幸炎 Joyous Flame (part 2)

Vase, Reiko Kakiuchi Cohen

Echizen-yaki, Fukui, Japan

The title of this random series of essays is “My Japan Journey.” It is a personal account, in no particular order, of events, encounters, and experiences that have shaped my understanding and appreciation of Japan over more than 50 years. All of these encounters, those I have forgotten and the many I remember, have shaped me. But few that have left a deeper mark on my imagination than the encounter with the American potter Ben Cohen and his wife Reiko Kakiuchi. For me, nothing has been more emblematic of the journey to Japan than the way up the long, narrow road to the tiny village of Kadanji in Fukui Prefecture, where Ben practiced his craft.

Once Ben chose to pursue pottery, he did so with single-minded determination to the end of his life. His engagement with ceramics took a strange and unexpected turn that has always had for me a romantic, even cinematic dimension: the intersection of craft, crossing of cultures, tragedy, the power of place, and the ties of love. Ben went to Japan, a country about which he knew little, without a specific plan. He met and married a Japanese woman, started a family, and stayed in Japan until the end of his life.

Ben and Reiko had two boys, Elijah and Simon. One day in the spring of 1989, Ben was horsing around with Elijah, who was 8 or 9 years old. The two were arm wrestling and, as loving fathers do, Ben was letting Elijah win. At some point, Ben tried to pin Elijah, but his arm would not respond. Over time, he continued to weaken and ultimately, he went to see a doctor. The doctors diagnosed ALS.

Ben’s condition deteriorated rapidly. He returned to the U.S. in August 1989, essentially to say goodbye, returning to Fukui in October. By 1990, he was in a hospital bed, unable to move. His doctors thought he needed to be intubated to allow him to breathe. Hospital stays in Japan were and remain notoriously long, and an ALS diagnosis often meant a one-way trip to the hospital. On a short business trip to Japan in the fall of 1990, I hurried to see Ben where he lay immobilized in his hospital bed. A handheld voice synthesizer placed on his throat allowed him to speak in a croaking voice. It was a heartbreaking sight: the vital, active man I’d known was gone. Some time after my visit, Ben’s sister, the artist Judy Chicago, hired an American nurse skilled in supporting ALS patients and flew her to Japan to help her brother. The nurse immediately took charge and told the doctors to get the tube out of his windpipe, sit him up in a wheelchair, and discharge him from the hospital to his home in the village below Kadanji.

I never saw Ben Cohen again. I was in the U.S., working at a Japanese company in New York City, when I learned that he had died in February 1992.

In 1999, I took my son Daniel for his first visit to Japan since his birth in Fukui 11 years before. I wanted to introduce Daniel to the country of his birth, but I also felt the need to return to Kadanji, to visit Reiko Kakiuchi Cohen and find out what had transpired in the nearly 10 years since I had last seen her, in the years after Ben’s death.

My old friend Takako Watanabe drove me up the twisting narrow road to Kadanji. It was June and the air was warm, but the rainy season (tsuyu, 梅雨) had not yet set in. The paddy fields were intensely green with maturing rice. Reiko greeted us and showed us around the house. It was no longer the tumbledown wreck I remembered from 10 years earlier: When Ben fell ill, an American architect friend who was working in Tokyo at the time came to Fukui to design and supervise a complete reconstruction of the house. From my journal: 

(June 7, 1999)

This room: Dark wood ceiling supported by square posts. White plaster walls. Fusuma [sliding closet doors] made of reeds. Over Ben’s photo in the alcove, a banner with the first kanji of his Japanese name: 幸 [joyous]. To the right of the reed fusuma, the second part: 炎 [flame]. Paper lanterns. Paintings by the boys adorn the walls. Simon [Ben’s younger son, about 15 at the time time] talks in quick adolescent bursts on the phone.

Simon’s paintings, dated February 20, 1992, with the time, 9:30 and 9:36 a.m. [the time of Ben’s death]

 * * * *  

Japan was intensely foreign to Ben when he went in 1976. He was 29 and didn’t have much in the way of a life plan. He had studied art and history at UCLA. After college, he’d worked as a letter carrier in Los Angeles, delivering mail to the stars. Once, a customer on his route, the actress Jean Seberg, invited him in and gave him wine. Ben returned to the post office tipsy, and that was the end of the post office job. He found work at a daycare center. One day there was a commotion, with children laughing and shrieking with delight. Ben thought it a good idea to make popcorn for the kids – without a lid on the pot. Popcorn flew all over the room. Ben was like that: he broke rules.

A Dr. Ōhashi, a heart surgeon doing a residency in LA, had his son in the daycare center where Ben was working. Ben and the doctor struck up a friendship, and at some point, Dr. Ōhashi suggested that Ben might go to Japan to teach English. It seemed like a good idea, so off Ben went to Japan, to Kyoto. That’s where he and Reiko met.  

