Japanese homes and culture; Japanese art projects

My friend Carrie Ann, who teaches college classes in interior design, and who has been to Japan to visit her brother and Japanese sister-in-law, graciously came to talk to us about the traditional Japanese home. It was awesome. She showed us lots of pictures and we learned some new words:

tatami—the straw mats that line the floor of traditional homes

tokonoma—a little alcove where beautiful things are displayed (usually a scroll, some seasonal flowers, etc.)

genkan—the entryway, a step down from the rest of the house, where people leave their shoes

ikebana—traditional Japanese flower arrangements

wabi-sabi—Carrie Ann described this as the concept of "perfectly imperfect." We loved that.

The children also wanted to know ALLLLL about Japanese toilets. And Carrie Ann obliged. They are cool! Heated seats, jets of cleaning water, etc. We wish we could get one. We later watched a whole episode of "Begin Japanology" (we LOVE that show) on toilets. We highly recommend it. It is the most discreet, polite, yet fascinating look at toilets you will ever encounter.

Another day, we watched this fascinating video about kimonos. There are so many different and beautiful designs! And it was really interesting to learn that they are only sewn with straight seams.

We made little paper dolls/bookmarks wearing kimonos. We got the idea here: paper kimonos. The template for the doll and kimono is here. I just went into Photoshop and erased the flowers from the image so we could draw our own designs. I personally like Abe's ultramodern Rubik's Cube kimono design.

And here is another art project we did. We learned about Katsushika Hokusai and looked at some of his famous woodblock prints. I thought about having the children make some woodblock prints themselves (we have done this before, when learning about Winslow Homer and the Civil War) but we were short on time that day, so we ended up just painting these Japanese woodblock print coloring pages. They liked doing that too.

You can learn more about Hokusai (and see examples of his work) here at Artsy.

But—the best thing we did was watch some videos showing every step of the process of traditional Japanese woodblock print-making. Sam's friend did a kickstarter project where he had some of these prints made using the old methods. The videos are fascinating. A little long, but it just gives you some idea of how much meticulous, painstaking work goes into making a woodblock print like this. We were all just amazed. Here is a link to those videos: Woodblock prints process

On another day, we wrote haiku. These are the two the children came up with together as we learned about the form (they also each wrote their own). I think they're pretty good.

Homemade Japanese Ramen

There is so much delicious Japanese food to try! We had several different days where we were talking about and trying out various foods. One day we decided to try to make our own ramen. We got a recipe here, and it was really easy. Yummy, too.

Cutting the noodles up was fun. I don't know if we got them thin enough, but they tasted good!

Seb made a point of setting his food all up neatly on a tray, since artistic arrangement and attention to visual detail is one of the hallmarks of Japanese cooking.

Um…Daisy is still working on her chopsticks skills. :)

BY the way. Our favorite place to eat Ramen in Salt Lake City? Koko Kitchen. We loooove that restaurant. Not just their ramen, but their katsu chicken, their gyoza, their teriyaki chicken, and everything else we've tried. Yum!

Topaz Internment Camp Field Trip

After we learned about Ancient and Feudal Japan, it was on to Pearl Harbor and Japan's role in World War II. We happen to live a few hours away from one of the internment camps used for Japanese-Americans during the war, and on a whim I suddenly decided we should go visit. I knew there was probably nothing much to see, but it felt like it would be a cool connection to the history of that place. So off we went.

With all the Spring rain we had, the drive to the West desert was quite beautiful. There were green fields and mountains…

even in the desert areas where you wouldn't normally expect it.

And sheep. With lots of baby lambs. So tiny! So cute!

There is a new museum about Camp Topaz in Delta, which we visited first. We liked it a lot—there are pictures and artifacts from the camp, and one of the barracks used for housing is there so you can go inside and get a sense of what it was like. 

After the museum, we drove over to the camp site. Our GPS didn't get us to quite the right place (we should have followed the directions the museum lady gave us better), but after a bit of turning around and worrying, we found the sign and saw the flagpole. It is so desolate! There are a few ranches and farms around but lots of empty space, too. The day we were there it was cloudy and hot and quite beautiful. I love being able to see the whole sky at once.

You can just wander around wherever you please. At the museum they gave us a kind of map that showed where things were in the camp, and which road to drive around on. You have to stay on the main road because there are lots of old nails and things around that could damage your tires. The children liked these rusty iron rings. We didn't know what they were from—I thought maybe barrels, and the wood had rotted away?

After the end of the war, the barracks from Topaz were sold off and many of them were brought into the town of Delta for other uses—storage, meeting halls, etc. Some people even used them for houses. Everything else was hauled off by the army, I guess, or else just left where it lay. It's kind of a strange feeling to see things lying around, just abandoned. If you visit Camp Topaz, you are supposed to just leave everything where you find it so that others can come and see, too.

