Ikebana (Flower Arranging) Class

The Meguro International Friends Association (MIFA) is a group dedicated to international outreach and offers a variety of workshops and language classes designed to breakdown cultural borders. I saw that they offer a weekly ikebana class and signed up. