by Bondo Wyszpolski
After emerging from the south exit of Chigasaki station and veering right for two blocks, one comes to Southern-dori, or Southern Street. This narrow, slightly curving thoroughfare winds downhill to Sagami Bay. Keep walking, and before long the vibes and rhythm of a rather funky beach town will appear. Less than half an hour after leaving the train station, and now stepping through the pedestrian tunnel that scoots under a busy roadway, the wanderer is welcomed by the unmistakable scent of ocean air and a panorama of Southern Beach.
There may be surfers in the swells and people on the sand. An enigmatic island, Enoshima, is to the immediate left, while Eboshi (a jutting reef that resembles the eboshi hats worn by aristocrats during the Heian era) is straight ahead. If you walk half a mile to the right and then head down to the shoreline you can turn around for a majestic view of Mount Fuji which, if weather permits, will surge up to surprise and astonish.
From our beach to yours
Chigasaki is a weekend getaway, an hour or so down the Tokaido line from Tokyo by way of Yokohama. However, having stopped halfway along Southern-dori, you’d be outside Creative Space Hayashi, a small, inauspicious art gallery that’s the focus of our story.
Here’s where it begins.
In June of last year, Kimie Joe, who runs the Gallery of Hermosa on Pier Avenue, and Torrance-based artist Harry Ohta, met for lunch on Hawthorne Blvd. with Misa Hayashi and her son, Shun Kunori, who were visiting from Japan (Misa is the owner, and Shun the manager, of Creative Space Hayashi). Harry Ohta is originally from Yokohama and he’s exhibited his art at the Gallery of Hermosa. Kenny Ishii, who grew up in Chigasaki, met Harry years later in Chicago, and they found that they’d attended the same school in Yokohama. Afterwards, Ken told Misa about him. Misa — thinking that Harry’s pictures of South Bay locations would appeal to her clientele — gave him a solo exhibition in February, 2024. There were 25 pieces, and she sold all but two. A second solo show would follow, yet more importantly was the growing friendship between artist and gallery owner. And so, when Misa and Shun were in Los Angeles last year, Harry introduced them to Kimie and from this emerged a collaboration they’ve named “Shared Horizon.”
“When Misa and Shun visited Hermosa Beach to see the gallery,” says Kimie, “we had a natural connection. We felt aligned in vision and intention, and because our galleries are both part of beach communities the decision to collaborate came naturally.
After visiting Kimie’s gallery, Misa says, “the idea for a collaborative exhibition came to me almost immediately.”
This writer quickly threw his hat into the ring, even though it wasn’t an eboshi hat.
Shortly after their meeting and subsequent discussion, “I organized a national call through the Gallery of Hermosa,” Kimie says, “which drew several hundred entries from across the United States.” Then, together with Misa, Shun, and Harry, she selected close to 20 artists, and among these was Stephanie Kohler of Redondo Beach.
“Japan had been a childhood dream of mine,” Stephanie says, “so being chosen to exhibit my work there almost felt unreal.”
The majority of the art that was sent to or taken to Chigasaki and then displayed was of a realistic or figurative nature (Harry’s scenes along the Redondo Esplanade, for example). Stepanie’s isn’t. “I’ll admit,” she adds, “I felt a bit apprehensive at first. My work was one of only a few abstract pieces among more realistic styles. But hearing from the gallery that it drew attention, and ultimately sold to a collector who is a professor at a women’s college in Tokyo, was both humbling and deeply rewarding.”
Stephanie and her husband, Lance, decided to come to Japan and attend the opening reception at Creative Space Hayashi on April 10 — and more on that in a minute. Another Southern California artist who made the trip was David Lang, accompanied by his wife, Christine.
As David tells it, “I grew up in Japan and traveled there frequently as an adult, so Japanese culture and art is a huge influence on my life and work. It has therefore been a dream of mine, ever since I became an artist, to display my work in Japan. I am so grateful to Kimie and Misa for allowing me to realize that dream. I had never been to Chigasaki before, and was also delighted to be able to experience that city.”
Other artists who were represented by their work, in addition to Kimie Joe and Harry Ohta, include Andree Brown, Rush Brown, Val Chan, Monica Jacobs, Chrisi Karvonides, David Larson, Alabaster Raven, Jove Wang, Richard Wilkie, and two more South Bay artists, Alvin Takamori and John Van Hamersveld.
“Misa played a wonderful role on the Japan side,” Kimie says, “laying the groundwork in Chigasaki well before we arrived, where she connected the exhibition to the local community and building visibility and support.”
In praise of shadows
On Easter Sunday I met up with Kimie, her husband Ben and son Zachary, and our 11-hour flight from LAX landed us at Haneda, one of Tokyo’s two very busy airports. Misa had hired a driver and van to collect us and our belongings, and thankfully they were patient because it took f-o-r-e-v-e-r, as a young person would say, to wend our way through customs. I’m guessing that several planes had landed simultaneously with each one disgorging 200 or300 hundred passengers.
