Lifestyle

Japanese flower art helps calm a frantic Moscow

HARMONY: As Moscow watched the Soviet empire collapse around it in 1991, an expert in the ancient art of ikebana flower arranging flew in from Japan.

For most of the 16 years since, Midori Yamada has taught Russians to search for harmony in the lines of

 branches, flowers and vases as attempted coups, and spectacular booms and busts played out on the streets outside.

"Our school is very strict, each flower has its laws," she said.

"With constant work you finally learn them, but it is not the head that learns, but the heart," she said in an interview in a northwestern Moscow apartment, transformed to feel like a little corner of Japan.

Yamada is one of dozens of masters sharing the ancient secrets of ikebana with students seeking refuge from the frantic pace of the booming capital.

"The city drains your energy and this creativity revives you. It allows you to defend yourself, to become a normal person again," said Dina Gorodetskaya, 47, a student at a Moscow school.

Antidote

Popular when the pace of life was slower under the Soviet Union, the art is today taught by Yamada and her fellow teachers as an antidote to the frantic existence in the new capitalist Russia.

"It's an immense pleasure, it gives you energy," said biochemist Yulia Yarlykova, 40, a 10-year veteran of the art.

Her teacher, Moscow native Olga Fomicheva, is equally wrapped up in the lines of composition. "When the weather is very hot, it is vital to evoke an impression of freshness," she told a class in Moscow recently. "If your composition is too dense, it will not quiver."

Back in 1991, Olga was a young researcher for the Soviet space programme, when she realized the upheavals shaking her country might endanger her job.

Strict rules

Inspired by ikebana, her hobby at the time, she began to organize floral decorations for one of the first luxury hotels in the capital. Today she directs the Russian subsidiary of the Sogetsu school, which was founded in Japan in 1927 to free the art from its very strict rules, allowing the use of everyday objects, from nails to multicoloured coat buttons.

With a curriculum controlled from Tokyo, the school today boasts 200 pupils in Moscow.

Olga also travels across Russia, where followers of the discipline are relatively young, often decorators keen to improve their skills.

Her colleague from Japan Yamada Sensei as her students call her teaches the very traditional ikenobo school.

"One does not simply arrange a flower in ikebana, it is absolutely necessary that there are branches and leaves," she explained.

Before coming to Moscow, Yamada spent years in Japan teaching the arts of tea ceremony, flower arrangement and painting, before suddenly giving up on her harmonious life at 54 to learn Russian in Moscow.

Calm life

"I began to think, 'I have such a calm life, it's not good. My brain is growing dull'," she said.

Arriving in late January 1991, she moved into a freezing hostel amid the food shortages of the dying days of the Soviet Union, which would cease to exist in December that year.

Invited by chance to teach ikebana, already popular in the Soviet Union through the support of the Japanese authorities, she jumped at the chance.

Throughout the turmoil of the post-Soviet transformation, her life has remained dominated by the ancient arts.

Most days she ends a class with a tea ceremony in a room that whisks its visitors to Japan with its simple decor and traditional tatami floor covering.

She leads the women, in light summer kimonos, in silence through each gesture of the ritual, filling her small corner of the Russian megalopolis with perfect calm.

(AFP)

Disappearances with a tinge of romance

ABDUCTION: A statement made by a prominent personality on the abduction of businessmen is bound to cause quite a stir among the public at large. The public figure, known for his maverick disposition, remarked that some businessmen disappeared on their own volition in order to indulge in extra-marital bliss.

The sweeping remark is bound to cause an upheaval in conservative Sri Lankan society. It is also certain to give 'ideas' to philandering spouses who may well engineer their own abductions only to have a whale of time for a couple of weeks with their lady loves.

No more will there be wives waiting to welcome their 'abducted' husbands with open arms. Nor will the fattest calf be slaughtered for the return of the prodigal.

The whole issue may obfuscate the current investigations to arrest the spate of abductions. For, who is to know what the abducted persons are up to. For all intents and purposes they would be on unofficial honeymoons and it would be many moons before they decide to return home.

One dreads to think of the consequences of the practice catching up in general. Before long we may hear that the abductions hitherto restricted to businessmen have come to haunt the entire society as well.

Suddenly well known people may go missing with accompanying ransom demands. The LTTE or the Karuna faction may be blamed for good measure and newspapers and TV screens will be full of weeping spouses pleading for the release of their innocent hubbies.

The man may eventually return with a beatific smile adorning his face providing an inkling if the experience at the hands of his 'captors' were a harrowing one or one of rapturous bliss. Politicians may rue the day they received such an army of bodyguards.

For them it would be an opportunity lost. The controversial remark may also put female spouses on the alert to look out for husbands who delay returning home after invented errands.

Henceforth any abductions may not be taken with the seriousness it warrants. Female spouses may also venture to say 'good riddance'.

Rambler