Kjell Hahn

took myself a vacation. went to Oshima onsen, a hot spring bath town, in northern Gunma and stayed in the oldest ryokan, or Japanese style hotel, in the country. didn’t have the money to get one of the fancy rooms but staying there everyone had access to the same group of baths. and anyway, the cheaper rooms were in the oldest part of the building.. fascinating place, the original structure was began in the late 1600’s and as they added on over the years it has become this 8 floor complex built into the side of a mountain. kind of a confusing maze of creaky old halls and elevators and this strange cave-like tunnel linking the buildings.
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Of course there are older onsens in japan, but as the oldest hotel hey had all these original documents laid out in a long glass case in the front of the building- guests and bits of history about the place. they even had the original proposal to build the building from the 1670’s laying out.
impressive place.

(colored dots and lines refer to attached map)

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To get to work everyday i ride my bike about 25 km each way across a mountain pass to the next town. the map attached covers maybe 40 percent of the trip home. I live to the north along the blue line but lost too much resolution trying to fit it on the screen. i work at the bottom of the map at the yellow dot.
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the other day I planned to go to a hot spring bath house (onsen) partway home at the purple dot. since the bathhouse is cheaper after 5pm and the swine flu got me out of work at 3:30 i decided to do a little exploring. normally the yellow line takes me down hill to Minano town and then i have to climb back up as I come around the back of the mountain. it might not look like much on the map but its significant on a bicycle and you kinda get tired of sweating up the same hill after 200th time. All that going up and down seemed inefficient and gave me an idea. a little mountain climb through terraced farms and forest seemed like a pleasant alternative to the crowded street I normally use, even if there were a few more ups. i didnt realize it at the time but the mountain between the two is 600m – 1800 feet tall; more than a few ups. Anyway, without the benefit of looking at a map i was fairly certain that if i made a straight shot across the nearest mountain the bathhouse would be waiting for me on the other side. With an hour and a half of sunlight left I took the dark red path in the direction I assumed the bath was in. While more difficult than my usual course, I enjoyed the quaint little farm houses chiseled into the side of hills, no cars and a view of the surrounding town. The unfamiliar area made the whole outing feel like one of my old bike trips across the country.
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after several minutes up a steep incline I met an old man who told me the street wasn’t a dead end. good news. Unfortunately he couldn’t provide any details on where it would take me. I kept on going until I came to a clearing where the street began to go back down, disappearing behind another clump of mountains (orange dot on map). I stopped to access the situation figuring the street would probably just wind back to the main road and that my little wilderness trek had already ended. Ive done a lot of unmapped riding on mountain roads and learned that most just lead back to the bigger roads. Finding interesting, out of the way routes is quite uncommon.
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Standing there overlooking Chichibu city I heard a rusting sound down the cliff in front of me. Halfway expecting to find a wild bore I looked over the edge. No pig, but I saw one of those old ladies permanently bent over at nearly right angles you find all over the Japanese countryside. I didn’t know what she was doing since there was no garden or house nearby. I called down to ask directions and she immediately stopped fidgeting with some dirt pile and scrambled up the cliff to meet me. clearly not one to get many visitors she decided to compress a normal week’s worth of conversation into our brief encounter. Now I can speak Japanese pretty well and was only asking directions but found myself completely lost after the first few sentences of this woman’s ramblings. She went on about a relative in France, then japanese-american relations and somehow we ended up on the subjects of the edo period, the meji revolt, ancient gold routes and am pretty sure she brought up something about outer space. When I told her I was trying to get to the onsen on the other side of the mountain she lit up. “oh, oh. Wanda! Wanda! Go Go! Yes! Yes!” she belted out while jumping side to side with her arms in the air. apparently I was on some kind of trade route that hadn’t been used in 100 years. She insisted i continue on but was a little concerned about me running into ghosts that had never met a foreigner before with it being a forgotten path and all. She assured me that if I made a lot of noise so as not to startle them I’d be able to make it across the mountain safely. Maybe I looked hesitant or something because she did another of her one legged “wanda! Wanda! Go! Go!” dances in an attempt to urge me up the mountain. –wow, this woman was a lucky find. usually when you tell an old lady you plan to enter a mountain forest just before sunset you get a lot of “muri! Ikenai wa!” “that’s impossible, you cant go that way!” No, my new friend may have been out of her mind but she was all about adventure. I had to find this path that possibly led to gold, riches, ghosts or maybe even outer space.
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I took the road up an increasingly difficult slope to the end of the dark red line. Here there was one last building on a dead end street. I didn’t see any way to continue on, only a small creek bed that went up the mountain. No pavement, no signs, no more road. The crazy lady had been too insistent about this thing for this to all end so I entered the forest near the creak in search of some way to continue on. I climbed up several meters along a retaining wall and found that there really was a way cleared into the forest. I pulled my bicycle over my shoulder and hiked up.
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Now after 4:00pm the sun had sunk low enough that the mountain valley was already in shadow. if I was going to make it to the top before dark I had to hurry. I checked my flashlight and pushed forward. I made good time and got just below the mountain ridge when the path suddenly branched off in two directions. I followed both as far as I could but they just faded off into nothing. to the right I could make out some dark shapes deeper in the forest- maybe caves or cliffs? I wasn’t sure, either way they werent going to get me to an onsen. I didnt understand why the path would just stop so close to the top. I had all these ideas of ghosts and ancient riches floating around in my head and was just a minute or two away from the top. i knew i could make it up, path or no path. more than anything i wanted to continue on.. once i cleared that ridge the rest of the way would be all downhill. On the other hand I had no cell phone reception or compass, one light sweatshirt and a little thing of milk with me. I didnt even have a map or know for certain how close the onsen was. Realizing that if I lost the path in the last minutes of light i might have an incredibly long night ahead of me, my only choice was to stop and turn around.
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facing South down the mountain I could see the last sliver of the sun as it fell behind the horizon. I turned on my flashlight, shifted my bicycle to the other shoulder, and hurried down as fast as I could.
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Someday I gotta find the “wonder wonder” world the mountain lady jumped up and down about.

