Because I have, perhaps, an unhealthy interest in pens, it was only natural that after I came to Japan I would start playing with brushes.

Through a Japanese colleague who piqued my interest, and because I thought it would help me learn Japanese, I began studying shodo, or Japanese calligraphy. This involved acquiring some equipment (which the teacher was more than happy to sell me).  I needed brushes, a couple felt pads, a weight, some bottled ink, some ink sticks, a grinding stone and a lot of Japanese paper.

Each lesson started with me pouring some liquid ink on a grind stone and then darkening it with an ink stick. When it was ready, my teacher (whose name I’ve completely blanked on as I sit down to write this) would hand me the day’s lesson. I would then force myself into something resembling seiza and begin my practice. (To understand what it’s like to use a brush, hold a long pencil with a proper grip, but up by the eraser. Then hold the pencil straight up and down and try to write your name.)

I started with a kids’ book but she quickly realized I was serious and I moved on to higher level characters. For example, I might have these four characters: 雪山千里. I would copy them, using proper stroke order and technique (the first character has 11 strokes and starts at the top.) My teacher would then take out a brush loaded with orange ink and mark my mistakes. If I was correct, she would circle it. Eventually I’d do a test version that would be sent off to some evaluation committee that would rank me in a way similar to karate ranks.

Early on, I asked my teacher what a certain group of characters meant. She basically asked why the hell I needed to know what they meant; I just needed to copy them. 雪山千里, for example means, Snow Mountain Long Distance and apparently comes from a poem, but I’ll never know. This left me in the odd position of focusing on language simply as movement and form but not as meaning. Wondrous philosophical, that. Useless in getting a date with a Japanese woman, though. (Check it out, sweetheart, I can totally scribble the hell out of this piece of paper.)

Eventually I moved on to the cursive, or KANA, version of the characters. There was a small version, but my favorite involved a meter long piece of paper and a lot more pain as I crawled around on the floor. The cursive characters look a lot like the start of a Jackson Pollock painting when he was only dribbling black paint and cigarette ash. I still like this version the best because it has more flow and style than the block letters. Unfortunately, for all their apparent haste and sloppiness, they are no less precise than the block letters and my teacher spent a lot of time marking them up with orange ink.

In this style, I eventually earned a ranking. I even adopted a pen (er, brush) name and got an official stamp. My “official” name was 旅人道延, or Tabibito Doen (the latter pronounced very close to Dwayne). It stands for, more or less, “The Traveler’s Road Stretches.” (Another post that.)

However, after several cancelled practices on both our parts, I started attending a second night of karate instead and stopped studying calligraphy. I still have better handwriting in Japanese than I do in English. It just has no meaning.