ARCHIVE
Centering a Life: Interview, Overview, and Review with Kazuo Tanaka
By Kit Pancoast Nagamura
The Nishimachi Internationalist, Spring/Summer 2009, Vol. 43
When Kazuo Tanaka, Nishimachi International School’s elementary art teacher of thirty-two years, creates a ceramic bowl, the process is hypnotic. He kneads the clay approximately 200 times to remove air bubbles, and it curls up like a shell around his hands until he rolls it into a manageable cone for throwing. Then he thunks the clay on the wheel—“that’s why it’s called ‘throwing’” he says—and starts it spinning, trickling water from his fingers onto the clay’s surface to achieve receptivity to pressure. “Too little water, and the clay fights back,” he says, “too much and the clay will be weakened.” Centering, which Tanaka-sensei can accomplish with his eyes closed, is a matter of concentrating stillness in the spinning clay, bringing the mass to harmonious motion before opening up its boundaries of beauty and form. There are further steps before completion—trimming, bisque firing, glazing, and firing again—each with techniques and rules that require days of precise timing and patience. 
Tanaka-sensei approaches the teaching of art in much the same way, as a process that requires patience, timing, centering, and working with the material of a child’s integrity. “What I do,” he says, “is not really teaching, but facilitating. In fact, mostly, I want to work with the kids. There are two kinds of teachers—one just teaches with language, the other one demonstrates something himself or herself. I am the latter. I myself don’t realize how to make any project until I do it myself.”
Luckily, Tanaka-sensei was exposed to a wide variety of art forms from early on. Born in 1948 in Yahata-shi (a city now subsumed by Kitakyushu in Fukuoka), he attended a public school, with art classes once a week. “We had projects in wood, painting, drawing, sculpture, and clay modeling . . . but no pottery,” he says shaking his head. From there, he was admitted to a prestigious and exceptionally competitive high school, Mie Daigaku Kyoiku Gakubu in Mie Prefecture, and later majored in oil painting at one of Japan’s best art schools, Musashino Bijitsu Daigaku (also known as “Musabi”).
Upon graduating from Musabi, Tanaka found himself hanging out with other painters at the college, wondering how he was going to support his wife, a weaver, and their newborn baby. As he recalls, “I didn’t know I wanted to be a teacher until after my son was born. I knew I had to support my family. For an artist, a painter, there are not so many job options. I was not excited about teaching art, nor was I looking very hard for a job, but fortunately Tané Matsukata called at my school, and I was still there, because I often went to the college to paint. She said Naomi Maruyama-san, the previous teacher, was getting married and quitting. That’s the way in Japan—when ladies get married, they often quit their jobs. I came to observe the class several times, and I got an interview with Tané-san.”
“And what,” I ask, “were your first impressions of Ms. Matsukata?” He responds immediately, “Waaaaa, she was a really different kind of person, very dignified. She never really spoke up, she was very quiet, just listening…for one hour, or two hours. She would listen very carefully.” Her quiet consideration settled comfortably on hiring the young painter, and he started work in 1977.
While everyone’s first serious job is cause for some anxiety, the prospect of teaching young children, many of whom spoke no Japanese, was understandably daunting to young Tanaka. “Why do you think Ms. Matsukata chose to hire you, given those circumstances?” I ask Sensei. With his trademark honesty and humility, he answers in a muffled laugh, “I don’t know. But, she told me that art is not based on language. I did not speak English at all at that time. The English I had learned at my Japanese school was not English, ne? So, I carried a little dictionary in my pocket. But kids cannot wait for that. I communicated with them by actions or demonstrations, or I asked someone to translate.”
Beyond this, it wasn’t long before Tanaka-sensei began to recognize that his new position carried some benefits and further challenges. “I had no choice, really, about the job, to teach to make money,” he explains, “but at a Japanese school, I couldn’t have done anything. Everything there is already decided and rigid.” Instead, Tanaka-sensei arrived at Nishimachi International School to find an utterly bare art studio. “When I first came here, I was surprised,” he recalls. “There were no facilities. Nothing. I built almost all the furniture here, the shelves, work benches, and designed the tables, asked a carpenter to build them, and look, they have lasted for over thirty years.” 