Here is the cement footing for one of the latrines, with lots of broken pieces of brick on top. Most of the barracks weren't on cement, but the recreation halls and the latrines did have these foundations, which you can still see.

Here's one of the drains in the floor, the pipe all filled with dirt and the drain cover rusted and broken.

Threatening skies. It didn't rain on us, though. (We were hot. We wished it had.)

Some of the sites were just covered with rusty nails. I guess they're left over from the dismantling of the barracks? I'm not sure.

So many of them!

And there were other things too, like this rusty spring—a bedspring, I think.

Wow, the sky is so wild in this picture! I love the desert skies. The children really loved going off to explore on their own. They got excited whenever they saw anything buried in the dirt, and enjoyed speculating about what things were used for, or which activities had gone on and where. It is fun to wonder what you might find if you wander around long enough!

I don't know what these wooden structures were. They were near the front gates of the camp, where the hospital used to be, but I don't know if they were part of the hospital or not. This one had a hill going up to it almost like a ramp. Anyway, they were fun to look at.

Here are the footings to one of the guard towers. There were several of these around the camp—although the lady at the museum told us, for the last several years of the war, the internees weren't really required to stay in camp. They could sign in and out and go into town or up into the mountains, etc., relatively freely.

Even though the area is pretty barren, we were really glad we visited the Topaz Camp. It was a very interesting and thought-provoking place to go, and there was a sense of weight and history to the place that we felt very strongly. I wouldn't mind going back someday and exploring more, and seeing if there are more interesting artifacts to be found. Maybe we will make a stop there next time we go rock collecting at Topaz Mountain!

Topaz Museum Field Trip

If you are going to visit the Topaz Internment Camp, it's definitely worth a stop at the new Topaz Museum in Delta first. We thought the exhibits were really interesting, and especially liked going into the barracks to see what the living and recreation areas were like for the internees.

The first things we saw were these beautiful pieces of shell jewelry made by some of the internees. They would go up into the mountains and collect these tiny shells (left over from ancient Lake Bonneville) and then glue them and paint them to make these exquisite little decorations. I loved seeing how the people there made the best of their circumstances and tried to beautify their surroundings as much as they could. We saw a whole bunch of these shells while we were over at the Topaz Camp site, so they must have just had piles and piles of them. Aren't the little Minnie and Micky Mouse (bottom shelf, above) cute? And my favorite is that gorgeously intricate chrysanthemum brooch.

More shell jewelry, and some lovely carved wooden pieces, too.

There's quite a large exhibit of art at the museum. There were some really good artists at the camp, and they taught art and painting classes to others as well. (Here are some adorable preschool kids painting!) I really liked these watercolor depictions of different seasons at the camp. The colors in the sky are so lovely! And I love the way the mountain in the distance (Topaz Mountain?) is reminiscent of Mount Fuji.

Junie particularly liked this picture of a girl and her pet pig. Look how she hugs him! :)

Malachi liked the sweeping, inky lines of this bird on a branch (and the beautiful signature below).

This was interesting, showing the set-up for a calligraphy station, with all the supplies. We thought the paper weight above and felt cloth below were great ideas (when we did calligraphy ourselves, we noticed how much the ink can tend to bleed through the paper if you aren't careful).

Here we are inside one of the barracks. The beds and mattresses were standard issue, but the other furniture was made by the internees. A family of four would have slept in a room like this. 

In the corner of the room there was a little coal-burning stove for warmth. I don't know if they ever cooked here, or if all their meals were in the mess hall?

Here is Daisy by some of the handmade furniture from the camp. They made some really beautiful things (one of the men made an amazing wooden Noah's Ark that is on display at the front of the museum. It's gorgeous!) and we loved the miniature chairs clearly built for children. The furniture really helped make the barracks look cozier and more home-like—you can see a picture here.

Japanese history, pre-WWII

The history of Japan is so fascinating. I absolutely loved the book Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun for a great overview of, plus tons of interesting details about, Japan's isolation and then re-opening to the Western world. It's a longer book, so I just read parts of it to the children, but I really liked the whole thing and recommended it to Abe (age 12) too.

I think the 200-year peaceful isolation that is this book's subject is one of the things that makes Japan such an interesting country. Their culture had time to change and develop in all these cool ways, independent of the rest of the world—but then, it put them so far behind the rest of the world in other ways. It makes for such a cool mixture of old and new that, from what we learned, still persists in Japan today. And the story of how the Americans persuaded Japan to end its isolation is full of amazing surprises. The way the leaders of both sides misrepresented their identities—the strange mix of polite and threatening communication—the blustering and posturing—the ineffectiveness of the shogun and his sudden death—the samurai hidden under the floorboards of the treaty house—it just makes for really great reading.

