Bonsai, Music, and Deadwood

Deadwood Carving with Mehrdad

This First Thursday workshop will feature Mehrdad’s deadwood carving demonstration. In addition to his trees, please bring in some examples of trees with deadwood to share with the club to share.

Bjorn Bjorholm Demo

The Marin Bonsai Club, Midori Bonsai Club, and Redwood Empire Bonsai Society (REBS) would like to announce a joint Zoom demonstration featuring Bjorn Bjorholm on Tuesday, April 5 at 7pm Pacific Time. Note to our Midori members that this is not on our usual First Thursday Meeting, but two days prior. This event is hosted by the Marin Bonsai club and co-sponsored by Midori Bonsai and REBS.

It will be a 2 hour demonstration and will cover two different topics with a fifteen minute Q&A intermission. The first topic will be on junipers with a focus on deadwood, raffia application, and design tips. The second topic will cover the maintenance schedules of pines, junipers, cypress, and spruce from spring through winter. This includes pruning, wiring, fungicides and pesticides, and fertilization. It will be streamed live from Bjorn’s studio in Nashville, Tennessee.

Note that only members in good standing will be sent a link to the event. If you have not paid your dues yet, this meeting alone will be worth the renewals. Non-members may attend for a nominal fee. Please contact Tung for more information.

The zoom link details will be sent out by April 2nd at the latest.

Tegami—Greetings to my younger self

By Tung X. Dao

This year, Midori will be having a show at the Cupertino Cherry Blossom Festival. This has been an annual tradition for many years—until 2020 happened, of course. Many of us have appreciated the opportunity to present our trees to the curious public, teach about bonsai and share our love of the art. If you haven’t signed up to volunteer for this show, I highly encourage you to do so. It may change your life.

One of my passions for many years has been music. I have loved it since I was young. I studied piano for many years and almost went to a music conservatory. That didn’t quite work out and I studied engineering, fulfilling another childhood dream, but I still study and enjoy music to this day. As you can see, I have many passions. I want to share a very important, life changing song that I heard at this festival in 2019 while working on my bonsai.

Mixed Chorus Kakehashi

It was a Saturday afternoon. We were busy in the community center working on our trees when a choir started singing on the other side of the hall. I decided to take a break to listen to the music. The bright pink program informed me it was the Mixed Chorus Kakehashi performing. They started singing their first song. It was quite nice! I had no idea what they were singing, as it was in Japanese. Then they sang their second song. The chorus started off in unison,

Haikei kono tegami,
Yondeiru anata wa…

Oh, what a beautiful melody. I started really listening to it, studying the interactions between the melody and the harmony. It was so exquisite and emotional, even though I understood none of the lyrics. The song went on to the second section. The tenors sang the melody this time,

Haikei arigatou.
Juugo no anata ni…

The altos and sopranos later entered with a beautiful uplifting counter melody. A tear started to form in my eyes from the harmony alone. By the time they finished the second section, I was lifted into an emotional high, with a salience that I couldn’t describe. I connected with this music. By the time the song ended, I felt overwhelmed emotionally, an emotional high that I had never experienced before. I had no idea what the song meant, but I felt the many emotions that the music expressed.

For the next week, I reminisced about the experience. I had to find out what the song was. I decided to take a leap of faith. I reached out to the chorus on Facebook to ask them what songs they performed at the festival. They told me that the song was titled Tegami, A Letter—Dear My 15-Year-Old Self.

Cool, interesting title. Definitely an unconventional title if it were an English song, I thought to myself. Little did I know that this would continue to become a years long musical, cinematic, and emotional journey.

In case you are wondering, yes, I did go to their annual concert to listen to their performance of it a second time.

The English Sub

Armed with that information, I went on YouTube to see what I could find there. After some sleuthing, I found an English subtitled choir version of the song, just like the one I heard at the festival. It begins with a pianist who accompanies a middle school choir in a concert hall. Before starting, she tells the choir, “Smile. Have the song on your lips. Stay in tune.” The choir nods. The conductor begins the song and the choir begins their song in Japanese,

Dear whoever is reading this letter:
Where have you ended up, and what are you doing?

At 15 years old, there are things on my mind
that I can’t tell to anyone.
But if it’s in a letter to my future self,
I have confidence that I can go ahead and let it all out.

I feel like I’ve lost, I’m about to cry,
and I could just disappear.
Whose voice can I follow?
This heart of mine,
my one and only heart,
has been shattered so many times.

But for the moment,
I’ll live through this pain.

