Sori Yanagi Appreciation Society event at Tokyobike London.

Appreciating Yanagi

Words by Maiko Tsutsumi

After chatting with Michael about the nature of Sori Yanagi’s work, about possible reasons why his work is not better known in the UK, how understated his design works can be, and the obvious influence of Mingei (and let’s not forget music) on his eye, his thinking, his view on what design is, I revisited some of the writings of Sori Yanagi and Soetsu Yanagi. Their words speak well of the things I understood holistically and experientially in my days in Japan while immersing myself in the culture of craft.

Someone once told me that the Japanese language is all about feelings. I think this extends to the common way of being in Japanese culture and society. What I have come to understand in my life-long attempt to figure out what this feeling of knowing is and how it works, what roles it plays, is that feeling equates to reason, but has no formal structure. To celebrate this poetic way of being in the world, I have put down the feeling of the thoughts I had when thinking about Yanagi.

So it went:

It’s all about beauty

That resides in moments of moving towards something

Yanagi talks about beauty, intuition and truth

as well as reason and rationale,

and received ideas and projected ideas

His forms are informed by his active seeking of the structure of beauty

that comes through without reason, and his reflection on the conditions that contributed to its coming to be

Like Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, he looks at the source of aliveness in things he has observed that he wanted his work to embody

I have once read somewhere that to appreciate something is to become it, not necessarily the thing but the characteristic that the thing carries

Perhaps that Yanagi’s work was about enabling this becoming, not so much about the objects he designed?

He said:

Folk Art reflects the culture of a given place

Design reflects the culture of humanity

So I say:

To appreciate Yanagi’s work is to appreciate and celebrate humility?

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