Healing Japan with flowers

Maki Aizawa explores negative space (From the 2011 Winter issue of SONOMA)

Maki Aizawa speaks of ma, the Japanese word for negative space. Ma describes the space between arranged flowers, the pause between musical notes, the reflective gap in conversation. Ma recognizes that what is not present is exactly as important as what is. It does not translate into English. In English, there is no such word. 

But Maki Aizawa understands ma well. She’s a professional floral designer of the first order. Anchored in Sonoma but rooted in Sendai, Japan, Aizawa understands both presence and absence, the beauty of space and the ache of distance.

She basks in raising her 7-year-old son, Riku, and relishes her thriving career. Her company, Viola Flowers, graces weddings and special events with stunning arrangements. But since the tsunami, forced to watch helplessly on TV while the land she grew up in washed away, her thoughts are consumed with helping the thousands of people left with nothing.
 

Last Mother’s Day she sold bouquets, not a usual part of her business, and sent all the proceeds, $12,000, to Sendai. She knew this was only a beginning. Aizawa returns to Japan every fall, leading tours for Journeys East. In between tours, she visits her mother in Sendai and her father and sister in Tokyo. This year she felt drawn to make a difference while there, and so Aizawa dreamed up two projects.

For the first, Aizawa paired up with photographer Sven Wiederholt to make a post-tsunami film. With Aizawa doing on-camera interviews, difficult stories emerged, one painful memory at a time. “The memory of that day is still very emotional for them, and now they are living in shelters that are very minimal,” Aizawa says. In the beginning people were sheltered in large communal situations, sometimes in buildings left still standing, sometimes outdoors. By July, thin-walled structures were built for the homeless.  The huts have no insulation, and, as Aizawa points out, it will be snowing soon.  They have been told they can stay in these shelters for two years, and most have no idea what they will do after that.  Every single thing that they have—clothes, teapots, blankets—are donated goods. Nothing from their former lives remains, not even jobs, as many were farmers whose land washed away with the raging sea or was contaminated beyond use.

Aizawa and Wiederholt interviewed dozens of people and are now editing their work into an English-dubbed film, though they are not sure just yet how it will be distributed. If a network doesn’t pick the film up, they’ll show it over the Internet. Aizawa hopes the film will prove to be a powerful fundraising tool. “We are not seeing here what it is like there,” she says.  Aizawa explains that Japanese culture embraces mujo, the idea that nothing is permanent and that change must be accepted. “It was amazing to see that people are appreciating life and all the support they are being given. That is what the film is about. They are smiling.”

The second project was the creation of a women’s art collective. Along with her mother, Tsuyo Onodera, a renowned kimono maker whose building was spared in the March earthquake, Aizawa began the Senninbari Project. With the shelters full of people with nothing to do, Aizawa and her mother thought to provide them an activity they could take pride in. 
 

Senninbari means “thousand person stitches.” In Japan, it’s believed that a garment sewn by many becomes an amulet, protecting the person who wears it from danger, sheltering them with prayers.  The first piece the women made together was a Dotera, a quilted kimono made of layered cotton to guard against the cold.  Each woman stitched a 20 inch square; 34 squares sewn together made the Dotera. “Our goal is to share the beauty of Japanese culture and the resilience of the people. The way they are folding their sad memories into their strong character and their new lives,” Aizawa says. “People who do not know Japan think geisha, samurai, sushi. I want to show what’s really going on in the Japanese culture,” she says.

Certainly Aizawa is qualified to do so. She grew up at her parents’ school, where girls came to board and learn the art of kimono. Though never a favorite activity for her, Aizawa learned to sew kimono, too. She studied calligraphy and learned to play koto, a large Japanese harp, which she still plays, sometimes for audiences. But ever since she was a little girl she was drawn to flowers. When she was still in knee socks she began studying ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging heavily influenced by ma. Ikebana is typically learned in adulthood, and Aizawa was the only child in her class. But by the age of 19, she was Ichi Maki, meaning she was qualified to teach the art, and she had passed the tests required for the title Shihan, meaning master.
 

In 1995, when she was 20, Aizawa came to the United States. She studied at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and later at San Francisco State. Focused on museum studies, Aizawa earned a degree in art history, but an internship at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art changed all of that. The position required that she work with a florist, and the experience renewed her passion. “I found I really loved it, more than being in the museum all day,” she recalls. She learned the European style of flower arranging to complement the ikebana, and today she can do practically anything with flowers—short of make them tango.

Viola Flowers does weddings of all shapes and sizes, from chi-chi estate celebrations to intimate winery gatherings. The clients might be local, or they might have crossed oceans for the Aizawa treatment. Sometimes, she doesn’t meet her brides in person until the day before nuptials. But no worries. “My brides are very sophisticated, really cool. They are all wonderful,” Aizawa says.

Maki Aizawa embodies the essence of ma. In her work and her life, space figures heavily. Ma is more than just a word for this woman; the idea of ma transcends language. It is the indefinable gap between what’s known and not known, where more can mean less and distance is near; it’s that small, hopeful sliver between, where upheaval and chaos can bring balance. S
 

Additional photos courtesy of Viola Flowers

(From the 2011 Winter issue of SONOMA)

2011 winter