always captivated us. A sketched plan is mounted on the wooden base Tsuji uses as he weaves; the radial lines and concentric circles of the plan are inscrutable to an outsider, but he understands its secrets.

“Personally, I think it’s the softness that woven wires create and the symmetrical forms that make kanaami so beautiful and unique,” he says. “The tofu server we make is not only to scoop tofu, keeping the shape. Tofu is a simple food.” Instead, what really fascinates him is the beauty of the chrysanthemum-shaped shadow that kanaami throws over the tofu. Light and shadow, as interwoven as the wires of kanaami, is a recurring preoccupation for Tsuji. Since 2012, he’s collaborated with Danish design studio OeO to create projects such as The Chrysanthemum Shades, a series of kiku-dashi lampshades that cast beguiling, shifting shadows on their surroundings.

When Tsuji is at the shop, he usually works from 9am to 6pm, then again from 10pm to 1am. But he wasn’t always burning the midnight oil to create kanaami. At 18, he opened a shop selling hip-hop-inspired streetwear. At 20, he moved to Jamaica for a while. “I never liked our family business when I was small. However, after going through other jobs and different experiences, now I have great respect for my father and our business,” he says.

The company is now working with a university that’s studying the movements of expert kanaami craftspeople to pass on the precise techniques to the next generation. It’s Tsuji’s hope that, in the future, greater priority will be placed on sustaining this tradition. The divide between the ordinary and extraordinary isn’t always at the threshold of something grandiose. The sublime is equally at home in a small shop on Ichinenzaka Street.