Our first stop, an hour later, was at the Taishokan (a Taisho-era inn, formerly Misa’s home, built in 1923, and renovated to become a vacation rental or guest house for visiting artists). It’s right next door to Misa’s current home, a modern two-story unit connected to the art gallery. We were given a quick tour of the Taishokan’s premises, where Kimie and her family were to stay.
I was to spend a few nights at 8HOTEL Chigasaki, located one Shohei Ohtani homerun from Chigasaki station. I instantly became an early riser and took breakfast every morning in the small, yet pleasant dining room with a sliding-glass door view of the pool. As my room didn’t come with a reading lamp, let alone a comfortable armchair, I took to spending an hour or two most afternoons in that same dining space with W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” brought along because of its length and the fact that my artist friend Janet Milhomme had sent it to me some years ago.
Misa came by the hotel the next morning and we drove to the Samukawa Shrine, a spacious complex and about as traditionally Japanese as can be imagined. The weather was perfect, cool, sporadic drizzling and not many other visitors, with nary a Westerner in sight.
Then we lunched at Soba Sakaeya, perhaps the best noontime meal of my stay in Japan, which in this case not only encompassed the duck meatballs and side dishes, but the presentation of our food, to be savored first with the eyes and nostrils, let alone the intimacy, physical charm and atmosphere of this quaint, elegant restaurant.
While eating, Misa and I talked about classic Japanese film directors (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, etc.) and then writers: Did I know Junichiro Tanizaki’s little book, “In Praise of Shadows”? Well, by all means, yes, and not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve read every Tanizaki book (mostly novels and short stories) available in English. Furthermore, the screen version of “The Makioka Sisters,” directed by Kon Ichikawa, is not only among my favorite films, watched by me just after its original release (1983), but I immediately lost my heart then — and she still has it — to the actress Sayuri Yoshinaga who played Yukiko, one of the four sisters of the title.
After telling Misa that her home, the Taishokan, reminded me of “In Praise of Shadows,” she seemed quite impressed because its renovation had been inspired by principles underlining Tanizaki’s book. Which is to say that I actually thought of “In Praise of Shadows” as soon as I’d walked through the narrow passageways and peered into its rooms. To illustrate what I mean, here’s a brief passage:
“The beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows — it has nothing else… We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose… We never tire of the sight, for to us this pale glow and these dim shadows far surpass any ornament.”
The Taishokan is just such a place, and so is the Chigasaki-kan, which I was to see a couple of days later. But meanwhile, things were coming together at the gallery.
“Late Spring” and an “Endless Summer”
It’s Tuesday evening, and the installation is going well. I watch as Shun, the gallery’s manager, puts up a few pieces, encouraged here and there by suggestions from Harry and Kimie. Two or three more pieces are expected to arrive the following day. In the adjoining house, Misa has gathered the ingredients for a make-your-own sushi meal, and soon several of us have congregated around a large table for a delicious repast.
There’s additional work and arrangements to be made before Friday’s opening reception, and this consumes part of Wednesday morning. Then Kimie, Ben, Zachary, and I head to Yokohama, half an hour by train, where we step into a station that is a beehive of activity within a labyrinth of corridors, entrances and exits, from which even Theseus would struggle to emerge. Eventually we found Harry, who like Virgil in Dante’s epic guided us through the twisting byways of that great port city. Our first goal was lunch in Chinatown, which turned out to be more crowded than Mecca during the Hajj pilgrimage. Afterwards we walked along the Motomachi shopping street, Zachary in quest of a perfect pair of chopsticks, then made our way uphill past the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery to Harbor View Park, and over to the English Rose Garden, which is near the British House (formerly the British Consulate-General).
Misa had hinted at a possible excursion to Kamakura on Thursday, but there were urgent matters to attend to with the clock ticking down for the next day’s art show. So I decided to familiarize myself with the area along Southern beach, having first stopped by the gallery to see the final pieces being installed. Later that afternoon, the day’s work now over, Misa came by the hotel and we drove to the aforementioned Chigasaki-kan, a small ryokan or traditional inn founded in 1899 and overlooking the Shonan coast. This was, of course, no ordinary retreat.
Recall that just two days earlier Misa and I had talked about literary figures and film directors, Yasujirō Ozu among the latter. As it turned out, Shun had contacted Hiroaki Mori, who oversees or manages the inn, and had made arrangements for a private tour. The cultural significance of the Chigasaki-kan is that for several years Ozu and his chief screenwriter, Kogo Noda, would stay here while developing their scripts for such films as “Late Spring” (1949), “Early Summer” (1951), and “Tokyo Story” (1953) — the latter, in a 2012 Sight and Sound poll, anointed best film of all time.
Ozu is to Japanese cinema what Flaubert is to French literature, an incomparable master of world class proportion, on the same pedestal we’d place Fellini or Bergman or Kurosawa. Hiroaki Mori (who proudly shows us a photograph of his father with Ozu), ushered us down one hallway, this is the room where Ozu stayed, along another hallway, this is the room where Ozu and Noda worked; and let me add that the rooms have been respectfully maintained despite the 70-plus years since Ozu was there.