Wow. I remembered my experiences from when I was young—the pains and struggles, the things I kept secret, the things I wanted to be when I grew up. All the feelings of childhood—expressed in song. This is what the chorus was singing about at the Cherry Blossom Festival.

The choir’s performance is interspersed with various cutaway scenes of some of the characters. I didn’t quite understand the context of these scenes.

The song continues,

Dear 15 year old me: Thank you.
I have things to say to you.

If you keep on searching for the answer
to where and what you should aim for, you’ll find it.
The chaotic tides of your youth may be hard on you,
But your dreams are a boat on its way to the shore.

Just don’t lose out and don’t cry.
When you feel like you could just disappear,
your own voice is the one you can follow.

As an adult, I do have painful nights
without a wink of sleep.
But I’m living my bittersweet present.

At this point, I reached for a tissue. I wished that my 15 year old self knew that 30 year old me could tell me those words.

Everything in life has its purpose,
so just have faith and follow your dreams.
Keep on believing!

Such powerful words of encouragement. The song continues and ends with these words:

Dear whoever is reading this letter:
I wish you the happiness you deserve.

At this point, I was crying. Not tears of sadness, not tears of joy, but a sort of indescribable mix of yearning, nostalgia—perhaps that feeling a child has as he dreams of his future? A feeling of pathos, of mono no aware, of melancholy, that life is imperfect? It’s very difficult to describe.

I find out that this song is by the Japanese artist Angela Aki. She wrote the song in 2008, inspired by an assignment she had as a 15 year old in school to write her future self a letter. The song started out as a single featuring herself, and then, at the request of the NHK, it was later rearranged into a choir version by Hioaki Takaha for the annual NHK National School Music Contest (NCon). Since its release, it has become a culturally important song, as it is sung at graduation ceremonies by the graduating class to the underclassmen with many students tearing up from the emotional lyrics.

The song has also reached international acclaim, with translations and subtitles into other languages. Being Vietnamese, I found the version by Vietnamese singer Hai Trieu to be just as emotional as the original Japanese version.

The movie

I noticed some interesting text in the title of the song, Kuchibiru ni uta o (Have a Song On Your Lips). A quick search revealed that this is the title to a film. I started putting two and two together. The choir’s performance is a scene from this movie and this explains why there were various cutaway scenes interspersed throughout their performance. I did not understand the context of these scenes, but I knew I had to watch this film. I had to experience the significance of those cutscenes and how the song fits into the movie.

The film is about a talented pianist, Yuri, who returns to her hometown. She becomes the choirmaster for the local school chorus, relieving Haruko, the original choirmaster who has to take maternity leave, of her duties.

In the choir are Satorou, a boy who has an autistic older brother that he has to take care of, and Nazuna, a girl who has an abusive father who robs her family. Yuri also struggles with her own challenges that have suddenly stopped her from playing piano as she prepares the school choir for NCon, the national choir contest. (The whole film is kind of like the Japanese version of Glee, if Glee were made into a Japanese movie.)

Yuri learns of her students’ struggles and, like Angela Aki’s personal experience and the song they prepare for, makes them write a letter to their older selves to help them deal with their experiences. The film culminates with the choir singing the emotional Tegami at the competition. The film ends with Yuri leaving town with the choir waving their goodbyes.

The film moved me like no other film has. There are so many emotional points in the film. For me, three of them include the song at the end, the scene where Satorou writes to his future self about him taking care of his older brother, and the scene where Yuri reads her letter on why she became a pianist:

My dream for the future is to make people the world over happy by playing piano. That’s because I believe music has the power to save people. Who will the future me be playing the piano for? Who will the future me be giving happiness to by playing piano?

My jaw dropped and I could not hold back my tears. The musician in me did not expect to have such a deep connection with this story as I looked at my piano keyboard across the room and back at my computer monitor with some code on the screen. I was moved.

To this day, I cannot describe the emotion that I felt, though. I hope that someone will watch this film and help me describe that feeling that the film brings to its viewers. It’s a feeling that I have never experienced in western cinema before.

The Piano

Now I knew I had to perform this piece. There was a summer music jam at a friend’s house coming up a month later. After not performing solo piano for a number of years, I needed to make music again. I learned a solo piano transcription of Tegami and performed it at that event to my friends and strangers. What a perfect song to perform. I hoped that I, too, brought happiness to people with this song.

I went on to arrange a piano four-hands version that’s yet to be performed live; it only exists as a score on my piano. If anyone is interested, let me know and perhaps we can perform this piece for our club sometime.