It was not just the studio that awaited creation, but the fundamental aspects of the entire program were a tabula rasa. “My boss then, Shigeko Hosoki, knew everything about that Monbusho curriculum, but I had to revise it completely for Nishimachi International School kids. Many parents demanded me to teach Japanese art crafts at that time, like stencil dying and very precise woodwork, and woodblocks.” He dusts off a handsome mailbox of expert joinery and carving from thirty years ago to show me. Creative projects made by children find themselves orphaned in art studios around the world—forgotten or unappreciated—and most art teachers toss them. Tanaka-sensei has kept some abandoned pieces for decades, assuming that one day the artist will come back. And, sometimes they do.
One of his early students, Gary Flint (’79) writes, “After leaving Nishimachi International School, I have often returned to visit Tanaka-sensei and he has always been happy to see me again. He is so proud of his students’ work, always showing what he is teaching this time and how nicely his students are completing their projects. He is one of the most dedicated teachers I have ever known.”
Dedication, as perhaps Tanaka-sensei knows better than most, is not a reputation easily earned. “My plan was to only stay here two or three years,” he admits, “and at one point, I even said ‘I quit.’ But Tané and ‘Yama’ Kobayashi said not to leave, because there were only two male teachers in the elementary school, myself and John Laudenslager. So I stayed.”
It was a decision with long-reaching results. Tanaka-sensei had been teaching at Nishimachi International School for five or six years when, for the first time, he focused in on the world of pottery. “A lady from the American Embassy, Judy Foster [then vice principal Nancy Foster’s daughter-in-law] held a workshop here at the school,” Tanaka remembers. “She brought one wheel, and showed us how to make pottery. It looked very interesting. I was watching it very closely. After they left, I tried it myself, but I didn’t even know which way to turn the wheel. I tried both ways. Just after that, one week after the workshop finished, I bought a wheel. Many people were interested in pottery at the time, and they pushed me to do it. STuCo even bought the kiln we have now for the art department.”
In speaking about exactly how pottery functions as a core element in his art program for elementary students, Tanaka-sensei, generally happy to offer the briefest of answers to most questions, turns loquacious.
“When I teach pottery to children,” he says, “I will start with an explanation of why the clay cracks. If the clay is soft, it means 40% of the clay is water. When it dries, water will be gone, so clay will shrink. If there are bubbles inside, the bubbles will stay the same size, but the clay will shrink as it dries, and then in the kiln, the clay will shrink again but the air bubbles will get bigger. That’s why the clay cracks.
“This is a kind of chemistry,” he continues. “Three years ago, two boys tried to make their own original glaze from scratch. They needed ash, wood, straw, and feldspar. The process involves burning and mixing the right amounts of things, and every morning, they came to change the water in the mixture. After a few weeks, we tried to use it, and it worked,” he exclaims with undisguised pride. “This is because of patience and process,” he says, underlining a core theme in his pedagogy.
Tanaka-sensei points out that pottery produces a practical cultural product, formed from four essential elements—water, earth, fire, and air—and furthermore, he says, “pottery can be related to everything. In history, 1592, during Japan’s Korean War, Korean potters were kidnapped and brought to Japan, so you see it’s related to history, politics, and economy.”
But when children are first exposed to throwing, gravity of a different sort takes hold. “Kids at first treat the pottery wheels just like a car,” Tanaka-sensei laughs. “They push down on the accelerator. Then they realize how difficult it really is to make something. Some practice and can do it, but some do not. I have had two students who could make everything, anything. But they showed up every morning for two and a half years. Every morning.” Tanaka-sensei doesn’t mention that he, himself, rises in the dark at 4:30 a.m. to leave his house in Kanagawa Prefecture by 5:10, then rides his bike up to school every morning by 7, so that he can offer extra studio time and instruction to students who want it.
Feliz Soyak (’94) recalls the kind of dedication Tanaka-sensei inspired by example: “He was tough, but very, very good. I admired how skilled he was as a ceramist. I liked how he held us up to high standards—like real professionals, which to me, at age eleven, was very exciting and gave me a sense of importance. He gave us a sense that what we were doing was valuable.” Now a teacher of art and a working artist herself, Soyak notes that “pots that I made in his class in sixth and seventh grade are better than the work I did in graduate school ceramics.”