(home near end of dark red line along the “wanda wanda” gold route)

for a few hours vacationing happened. rented a boat and went swimming up the river above the dam. in fuyuko’s picture it looks like im jumping to my death. clearly not the case.
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tomorrow some kids from tokyo starting a NPO, “We All Japan” are coming up to interview me while i help neba fire his oni castle sculpture. hope i can manage to entertain all.
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studio 98% ready for the exhibition.
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almost finished with my installation piece… an oni drawing sculpture that you have to crawl under to view. im fairly satisfied with the outcome. my original plan of backlighting the image turned out to be a problem so i ended up lighting it from the sides using thin japanese paper to diffuse the light. ill post images once the exhibition starts.
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tomorrow no more studio anything. im have done very little vacationing on my vacation.
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picture: watermelon in my garden. we killed almost every other plant, but the watermelon somehow survived.

started the oni castle on the mountain using low-fire tera cotta clay. everyone made little oni figures to place around it… now, if it would just stop raining for a couple of days it just might dry enough so as to not explode in the fire next week.
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havent made much progress with the mikoshi but ive got the plans for my oni drawing installation sketched out.. aichan, fuyuko and i brainstormed for about an hour, then made a little model. this is something ive wanted to make for a long time and ill be able to build the basic structure in less than a day. very excited.
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neba, a potter friend of mine, came over the other day and showed us some raku bowls he had just made that afternoon…
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on august 1st and 2nd he’ll be back in onishi to fire a giant oni sculpture for the ONi TEN exhibition. we might also start building a mikoshi or portable shrine for the opening party.
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off work the next 5 weeks.
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doing a whole lotta nothing.
onishi river swimming

opening party done and done.
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a strange night. hard to quantify how successful it was though. on one level things couldnt have gone better. a ton of people came including a photographer and interviewer from a tokyo artist magazine and a gallery owner friend. ive met with the gallery owner a couple of times now and will be helping her start up a new gallery in Harajuku in June. Everyone who came couldnt have been nicer. they dressed up, brought piles of flowers, wine, fancy japanese sweets, and presents too. I had worried that only a few people would come, but they packed the place from wall to wall. I got to meet with people I hadnt seen for months and even some classmates from Jimmy’s school in Nagoya came. if you are reading this and came to the show THANK YOU!!!
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I could have done better in the sales department, but there was some positive movement there. and that kind of led to the one big hiccup that ended up putting a stink on the whole little party. the dude who owned the place pretty much blew up at the end of the night and told me at the after party dinner in a loud enough voice for everyone to hear that my friends were basically losers and i didnt need them if they didn’t care enough to buy something. I didnt know what to say to that… it isnt his main business and the publicity was great but that didnt stop him from yelling “fuck them” and “fuck it” a good 20 times during the course of the evening.
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I dont really know what led to that. The events of the day were: first he showed up 4 hours late for our meeting in the morning w/o explanation. maybe he had some problem somewhere. whatever it was, before he showed up a photographer and reporter were there waiting. he apparently knew about them coming but for some reason he didnt want me to talk to them and told me nothing about it. i kind of tried to listen into their conversation in the next room, wondering if they came for his shop or for me… and they had come for my work. The woman had all these printouts from my site and really wanted to talk to me. why wasnt i informed about this fact? i guess he assumed my work would be more interesting with the added mystery. we eventually did an interview but i couldnt concentrate because the whole thing didnt make any sense. anyway, once people started coming he just got more and more uptight, so that it was really obvious that something was bothering him– it was a difficult to enjoy the event with that distraction. apparently he really believed that we would be unloading thousands of dollars of paintings that night and when we wernt millionaires after 3 hours the dude was red with frustration. I cant make sense of it, but that was pretty uncomfortable.
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aside from the childish outbursts I’m content with the work in the show, and glad everyone could get together. thank you thank you thank you everyone.
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anyway. the next exhibition has been decided for August in my new studio… an Oni-themed collaboration of madness like the Tom Thumb Gallery back from the Truman days. good times buddy, look out.

1)got hit by a car on my bicycle. somehow the bicycle won, but my back isnt very happy. the 21 year old construction worker who hit me was crying and almost fainted. i didnt have the heart to call the police and try to screw the guy out of the little money he has.

2)fuyuko and jamie senselessly murdered a carp the other day, then dumped the body in a river.

3)my landlord will fork over all the cash for materials to repair the new studio.

4)im spending all of my free time getting ready for the tokyo exhibition. making frames, drawing, organizing contacts and whatnot.

jamie dwyer learning to be a man

firing continues. they have a lot of wet pots in there and have kept the temp low for the first 24 hrs. so there isnt much to report… now that everything has started im less concerned about the results. if it works out, great- and if not, i’ll have a pretty good idea of what not to do.
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anyway, after my shift at the kiln today i came down the mountain and worked on the studio. there was some water damage on the ceiling and when i pulled back the wood paneling it revealed these beautiful wooden beams made from entire trees. i got so excited i ended up tearing out the entire upstairs ceiling and all the walls. ill post pictures soon..

spring sketch
oil pastel, graphite on paper
2009