![]() ![]() ![]() In those years, Kyoto was the destination for many people and, before the term ‘multi-culturalism’ had any currency, we found ourselves living a multi-cultural life with people from all over the world, very different from life in a diplomatic or business enclave. It saw the first Olympic Games in Asia - in Tokyo the first Nobel Prize in Science/Physics awarded to a Japanese scientist, Yukawa Hideki the first high-speed trains between Tokyo and Kyoto. The year of our arrival, 1964, was a big year. My background could have been summarized thus: the stories of Urashima Taro, Yoshi San and O Kiku and The Burning of the Rice Field, found in Victorian primary school readers, always reprinted during the war years the Australian War Memorial publications, Khaki and Green and Jungle Warfare, with their stories and illustrations the media of the day including comics service on the cruiser HMAS Australia which bore a bronze plaque commemorating the captain and crew who had died as a result of a kamikaze attack an awareness of the influence of Japanese art on modernism the post-war relationships with Sydney potters and that wonderful movie, Rashomon. ![]() And so it turned out that I was the first Australian sculptor and printmaker to do post graduate study in Japan without first going to England or Europe. In our years in Kyoto it was possible to count Australians on one hand. Japanese studies were not yet in place in Australian universities, despite the fact that the first scientific research institute in Sydney, the Kanematsu Memorial Institute, had been founded in 1933 at Sydney Hospital. My experience was, despite the war and family involvement, different and I knew Australia, not England, was my home. England was ‘home,’ next door, so to speak, and artists and writers headed for London a few went to Europe and the U.S. Japan was not high on the travel itinerary for Australians of my generation due to the war and the bitterness it left and also due to the colonial legacy of the British Empire to which Australia had belonged. When the first ever exhibition of Australian art in Japan, Young Australian Painters, was held in 1965, a map of the country was on the catalogue cover. It sat in the mind, and later, when I was trying to describe our country to fellow post-graduates at Kyoto Fine Arts University, I depicted Australia as a huge zen garden ‘karasansui,’ floating in the South Pacific, a bit ragged around the edges where most of us like to live, a good view being had from space. The famous zen garden of Ryoan-ji, with its raked white gravel and fifteen stones, was around the corner. We were living in a traditional house with ‘tatami,’ ‘shoji’ and ‘fusuma,’ hot in summer and very cold in winter, and which Barbara described in a letter home, referring to its geometry, as like living inside a Mondrian painting. I wore the coat through three winters and I never forgot that unknown woman and her husband. By the time I’d bought futons, heaters, kitchen utensils and winter clothing for the children, there hadn’t been anything left over from my Mombusho scholarship. We were living at Kinugasa-shita-machi in a small ‘hanare’ (a couple of rooms, small kitchen, bathroom, verandah and garden,) found with the help of another exceptionally generous person, Kimura Mikio. It had been a huge gamble with so little money, choosing to go to Japan, Australia’s former enemy, but we’d made it! I’ve got another.” That was my introduction to Kyoto and I knew that I had brought my wife, Barbara, and our children to the right city. And when I got up to go, leaving the coat, he said, “Keep it. That evening, on my return, I found the house and the owner, who invited me in. ![]() It was a three-quarter-length brown coat, and warm. Aiting in the snow at the Ryoan-ji bus stop on a Kyoto winter morning in 1964, without an overcoat or money to buy one, my anxious reverie about the day ahead and language classes in Osaka was interrupted by a woman who came out of a nearby house and, seeing me standing there, went back inside and returned with an overcoat which she helped me into. ![]()
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