This site brought back some intense memories. I was 12 years old when my family moved to Japan in early 1957. My dad was an Air Force transport pilot stationed in a town on the outskirts of Tokyo — Tachikawa. We lived in a Japanese house for the first 18 months. Talk about sensory overload. There was a shopping street about four blocks from where we lived. It was wonderful walking up and down that street looking in the shop windows, or doors, at this wild profusion of really wonderful, strange stuff. One of the shops was a basket maker's shop. I loved the beautiful shapes and patterns made from bamboo. Such a simple material — such wonderful baskets.

Tachikawa was an easy bicycle ride from the countryside. My dad, and two of my younger brothers, would go on rides though villages with the old thatched roof houses. Of course we would stop for a lemon cider while my dad had a beer. (I think it was a lemon cider. The bottle had reusable tops consisting of a glass ball secured by a wire contraption. I remember it was so carbonated that a good shake would evacuate about half the contents of the bottle. That made for some good cider fights.) It was those old thatched roof houses that awakened my interest in Architecture and sent me to the College of Architecture at the U of W, in Seattle, for two years — until I wandered off to Urban Planning in a fit of youthful megalomania, but that's another story.

This site has pictures of bamboo baskets and the countryside.

A Basketmaker in Rural Japan

  thanks to plep