If I was deeply moved by this unexpected treat, almost to the point of reverential tears, it was largely because a couple of years earlier David Dobson, a film aficionado and the husband of my Gardena friend Setsuko Owan whose travel photography I’d once written about, had gifted me some 25 to 30 Ozu films on DVD, which I proceeded to watch in order, per David’s recommendation, to know such actors as Chishu Ryu, Kinuyo Tanaka, Haruko Sugimura, Hideko Takamine, and Setsuko Hara, because Ozu enlisted the same actors in film after film. These are, almost unfailingly, quiet domestic dramas, shot from low angles, which was the director’s signature style. And they are, perhaps without exception, exquisite works of art.
Although Ozu died in 1963, on his 60th birthday, and Noda five years later, their legacy remains poignant, relevant, and very much alive.
It’s showtime!
On Friday morning we had rain. I walked the 15 minutes it takes from the hotel to the gallery and looked in on the final preparations. Through the winding, forest-like pathway that leads up to it, I visited the Chigasaki Museum of Art which was featuring paintings by Kunio Makino (1925-1986), a Japanese artist I’d never heard of. Makino once boasted that he had the ability to paint anything, and that’s almost an understatement. Rembrandt was his idol, but his pictures seem to merge Hieronymus Bosch with Salvador Dalí. Makino’s older sisters had started a dressmaking school near Chigasaki station, and he lived there, teaching, in his early 30s. I wasn’t planning to buy any books while in Japan, but I didn’t hesitate, not for one minute, to purchase a catalog with Makino’s art.
The rain had no intention of letting up. Later, from the hotel, I met Stephanie and Lance at the station and led them to the gallery. Although the reception wasn’t officially to begin until 6 p.m., the mayor of Chigasaki, Sato Hikaru, had sent word that he’d be coming by early, around 4 o’clock. Several of us were already on hand by then, and I watched as his taxi drew up just outside the gallery. Chigasaki isn’t a small town; it has a population of about 243,000, and so for Sato Hikaru to spend a leisurely amount of time posing for pictures and chatting with us was clearly a sign of his good will and affability.
Creative Space Hayashi is rather compact, and we anticipated that it would fill up, lousy weather notwithstanding. There were “some challenges,” as Misa later put it, “notably the heavy rain on opening night, which made things a bit difficult logistically. Despite that,” she notes, “the reception itself felt vibrant and engaging, and it didn’t dampen the overall energy of the event.”
Perhaps, like the mayor, guests arrived via public transportation, because there’s no parking on Southern-dori and no parking lots close by. For good art, some people brave anything! Before long, the gallery was tightly packed. There was a champagne toast to Misa and Kimie and the artists, courtesy of Champagne Borel-Lucas, and later “real Vietnamese coffee” courtesy of Mr. Viet.
Among those who attended were various artists (in this show, of course, and previous shows), art collectors, editors and publishers, a journalist who interviewed Misa, numerous friends, family members, local residents, with entertainment provided by crystal magician Michel Komagata. Business cards exchanged hands, and all the while I continued to photograph people, with the long road of putting faces to names still ahead of me. For this I’ve had help from Misa and Kimie and also Haruna Numakawa, one of those alluring young women whom cameras truly love. Conversations were animated, the art admired and discussed, and of course by the end of the night it was clear that all those days, weeks, months of preparation and hard work had paid off. And that’s how the memorable opening night of “Shared Horizon” came together. The art remained up through April 19.
Afterwards? “It felt less like a traditional opening,” Kimie says, “and more like being welcomed into a community.” Furthermore, “The sense of connection carried through the exhibition itself.” The president of a real estate firm, a Chigasaki councilman, and a college vice chancellor were among those who purchased work from the gallery.
“The project grew beyond what we initially imagined,” Misa says in retrospect. “What stood out was the genuine cultural exchange between the artists and the audience. The diversity of works and backgrounds created a dynamic atmosphere that truly reflected the spirit of ‘shared horizons.’”
“I came home inspired, grateful, and already at work on a new piece shaped by everything I experienced,” Stephanie says. “I’m already looking forward to Gallery of Hermosa welcoming Creative Space Hayashi to Hermosa Beach in October and continuing this synergistic exchange.”
There you have it. Misa will bring artwork from Japan (as well as Singapore, Austria, and Croatia) for an exhibition that opens in Hermosa Beach on Oct. 2.
“I couldn’t be more excited about [my gallery] presenting there,” Misa says. “It feels like a natural and inspiring continuation of what we started.”
A collaboration that promises to continue and evolve. Plans are for Misa to return yet again in May of next year, and for the Gallery of Hermosa to return to Chigasaki in September, 2027.
I left Chigasaki for Yokohama the following afternoon and spent the evening with Lance Kohler and a Canadian driver who showed us the hotspots where car geeks congregate to flaunt and parade, and the day after that I boarded a plane for Kagoshima, almost 600 miles to the south. I wanted to visit my friend Naho whom I hadn’t seen since 1984, when I was last in Japan. She was in her 20s then, and now she’s just turned 70. Life passes in the blink of an eye, doesn’t it? But that’s a story for another day. ER
