Yanaka was a backwater when I found it, a place nobody knew unless they had close relatives in the ground here. Yanaka has cemeteries.
We also have history. We are next door to the first imperial school of music and art, the first imperial library, the first national art museum. The great imperial university was founded on the next hill. Mori Ogai, and Natsume Soseki both lived on DangoZaka. Higuchi Ichiyo walked thru. It was her shortcut home.
The roots of Japanese modern arts are here as well, Okakura Tenshin, Takamura Kotaro, Yokoyama Taikan were here.
But I don’t want to talk about history, at least not history that old.
30 years ago Yanaka had people interested in the arts. People were banding together to preserve old buildings and culture against a bubble trend of development gripping Japan.
People formed a Yanaka Gako, a preservation and cultural society. Some of them formed an art group, Geikoten, local architects, artists and others that put together a wondrously complicated map and a month long neighborhood wide exhibition of art and culture in October.
Within a year another art group formed; was it a rival group? Sometimes it seemed so. That group was called Art Link. They had powerful art backing, the National Art U. museum, Ueno Mori Art Museum, SCAI the bathhouse gallery, and the Tatami people. Their exhibition map was simple, well distributed and didn’t cost a hundred yen. They had corporate sponsors. People in company buses visited on mass in October.
I was in both groups, and liked them very much.
Arts in Yanaka were blossoming. People came from far away to see how we did it, to set up community festivals of their own. I was blossoming too. Sumi ink was new. My family was young. Things were going very well and would only go better.
30 years now since I first waked up Kototoi Dori hill, past the shops selling artist pigments, past the brush maker’s shop. Art Link ended. Geikoten still goes on, but more for new cafes and bookshops, fancy new bakeries, craft beer, and bagel shops. Geikoten is promoting different culture now. I have become a dinosaur. It was not what I had intended.