One interesting detail my children liked was that the Americans brought a working miniature steam railway to show the Japanese. They brought lots of other funny and interesting gifts too (and received some in return from their hosts) but the idea of these distinguished Japanese gentleman excitedly riding on the tiny train, their robes flapping out behind them, just caught our imaginations. Here is a picture of that event (and you can find other pictures of the meeting here).

After I read Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun, I realized that I DID know some of the incidents described therein. Stephen Sondheim's musical "Pacific Overtures" tells the same story! I've loved the music to Pacific Overtures for years, but I've never seen it performed, and even after reading about the musical on Wikipedia, I only had a vague idea of the history behind the songs. But now, it all became clear—and I liked the musical even more.

I also finally understood why "Someone in a Tree" is supposedly Sondheim's favorite of the songs he has written. It's a song about how hard it is to know the realities of history. Even when we read firsthand accounts, they are always incomplete or biased in some way, and no matter how good the source, we can never know exactly what happened in the past. I think that's a good thing to take into account when discussing any historical event!

Anyway, my kids like some of the music from the musical too, and I told them how the songs fit into the history. It's pretty hard to find video recordings of the musical, but there is one video on YouTube here: Pacific Overtures. If you want to hear "Someone in a tree" it starts around 1:14:40.

I also like this recording
and this one.

And on the off-chance that anyone else likes Sondheim as much as I do and is interested: my other favorite songs are "The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea" (good description of the fuedal system in Japan during its isolation), "Chrysanthemum Tea" (the indecisive shogun is slowly poisoned by his mother), "Poems" (an exchange of Japanese verse between two characters), and "Bowler Hat" (tells about the rapid changes that came to Japan after Western visitors were admitted).

Also: incidentally, during this unit, I was reading a book by Laurie R. King called Dreaming Spies. It's part of a series about a woman who marries Sherlock Holmes later in his life, and in addition to helping him with his cases, she is an exceptional detective in her own right. I really like the whole series, and this particular book is all about Japan. It was really fun to be reading about ninja and Japanese bathhouses and so forth while we were learning about those things in school as well! I recommend it as a great way to keep your mind full of Japan-y things, if you want to. :)

Japan Unit Study—Schedule and Lesson Plan

After learning so many cool things about Japan and its people, we have all become Japanophiles! We absolutely loved this unit. We loved the food we tried and the stories we read and the art we saw. We wish we could go to Japan ourselves someday!

Our favorite series of videos were the "Begin Japanology" shows we found on YouTube. You can find our favorites listed here.

Here's my Pinterest page for the Japan Unit.

Robot Celebration

Our robot celebration was one of our best ever—if I do say so myself. :) I am not much of a "party planner" so the bar was set very low, but we had so much fun! The older boys made themselves into robots out of old boxes we had lying around. They went around talking in robot voices and it was very cute. They also printed out a bunch of pictures of our favorite robots, and hung them up to make a "Wall of Robots" in the kitchen.

Half the fun was getting ready for the party. We made a few box robots as decorations.

I had Abraham help me make these little tin-can robots for all the other children. We used them to hold silverware at dinner, and then the children used them for keeping various little treasures in.

Malachi drew some robot pictures to put up on the wall.

If you search "Robot Party" on Pinterest, you will find tons of great party ideas, nearly all of them more beautiful and elaborate than I felt confident trying to re-create. But a common theme was a "Build-a-bot" station where the children could make robots out of various things. Sometimes they used rice crispie treats as a base, or sandwiches, or whatever. We decided to use toothpicks and marshmallows and a few little candies as the robot components:

The children made some cute robots.

We had a good robot-y dinner based on other ideas from pinterest. To be specific:

• Pineapple Smoothie or "motor oil"
• Screw-shaped pasta with mizithra cheese
• Small corn chips or "microchips" (the mini chocolate chips we used to "build-a-bot" were even smaller, so we called those "nanochips" :))
• Cheez-its crackers or "washers"
• Almonds or "nuts." I saw lots of "nuts-and-bolts" trail mix/chex mix ideas, but the crackers really look more like washers than bolts, don't they?
• Peas or "fuel cells." This one is the weak link since they don't really look much like batteries. But maybe like those small button kind?

And this grand robot donut "cake" for dessert! We thought he was so funny and cute. I got the brilliant idea here.

We watched "Big Hero 6" after dinner, and I made one of these little slinky "robots" (as pictured here: no instructions, but easy enough to figure out) for each of the kids. (You can get a bunch of slinkies fairly cheaply here.) They ate their rolos and mints and tic-tacs during the movie and thought it was the most exciting day ever.

Other movies we considered: "Wall-E" and "The Iron Giant." But we loved "Big Hero 6."

This was an awesome unit! We learned so much, and we didn't want it to end!