LOS ANGELES —
He’s jolly, brings joy to children around the world, and is busiest in December.
But in lieu of a red coat, he wears a traditional Japanese ‘‘happi’’ coat and sports a ‘‘hachimaki’’ headband where Santa’s hat would be. If there is a strong wind, he won’t need magic reindeer to fly, but Edo kite master Mikio Toki prefers to keep his feet on the ground.
Toki is one of Japan’s few living experts at making, flying and painting traditional Tokyo-style kites dating back to the Edo period (1603-1863).
Throughout December, Toki is busy working on kites for the New Year. During the rest of the year, he travels the world teaching children to make their own Edo kites.
‘‘December to February is a kite season in Tokyo,’’ says Toki, an energetic 60-year-old Tokyo native with a ready smile. He remembers flying kites in Tokyo in the 1950s, when the city had more open space. Now the kiting in Tokyo is not as good because ‘‘wind diverted around buildings is unpredictable.’‘
‘‘The best place to fly is the beach, because the wind blows straight.’‘
Kites are a popular New Year decoration because their ability to take to the skies is associated with success and good luck, Toki explains. For 2011, the year of the rabbit, he has made a design based on a traditional bamboo toy called ‘‘tondari hanetari.’‘
Starting in mid-October, Toki secludes himself in his Chiba Prefecture workshop to create New Year kites. When he wakes up, the kite master starts to split bamboo and paint designs on strong mulberry paper.
Toki does 30 at a time, painting black outlines first, and then going back and starting from the beginning. By Christmas, he paints 300 kites by hand and splits 1,800 bamboo crosspieces.
These pieces of art bear no resemblance to Toki’s first attempt, made when he was 10 using pieces of bamboo split from an old broom handle. ‘‘It never got off the ground,’’ he chuckles.
Toki was in his 20s when he started to become really interested in kites. At age 25, after a brief stint at a design school in Tokyo, he found himself working at a children’s center where he taught traditional toy-making.
‘‘When I was a kid, we didn’t have TV, so the older kids taught me a lot of things, like how to use a knife and play traditional games,’’ Toki said. ‘‘These games were handed down over the years, and as we learned them, we changed them slightly and expanded our world of play.’‘
‘‘All of that changed…So I want the kids to know about the old games, too. And kites are a part of that.’‘
During his time at the children’s center, Toki met the late Katsuhisa Ota, a professional kite maker in Tokyo. While learning kite construction from Ota, he started to observe a famous third-generation kite maker Teizo Hashimoto (1904-1991), who specialized in painting intricate, symbolic designs on decorative kites.
The two of them inspired Toki to study kite making seriously, including the Japanese legends behind the traditional designs. But even as he gained skill in creating kites up to 6 meters tall that sell for 800,000 yen, he never stopped working with kids.
In addition to giving workshops at community centers and rest stops around Japan, Toki has flown kites at kite festivals and conducted workshops in 16 countries including Israel, Thailand, England, and Trinidad and Tobago.
In 1999, he helped children on the island of Sakhalin, Russia, to fly their very first kites. ‘‘It’s cold there, so there are really only a couple weeks of summer and that’s when we went.’‘
‘‘When we asked, they said there weren’t any kites in Russia. They didn’t even have a word for ‘kite.’ So seeing, making and flying kites for the first time in their lives, they were really excited.’‘
Every year, the Japan America Society of Southern California organizes the Annual Japan America Kite Festival and kite workshops with Toki for children in Los Angeles.
In 2010, on his ninth visit, Toki taught 689 students to make kites at eight schools and after-school programs. Kentwood Elementary School was one of those schools.
‘‘This is a wonderful learning experience…both culturally and from the perspective of art and learning the mechanics of kite making,’’ said principal Jean Pennicooke, as 60 fifth-grade students lined up awaiting Toki’s instruction.
Toki told them to draw a large picture on a rectangle of Japanese paper. Students were soon busy depicting flowers, dragons, baseball bats and other original designs. One girl drew a Japanese flag and wrote ‘‘Japan’’ in Chinese characters.
With help from school and JASSC volunteers, the children fastened thin strips of bamboo one at a time to the paper and affixed strings to each side and one across the back. Next, students flew their kites on a small grass field, running as fast as they could to get them in the air, ecstatic when the kites took flight.
Leaving this kind of memory with children around the world is Toki’s goal for his workshops.
‘‘If they think to themselves someday, ‘I remember that old guy from Japan came and taught us to make kites,’ and they start to appreciate kites, that’s all.’‘
Perhaps, he says, ‘‘If they end up liking them, then maybe they will take up the craft themselves one day.’’
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