Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy
Down a winding side street in the Aoyama district, western Tokyo. Into a chunky, white apartment building, then up in an elevator small enough to make a handful of Western passengers friends or enemies for life. At the end of a hall on the fourth floor, to the right, stands a plain brown door. To be admitted is to go through the looking glass. Sayonara today. Hello (Konnichiwa) yesterday and tomorrow.
Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, one of Japan's foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting.
She looks like someone too proper to chip a teacup, never mind revolutionize an old and hallowed art form. She wears a blue-and-white kimono of her own design. Its patterns, she explains, are from Edo, meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. Except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted), Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meiji print.
Her surroundings convey a similar sense of old aesthetics, a retreat in the midst of a modern, frenetic city. The noise of the heavy traffic on a nearby elevated highway sounds at this height like distant surf. Delicate bamboo shades filter the daylight. The color arrangement is restful: low ceilings of exposed wood, off-white walls, pastel rugs of blue, green and gray.
It all feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda's opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Dairen, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says, "People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted." But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers, "I think that if my mother had remained in Japan, she would have been an ordinary Japanese housewife. Going to Manchuria, she was able to assert her own personality, and that left its mark on me."
Evidently so. She wears her obi low on the hips, masculine style. The porcelain aloofness she displays in photographs shatters in person. Her speech is forceful, her expression animated and her laugh both throaty and infectious. The hand she brings to her mouth to cover her amusement (a traditional female gesture of modesty) does not stand a chance.