Bonsai as a letter

What a journey it’s been since that afternoon of working on my trees with my fellow Midori friends. What started out as a break from bonsai turned into a journey into Japanese art, culture, music, and film. And it took me on a personal journey that started with my first little musical keyboard, to music lessons and aspirations, to engineering school, and continues with bonsai.

I believe that a bonsai tree is a letter. It is a letter to our older selves, and it is our letter to future caregivers of the tree. A prune here, a pinch there, some wire and jin—they’re all words that tell a story to someone we may never know. Everything we do to our trees is a reflection of us in them. As we nurture the tree with nutrients and water, I hope that we keep the song and the film’s message in our hearts: to accept the past and live our current selves to their fullest extent. 🌳

Bonsai Stands

Nancy Schramm, plant extraordinaire and guru of Carman’s Nursery, shared this article with us. She writes,

In the April 2022 issue of Fine Woodworking, (#295) in the monthly column Designer’s Notebook, there is an article by Austin Heitzman titled Inspired by Nature. (pages 72-73)

Heitzman is “a professional furniture maker in Portland, Oregon”. The column shows five of the bonsai stands he has made along with the bonsai they were made for placed on the stands. He talks about moving to Portland and discovering he had “…found myself in the epicenter of America’s growing bonsai community…”

His article tells what bonsai is and about the importance of an appropriate stand, as well as his design inspiration and technique.

A worthwhile read, thanks Nancy!

UPCOMING MIDORI EVENTS

BJORN BJORHOLM DEMONSTRATION

Tuesday April 5, 2022 at 7-9pm on Zoom

Bjorn will be doing a demo in this not-to-be-missed event hosted by the Marin Bonsai Club with sponsorship from Midori Bonsai club and Redwood Empire Bonsai Society. This will be on zoom and only to members in good standing. More information will be emailed a few days prior to the event.

Deadwood Carving with Mehrdad Chavosh

April 7, 2022 at 7:30-9:30pm

Mehrdad will be doing a demo on deadwood carving. Please bring in some trees that have deadwood features or would be good candidates for deadwood for a show and tell in addition to his main demonstration.

Our Third Thursday meeting will be a normal workshop for club members to bring in their trees for help and to get answers to all of their questions.

JUAN CRUZ’S BEGINNER’S BONSAI WORKSHOP CLASS

Third Thursdays March-June

For those of you who would like to get additional help and instruction for your bonsai trees, the club will be offering a beginners class starting in March. Your instructor will be Juan Cruz, a dedicated bonsai artist who loves teaching the art of bonsai.

He will cover all basic aspects of this amazing hobby. Juan will be starting his first class in March at our usual workshop on our third Thursday meeting.

There will be an up front $5.00 charge to cover the four classes over a four month period. Please contact Juan at our first monthly meeting and let him know that you would like to be included with this group. Juan will let you know what materials you'll need to bring to each class each month.

New students are always welcome to start any time.

Cupertino CHERRY BLOSSOM FESTIVAL

Saturday and Sunday April 30-May 1, 2022 at the Quinlan Community Center in Cupertino

April means that the cherry trees are in full bloom, and with that, we look forward to our bonsai show we put on every year at the Quinlan Community Center in Cupertino. This is a two day show, April 30th and May 1st, where our club has a chance to display many of our member’s bonsai trees and in addition have a place to work on our trees at the show.

This is an annual fun event for our club where hundreds of local residents pass through inspecting our trees and asking questions about their age and development. With that in mind, the club needs to start to organize volunteers to support the transportation of the backgrounds and tables needed for our tree displays.

In addition, a sign-up sheet will be passed around at the next few meetings for those who have trees to be included and be displayed. We need various sizes of trees and accent plants. Trees that are in full bloom or seasonal are always popular. Be sure to bring the show tables that accompany your trees. This is a two day event where it's nice to exchange out trees for the second day, adding diversity to our club show.

NURSERY TOUR

This event was originally schedule for May 7, but has been postponed for now. Stay tuned.

Midori Bonsai Show

Saturday October 1, 2022 at the Quinlan Community Center in Cupertino

Our annual show is back! Please sign up to volunteer for this event. We will need everyone’s help in making this show happen again. 🌳

UPCOMING NORTHERN CALIFORNIA (AND BEYOND) BONSAI EVENTS

AMERICAN BONSAI ASSOCIATION SACRAMENTO SPRING SHOW AND SALE

April 9-10, 2022
Shepard Garden & Arts Center in McKinley Park
3330 McKinley Park, Sacramento

Bonsai exhibit, member and vendor sales, bonsai demonstration daily at 1:30pm featuring Andrew Robson as headliner.

