Spring Calligraphies is the first monograph devoted to the calligraphic work of philosopher and writer Itsuo Tsuda, bringing together 113 calligraphies and the research we have been able to conduct to date.
To mark its publication, an exhibition based on the photos in the book will be held at Tenshin Dojo in Paris on November 18 and 19, 2017. An opening reception will be held on November 18 at 6:30 p.m. Anyone interested in discovering the work of Itsuo Tsuda is cordially invited to attend.
The dojo is open and admission is free. Welcome !
In the meantime, we wanted to share with you a few lines about the origins and behind-the-scenes story of this adventure, which began more than thirty-three years ago.
1983, the beginnings
It was in early 1983 that plans to bring together Itsuo Tsuda’s calligraphies began to take shape. With Master Tsuda’s consent, Bruno V. and Alain L. catalogued the calligraphies, while Régis S. and Frédéric G. prepared a box set containing photographs of his works. Only a handmade mock-up was ever produced.
The project did not come to fruition because Itsuo Tsuda passed away in early 1984, but the idea continued to gain traction among some of his students. Alain L. continued for some time the work of cataloguing and photograph the calligraphy, as well as to research their meanings and translations. He identified around fifty, but many were still missing and a lot of information was lacking. Later, in 2007, Alain B. compiled around fifty calligraphies in a notebook distributed internally. Régis S. organised several exhibitions of some of the calligraphies and introduced his students to his master’s tracings.
However, the majority of the calligraphies remain unidentified, untranslated, and scattered throughout Europe among Itsuo Tsuda’s students.
A matter of time
Finally, in 2014, during the event celebrating the centenary of Itsuo Tsuda’s birth at Tenshin dojo, we were able to make significant progress. The event brought together many of Itsuo Tsuda’s former students and presented around thirty original calligraphies. We were able to talk directly about this book project, and some people were enthusiastic and gave us valuable support.
Based on the lists and notebooks previously compiled, the search began to locate and obtain the owners’ consent to use high-quality photographs. It was sometimes quite strange to call strangers and hear their surprise at being asked about a subject that took them back more than thirty years. The conversations had an almost surreal quality! At times, it was a delicate matter. In the end, almost without exception, every owner we approached agreed to participate in the book project.
Unfortunately, for some calligraphies, we arrived too late! Lost or destroyed over time. For some, it was a close call! For example, it was with great difficulty that we found those of Mrs. C. N. from Rome. As no one answered our phone calls, someone went to the address we had. Once there, they realised that the flat was undergoing renovation… The worker there informed them that Mrs. N. had passed away a few months earlier. The family had completely emptied the flat. In desperation, we left a written message for the family. That same evening, we were contacted by the nephew, who explained that everything had been given away or thrown away and that the calligraphies no longer existed. We insisted, saying that it was really important. But there was little hope. Finally, his wife contacted us again. She had found the people to whom the calligraphy had been given, and we were able to take the photos! But what a hassle it was to find the threads.
Other times we only had one possible slot, like when Mr. O., a Japanese man living in Italian-speaking Switzerland, finally told us: ‘I’m coming to Paris, I’ll bring the calligraphy and I’ll be at such-and-such a place on such-and-such a day in the evening.’ We had to make ourselves available and react quickly. Régis S., Sara R. and Costanza C. took a car, picked up the calligraphy, and raced across Paris to a professional laboratory with whom they had made an appointment. They had it scanned, hoping that the file would be good because there would be no chance to start over. Then they returned the calligraphy to its owner. All in two hours… During the brief conversation in Italian that followed the return of the calligraphy, Mr. O. mentioned a Japanese technique called rōketsuzome, a word he wrote on a small piece of paper. This put us on a trail that, after extensive research, proved to be extremely important.
Jérémie L., the photographer, travelled to Geneva and spent forty-eight hours with Sven K., Christoph N. and Kim N., surrounded by calligraphies, photo albums and reminiscences about Itsuo Tsuda. During this trip, he was able to photograph several calligraphies brought together for the occasion by Sven K. and Christoph N. A considerable amount of work also went into the photos. We wanted to have excellent reproductions that were as faithful as possible to the original works and to achieve images of consistent quality. Unfortunately, due to circumstances, this was not always possible.
Today, we have managed to gather together 113 photos of calligraphies, the last two of which arrived a week before going to print, having been found at the last minute!
Hanging in
What gave us a lot of trouble was figuring out the meaning of the calligraphies, which had often been lost or forgotten… It was like a puzzle! Sometimes we have phrases spoken by Itsuo Tsuda, clues passed on more or less accurately by the owners. Other times, we had no clues at all. Just a piece of calligraphy that even Japanese people sometimes could not read!
It was during a meeting at the home of ethnologist and woman of letters Claudine Brelet, former student of Itsuo Tsuda, that we met Mrs. Élisabeth Rochat de la Vallée. She is an eminent sinologist who guided us towards Chinese culture. We showed her all the calligraphies we had collected at that point, and she gave us some leads. This had a “snowball” effect. We therefore focused our research more on Chinese writing, and from that moment on, some of the mysteries were solved. Of course, there was still a huge amount of work to be done, but it gave us a direction in which to search, as most of Itsuo Tsuda’s calligraphies refer to classical Chinese culture. Every person we met who provided us with an answer, a clue or a comment helped us to advance our research, and in that sense it was like an investigation.
We were forced to take our research much further than we had initially imagined. This led us to spend months and months consulting works reserved for experts in the field, such as those held at the Bibliothèque Universitaire des Langues et Civilisations or the French School of the Far East.
We tried, as far as we could, to identify the sources of the works. After searching through various books and websites, Sara R. found a digitised version of a book by a Jesuit priest who was a missionary in China at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Chinese Characters by L. Wieger, a work from 1916 that is still considered a reference today.
She then immersed herself in this 1,200-page book to search for the ideograms used by Itsuo Tsuda, as they are very old and really difficult to find. From that moment on, the idea was born to develop the etymology of Chinese and Japanese characters, which at first glance may seem ponderous, but in fact immerses us in a unique world of thought. It is a construction built up over millennia, of a society, a way of approaching life, which is a priori very far removed from the Western conception.
This research, which enabled us to identify the ideograms, some of which are very ancient, ultimately led us back to the writings of Itsuo Tsuda himself! In fact, Itsuo Tsuda discusses the subjects he has calligraphied in his books, and in some cases we even found the exact text of the calligraphies once the sources had been identified. We were therefore able to insert, for almost all of the calligraphies, what he himself said about them.
Itsuo Tsuda’s use of ancient ideograms also presented difficulties for the layout. A work of this magnitude, nearly four hundred and seventy pages, is no small feat. The layout designer, Costanza C., had to be creative, especially as the text grew longer as the book took shape and because it is a text that combines French, Chinese and Japanese! What is more, ancient ideograms do not exist in all modern software packages. It was therefore necessary to scan and recreate certain ancient ideograms in order to insert them into the text. All this required infinite patience on her part!
A matter of times
This book required an enormous amount of human effort, of course, but it would have been impossible to produce without advances in computing and information sharing: the possibilities offered by digital photography and the ability to scan the calligraphies, digitisation enabling high-quality images, and the ability to send high-definition files from the other side of the world all facilitate exchanges!
Advances in digital technology have been hugely important in enabling amateurs like us to produce a work of this scale.
The internet is an invaluable tool for the research itself. All the preliminary work, from selecting research works to coming up with the right questions to ask experts, was essential and would have been impossible to complete in such a short time (around three years) without this tool. The research indexed in digitised classic works is also very important.
Particularly for the biographical section, in addition to organising the available information and people’s memories, it was necessary to explain and illustrate the historical situations that Itsuo Tsuda had experienced. Being able to email a Japanese specialist in kamon (family crest) or a professor in Tokyo made it possible to verify the data. We were also able to consult the archives of museums in New York and elsewhere to find images of Busan at the beginning of the century, and consult Japanese libraries that still have traces of Itsuo Tsuda’s work as a translator in Japan. Not to mention the Institut national d’audiovisuel, whose online resources were also very useful to us.
Today, most museums and institutions around the world make their resources available online. How long would it have taken us and how much money would we have needed to travel around the world to consult these archives and books and interview these experts? It simply would not have been possible.
It took an enormous amount of human effort, but today’s technological resources have made it possible to give this book, created by passionate volunteers, such scope. This has made a dream that was unattainable thirty years ago a reality.
We took great care to ensure that this book was of high quality, as we wanted it to be “worthy” of presenting Itsuo Tsuda’s work!
We hope you enjoy discovering it as much as we enjoyed creating it with passion and dedication. See you on 18 November 2017 at Tenshin Dojo, 120 rue des Grands-Champs, 75020 Paris, from 6.30 p.m., or on 19 November from 12.30 p.m.
Manon Soavi
Online sales will be available from 20 November on Yume Editions’ website
about the book:
Monograph devoted to the calligraphic work of philosopher and writer Itsuo Tsuda (1914–1984). Thread-bound volume, hardcover. Format 30x24cm. 468 pages including 97 full-page reproductions. Retail price: €75 (shipping costs €13.90 for France)