While his students who have pursued careers in art describe him as “serious” and “no-nonsense” and a teacher who was “not overly nice” and one who “didn’t go out of his way to praise,” each carries crystal clear, life-altering memories of Tanaka-sensei which prove that the lessons they took away from his classroom were infinitely more important than what they imagined at the time.
Tanaka-sensei is, in fact, my sensei, too; for more than two years, I’ve joined an odd assortment of die-hard potter wannabes—alumni and parents—on Saturday mornings for classes. During this quiet time, I’ve seen old students drop by, with their new babies and dogs, their new lives, and memories. Sensei knows every single one by name, asks after their classmates and their friends, and recalls their foibles as well as their achievements. His memory is preternatural, part of a quiet Nishimachi International School legend.
I’ve watched Sensei look over various elementary kids’ projects, like a mother hen. “I don’t help the kids too much,” he says, reattaching a dinosaur’s bobble head to its body, “because every one wants to do something themselves. But after the class, I might fix their work, secretly. I know the next morning they will be very proud of it, and that’s fine.”
From time to time, Tanaka-sensei frames a child’s work for no other reason than to show the work in a new light. “The child might think the drawing or painting doesn’t look nice, but with the frame, it changes greatly,” he explains. Professional graphic designer Christine Ito (Kobayashi ’88) recalls having this transformation occur to one of her works. In her first attempt to use an airbrush, she produced a simple flower in which “the lines were wobbly and out of control and there were speckles everywhere.” Then, she recalls, “months later, I found my ‘practice flower’ framed and put on display.” While she was shocked and even slightly embarrassed at the time, she now believes Tanaka-sensei taught her “that art is not about drawing perfect circles. That art is not only about fun, bright colors. It’s something more natural and maybe even coincidental. And sometimes you find beauty in the process in between, not what you think is the final product.”
In the studio, Tanaka-san is always mid-process, always moving: sanding bits of wood, sorting paints, sharpening tools, loading and unloading the kiln. While pouring a cup of green tea, he answers my question about art education today. “I think art programs have changed drastically because of the computer,” he says, “which makes kids think that they can produce something, because they can make it on the computer. But it’s not the same as really making something. They tend to have poor motor skills as a result.”
But, further, Tanaka-sensei reveals a philosophy that penetrates beyond motor skills. “The most important thing about art,” he explains, “is that it must be fun. Before I started pottery, I was a fisherman. I went fishing every single day. I made my own fishing rod, and I was always number one. If you like something, you will try it.” “Art,” he suggests, “must be fun, and a kind of communication, and if someone else loves what you have done, you have communicated.”
Though quiet people often seem serious, anyone who knows Tanaka-sensei well develops an ear for his understated humor. His glasses, for example, always appear skewed and gnawed. If you ask him, he will explain: “My dog likes to eat them. He has eaten five pairs.” When I first started pottery, I was having the devil of a time centering a hunk of clay, and started to get frustrated. Sensei said, “The clay doesn’t like you today.” It made me laugh, but later he explained, “You can’t fight with the clay—play with it. But your expectations will get higher and higher, and then the play is more serious, but you have to keep trying.”
For Tanaka-sensei, serious engagement in art has ancestral roots. His great-grandfather was an early Japanese oil painter. “My relatives were always against me to be an artist,” he says, “because my great-grandfather spent all the family money to be an artist. But, I’m the same. I think artists are born or made, but this may mean I am not a real artist. Just a craftsman. A craftsman will make something useful, an artist will make something to watch and look at. My level is down here,“ he says with his hand at his chest, then gradually lifting it, continues, “and an artist’s level is up there.”
I ask him, then, what he will do when he retires at the end of this academic year. He pauses for a moment, then says, “I will make something that I like. From now, I will do clay work, ceramic, but a kind of abstract work. That’s why I’m throwing out all my old works now.”
“Does that mean you will strive to be an artist then?” I ask him.
“Yes, that’s right,” he says with a laugh. “But it will take time. Also I am not a young man, and pottery needs a lot of power. My arms are strong, but my legs aren’t.” I ask him if there are other plans in his future, and he responds somewhat cryptically, “Science, and art, if you study these things deeply, they will point you to religion.”
From this June, Tanaka-sensei will be studying art, deeply, following the direction in which it leads him. If you would like to visit, he will be in Kanagawa-ken, Kozagun, Samukawa-machi at Okada, 8-19-6.