On The Tenth Annual Tokyo Quilt Show, Stout Amish Women, and Riding the Green Car

This started out as a short paragraph introducing a slide show of dozens of quilts I photographed at the Tokyo Quilt Show last week before my camera's battery expired.  But brevity has never been my strong point.  While assembling the slide show – a tedious task without College Boy here to point out shortcuts while rolling his eyes at my ineptitude – I realized that only two of you would ever get around to viewing those pictures.  This thought was a bit irksome at the cost (time as money)/benefit level so I extracted a few pictures to share with everyone.

Our quilt show party this year included seven American and four Japanese ladies. Usually the Americans travel to Tokyo on the Keikyu train line which, during the morning rush hour, means dangling from a strap and trying to score a pocket of oxygen in a crush of commuters until at least Yokohama and sometimes as far as Shinagawa. Knowing we were going to be on our feet all day wandering around the Tokyo Dome, we decided to spend an extra 950 yen for reserved seats on the JR train line. Had I known how easy it is to reserve a seat, I might have read a lot more books on my journeys last year. We bought the upgrades at an electronic kiosk on the train platform, climbed on a green car when the train pulled into the station, found vacant seats (they were plentiful), and then pressed our train cards against the little screens over our seats until the lights changed from red to green. Take note, AmTrak.

We went to the quilt show on a Wednesday to avoid the weekend crowds. A lot of other people had the same idea.

Quilt shows always seem to feature a special exhibit that you’re not allowed to photograph. The Obama quilts at the 2009 Yokohama show are a prime example.  This time it was Amish quilts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on loan from German and Australian collectors. The exhibit also included photographs of modern Amish people (is that an oxymoron?) and two stout Caucasian women in Amish attire stitching a quilt for the edification of throngs of onlookers. “They can’t be real Amish women,” I observed, “since you can’t get from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to Tokyo via horse-and-buggy.” Artistic Explorer suggested the ladies were Mennonites.

In any case, the Amish exhibit made me feel queasy, like I had swallowed a mouthful of scrapple.  What would Homer think if he traveled through time and space to find himself gazing at relics of Ancient Greece in the British Museum?  A little queasy I think.  Just before beating a hasty retreat from that exhibit, I had the distinct impression I was viewing the remnants of US culture from the other side of the planet several hundred of years after my country ceased to exist.  This was not one of the remnants I would choose were I running that museum.

And yes, I do believe I just compared myself to Homer. Eyes are rolling in heaven today.

Here are a few things that tickled my fancy:

A quilted bag in the shape of a guitar

This quilt (above) recalls a pilgrimage to some of Japan's most famous shrines and temples. Nowadays pilgrimages are mostly undertaken by retired Japanese over the age of 60 with the aim of making merit for their next life. My friend Nagasaki-san's husband made one of these pilgrimages with his 80-year old mother and then did it all over again on foot. What a lovely tradition.



The Jazz Quilt



This one is made of linen squares.  I bet it's fun to iron.

The London Underground

Lavish color carried the day in the Original Design category

Vendors' stalls horse-shoed the exhibit three aisles deep on three sides. Two different vendors offered Peko-chan and Poko-chan dolls but were asking 25,000 yen (about $300 these days) per pair. Too pricey for the likes of me. Dr. T thinks I can get them a lot cheaper if I track down the shops where the vendors normally conduct business.

Oh boy. A new quest.

And here's that slide show for Geraldine and JoAnn: