Report for October Activities

• Oct 1, 2022 ~ Oct 31, 2022

Report for October Activities

JFYG Culture Center

Art and Culture Activities

Shodo Class

With the aim to introduce the art and essence of Japanese calligraphy, JFYG launched the 6-month basic calligraphy course in October.The class will be one class per month and the duration is one and half-hour for 20 students with Yume Shintani as the instructor. The basic content of the course includes the introduction to history of Japanese calligraphy, how to write basic characters by calligraphy, how to write characters of intermediate level by calligraphy, evaluation of the characters of the class students, how to write Kohitsu, how to write letters, seasonal words and CV form by Kohitsu and so on.

The Japan Foundation, Yangon will award the class completion certificates to those who have finished all the six classes and they will have the chance to become the club members of shodo club that JFYG will organize in the near future.

Being the first intensive Japanese calligraphy course, the launch of the class received much attention from the audience and over 120 registrants applied for the class. Thus, it lead to increase the class into two sessions to accommodate as many interested students as we can within our capacity and management. The language is not limited so those who don’t understand Japanese can also join. The classes were divided into Japanese language Shodo class and English language Shodo class based on the student language preference and Yume sensei language ability. On the first week, the students were given the mizu e shodo set to learn the basic strokes. On the second week, the 3 basic techniques of shodo were taught. The students practiced the 3 techniques until they have acquired them perfectly. After that, the students presented their best version of their calligraphy of the kanji “ 平和”and the teacher and students reviewed, compared and discussed the calligraphy works. Finally, the teacher and the students chose the best calligraphy of the week.

Do Talk #7 Sado (Tea Ceremony)

Sat, 22 October (2 pm – 4pm)

The Japan Foundation, Yangon strives to introduce Japanese traditional arts and culture to Japanese cultural lovers in Myanmar and in October, as the 7^th event of Do Talk program, JFYG introduced Sado which is one of the popular Japanese traditional culture for Myanmar people. Japanese volunteers (Ms. Hyodo, Ms. Kashima and Ms. Oita) were invited as the speaker and to prepare the matcha for participants. The event  was set up in an enclosed room, with tatami mats laid out for the speaker, Ms. Hyodo san, who would demonstrate as the host preparing the tea, to sit and to display the tea utensils set and traditional iron kettle. A small tokonoma was also set up with the hanging scroll of  “一期に一度” calligraphy and the pampas grass flower arrangement.The participants were given a sitting seat to sit as the seiza position.

Ms.Hyodo, the speaker, firstly gave an explanatory presentation of Sado (the way of Japanese Tea and the philosophy of Sado that transcends from Sen no Rikyu’s time to today). After that, she demonstrated how the host prepares the tea for the guests step by step. After watching the demonstration, the participants were served Koicha (thick tea) with candies and usucha (thin tea) in beautiful chawans (tea bowls) with dango prepared by Ms. Kashima and Ms. Oita. All the participants enjoyed the taste of the combo of Japanese tea and dango and learnt the way of drinking tea and the guest etiquette (the way of whisking the tea, the way of rotating the chawan before drinking the tea, etc).  The Sado event came to an end after the lively Q&A session between the volunteers and the participants and the participants enjoying the tea at the balcony with miniature Zen gardens.

The culture center continues to open on Saturday with Kendo club in the morning and cultural activities in the afternoon.