Mindful language learning – my experience with zen calligraphy

I’m very much a pen and paper kind of girl – iPad pencil is useful for some things but doesn’t cut it for planning, journaling, getting ideas on paper.  With this in mind when I was lucky enough to spend two weeks in Japan recently I couldn’t miss the chance to do a zen calligraphy class 

We started the class with a short meditation and some basic knowledge of the Japanese writing system and some history about the art of calligraphy and how it’s used now.  Written Japanese has 3 types of characters – kanji which represents the main content of the sentence then hiragana and katakana which provide more of the grammatical and phonetic information.  To read a newspaper you need to know about 2000 of these symbols. Today we would be focussing on Kanji, picking out some of our favourites to have a go at ourselves.  We did some practice then made our final piece. I chose the character for happiness (only partially because it’s all straight lines and I hadn’t mastered curves yet!)

Where does the zen part come in then you ask? Well Japanese calligraphy is all about calm, smooth movements. It also takes quite some concentration and mindfulness to get into a flow state.  Everything about it is very intentional, from the special paper used to the particular way you need to hold the brush and even the way you breathe in time with each slow, deliberate brushstroke.  It was me and a group of German and Austrian tourists in the class but we soon forgot our linguistic differences once we got in the zone, breathing in unison as we perfected our work.   This was my final effort. I was very pleased with it, but all credit goes to my teacher Chifumi

For Chifumi, teaching Japanese calligraphy is her Ikagai – the Japanese concept that means having a reason for being, a purpose, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.  Japan is known for having a culture of working long hours so among younger people Ikagai manifests itself in the people you see on the metro checking emails at 8am, or asleep on their way home at 8pm.  For the older generation it translates to turning your kitchen into a minuscule cafe by squeezing in two bar stools, or wearing a high vis jacket and directing tourists to the correct bus, a desire to remain a useful part of society in some way even when you’ve retired from paid work.  Anyway, it’s obvious that Chifumi has a genuine passion for the art of calligraphy, in fact she has travelled the world teaching it.  

For some people, when learning a language, taking handwritten notes helps with memory. I’m sure that for a language like Japanese which is based on characters this is especially true.  The extra part that I really liked though, and hadn’t really considered is the mindfulness. Maybe I need to give journaling in Spanish or Italian a go!