There is a large vendor and member sales area, free admission and parking, and a beginner workshop Sunday morning from 10am-12pm (to register contact Renee Seely).

The benefit drawings on both Saturday and Sunday will include each day’s demonstration tree and many bonsai/bonsai related items. For additional information visit our website: American Bonsai Association of Sacramento, or contact Renee Seely, 916-929-2106, email breadcrust@comcast.net.

55TH ANNUAL NORTHERN CALIFORNIA CHERRY BLOSSOM FESTIVAL

April 9-10 & 16-17, 2022
Japantown Peace Plaza, San Francisco
www.sfcherryblossom.org

Welcome to the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival®, one of California’s most prominent celebrations of Asian traditions and the largest Cherry Blossom Festival on the West coast. All are welcome to join in the festivities as we celebrate Japanese and Japanese American culture with you!

Since 1968, the Festival has served to cultivate the continued alliance between Japan and the United States using culture as its bridge. Each year, over 220,000 people attend this dazzling display showcasing the vibrant colors and grace of the Japanese culture, and the rich heritage and diversity of the Japanese American community.

CUPERTINO CHERRY BLOSSOM FESTIVAL

April 30 & May 1, 2022
Memorial Park, Cupertino
www.cupertinocherryblossomfestival.org

The Cupertino-Toyokawa Sister Cities Committee is responsible for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival in Cupertino. The committee is also responsible for selecting & sending a delegation of middle school students to Toyokawa every year and a delegation of adults every five years.

KUSAMURA BONSAI CLUB 62ND ANNUAL SHOW

April 30th and May 1st, 2022
12pm-4pm Saturday and 11am-4pm Sunday

Addison School
650 Addison Street
Palo Alto

Join us and see over 50 Bonsai Trees on display. There will be a Sale and Benefit drawing with over 100 bonsai and pots. Club members will put on a demonstration on Sunday at 1:30pm.

Bob Shimon of Mendocino Coast Bonsai will be presenting at 1:30pm Saturday.

For more information contact show co-chairs: Lynne O’Dell at lynnemo@gmail.com or Idris Anderson at idrisan@gmail.com. Details will also be posted on the Kusamura Bonsai Club website.

LOTUS BONSAI ANNUAL SPRING SALE

May 14-15, 2022, 9am-4pm

Lotus Bonsai Nursery & Gardens
1435 Lower Lake Drive
Placerville, CA 95667

This is the not-to-be missed once a year sale at the nursery. Big discounts on all bonsai trees and stock plants.

VALLEY BONSAI SOCIETY 12TH ANNUAL SHOW

June 18-19, 2022
10am-4pm with demonstration at 1pm

Alden Lane Nursery
981 Alden Lane
Livermore, CA 94550

The finished trees will be raffled off at the end of the demonstrations. Bonsai pots, soil, etc. available for purchase. Admission is free.

BAY AREA SATSUKI AIKOKAI (BASA) 25TH ANNUAL SATSUKI AZALEA BONSAI SHOW

May 21 & 22, 2022
10AM-5PM Saturday and 10AM-4PM Sunday

666 Bellevue Ave.
Lakeside Park Garden Center
Lake Merritt

The Bay Area Satsuki Aikokai (BASA) 25th Annual Satsuki Azalea Bonsai Show will feature azalea bonsai in full bloom. Join us on May 21 & 22, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday, at 666 Bellevue Ave., Lakeside Park Garden Center, Lake Merritt, for the display of beautiful flowering bonsai. Featuring large member sale and imported Satsuki azalea from Japan. Demonstration from 1–3pm, Saturday with raffle of the demo tree. Vendor area. Free admission. Public parking available.

For information, contact Darren Wong at sohjuen@aol.com or visit our website at http://satsukiazaleabonsai.org.

MARIN BONSAI CLUB AT THE MARIN COUNTY FAIR

June 30-July 4, 2022
Marin County Civic Center

Join the Marin Bonsai Club at the return of our annual show at the Marin County Fair. This year’s show will be outdoors as we celebrate Being So Happy Together.

PACIFIC BONSAI EXPO

November 12-13, 2022

The Bridge Yard
Oakland, CA

The Pacific Bonsai Expo is a juried exhibition featuring 70 outstanding bonsai displays and a selection of the community’s top vendors. Jurors Bjorn Bjorholm, Ryan Neil, and William N. Valavanis will select the trees. The exhibitors are the judges. Your trees are the stars. It’s an event not to be missed. 🌳