They were living in the same apartment house. Reiko was working for the City of Kyoto. Her gift of strawberries to Ben one day led to an awkward chat: at the time, they spoke little of each other’s languages. Ben made strawberry crepes and Reiko was impressed. They married in 1978. On my visit in 1999, I saw a needlepoint pillow in the house: “March 26, 1978 – Ben and Reiko”

Ben began studying ceramics with Shijo Horikawa at the Kyoto Bunka Center (Kyoto Cultural Center). Reiko said he went every day. But Ben felt that firing with an electric kiln was limiting, maybe inauthentic, and he began searching for someplace beyond Kyoto where he could study traditional ceramics. Ben and Reiko found their way to Fukui which, although only an an hour or so from Kyoto, is worlds away.

Fukui is at the western end of the Hokuriku region  (Hokuriku chihō, 北陸地方) of northwestern Honshū, along the Japan Sea. It has “the highest volume of snowfall of any inhabited and arable region in the world.”1) From the Kansai region, where Kyoto is located, the Hokuriku Main Line train passes through the 14 km Hokuriku Tunnel. In the winter, this tunnel serves as a portal into another world: the “snow country” (雪国; yukiguni). Evoking another long railway tunnel into the snow country, Kawabata Yasunari famously began his novel Snow Country (Yukiguni) with one of the most well-known sentences in modern Japanese literature: “The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country” (国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。) In winter, passengers are startled by the sheer suddenness of the transformation: from the dry, brown fields on the Tsuruga side of the Hokuriku Tunnel where it penetrates the mountains under the Konome Pass to the deep snow where the tunnel opens on the Nanjō side. It’s a different climate and another world. 

* * * * *

The couple settled in Fukui, in the village of Miyazaki (宮崎町; now Echizen, 越前町), renting a barely-habitable house that could not have been more than 400 square feet. It must have been frigid in the winter, with smelly kerosene heaters scarcely keeping the cold at bay. Ben did what so many English-speaking gaijin in Japan did: he taught English to both adults and children, wherever he could. Elijah and Simon were born. Ben worked on his craft, developing a distinctive, unconventional style that still honored its roots in Echizen-yaki: unglazed, mottled, pitted, and rough, very much of the earth. Marked with ash from the kiln, streaked with iron or copper melted out from the clay. He made teapots, mizusashi (水指) to hold water for the tea ceremony, platters, and a variety of flower vases (kabin; 花瓶). He worked many hours at the wheel and firing the old brick kiln he’d converted (against more experienced potters’ advice) into a ceramic kiln, but the family depended for some years on income from Ben’s teaching.

By the time I began attended Ben’s firings, those all-day, all-night gatherings where talk, food, and drink flowed freely, Ben was starting to make a name for himself as a potter. By 1988~1989, he began to show his work in major department store galleries. His work sold, largely on the strength of its artistic quality, but also on the novelty of a gaijin who had yoked himself to the discipline of traditional ceramics. He was able to reduce his teaching load and focus more wholly on his clay-work.

And that’s when Ben fell ill.  

 * * * * *

When Ben was discharged home from the hospital, he and Reiko agreed to do something that I have always considered nothing short of heroic: Ben taught Reiko how to be a potter. Without the use of his hands, with only his imperfect spoken Japanese and Reiko’s determination, the two worked for months to transfer Ben’s skills to Reiko’s hands. Apart from some dabbling in cloisonné (shippō-yaki; 七宝焼) when she was younger, Reiko had little experience with craft. Ben could not leave wealth to Reiko, but he could help her learn to make pots.

They started with preparing the clay: wedging (to drive out air trapped in the clay) and rolling out. Ben instructed Reiko in hand-building. The work must have been hard and frustrating for Reiko. Ben told her to get a highway cone and to wrap the rolled-out clay around it to achieve a conical form. Eventually, she began working on the wheel: centering, raising the sides, turning rudimentary pots. He told her to experiment with manipulating the wheel-turned forms to achieve novel shapes. He encouraged her to find her own voice through the materials.

I wish I had asked more questions in 1999. I wish I could have learned what it was like in the space between husband and wife, between master and student, and what passed between them. What is clear is that, in surprisingly short order, Reiko attained enough skill to call herself a tōgei-ka (potter, 陶芸家) in her own right. In late 1991, it had become clear to Ben that Reiko would be able to fend for herself. It is my understanding that Ben chose the time and manner of his death.

The studio that I saw during my 1999 visit to Reiko Kakiuchi Cohen bore little resemblance to the tumble-down building it was when Ben rented the place from a farmer who’d had no further use for it (unbidden, he kept reducing the rent until it was essentially free).  The potter’s wheel was at the far end of the studio, surrounded by windows and perched above the road. From her seat at the wheel, she could look across the road and the rice fields toward the bottom of the hill where a crude memorial stone carved with two Chinese characters had been placed.  

幸炎

Joyous Flame