Flower artist Takeshi Sakamura personally goes into the fields and mountains to pick wild flowers and branches, and places them in the vases he has found. The green leaves seem to sway in the wind, and the flowers that bloom neatly are pretty and courageous, and stand quietly as if speaking to you. What exactly touched Sakamura's heart when he moved to Kumamoto in search of an "authentic space"?

Written by Takeshi Sakamura

I make a living by arranging flowers, but I also run an antique and coffee shop called ``Sakamura'' in Kumamoto City, and it has been 18 years since I opened a similar shop in Tokyo and moved to Kumamoto. As the years have passed, it can be called an important occupation, but today I would like to write a little about the important flower industry.

I started studying flowers by accident, so I won't go into details about the circumstances at the time, but I suddenly jumped into this field.
It happened when I was 25 years old.

After that, at the teacher's school where I studied for three years, there was no such thing as a textbook on flower arranging (recipes in a cooking class), so after I became independent, I had to make my own arrangements for the flower materials and vases by walking through the mountains and back alleys. After wandering around the country and visiting antique shops, I began to only use items that looked like them.
This is how the current style of procuring both flowers and containers by oneself was established.

However, when it comes to getting people to see the flowers, one important thing was left out at the stores and flower exhibitions in Tokyo. It was a "real space".

It is almost impossible to use the spaces called ``tea rooms and shoin,'' where ``ikebana'' has been developed over a long period of time since the Muromachi period, in Tokyo on a daily basis. However, you can only test your abilities in such a real space.
In other words, you can't expect any further improvement.

If arranged flowers are a literary expression, the container is a literary style, and space is the most important element to make them work. In other words, the origin of inspiration is to have a ``real space'' in one's own hands.

That was a long preface, but that's why I currently live in a rich natural environment, even though I live in Kumamoto city (you can walk into the mountains in 15 minutes), and I live in the Hosokawa family. Using the ``tea room and study room'' connected to her, she is able to present the flowers she collected that morning on a daily basis using old vessels that she purchased herself, something that cannot be expected in the Tokyo metropolitan area. They seem to be in a very happy environment.

→Next time is Yoshio Samukawa (ceramist).

(Titles omitted)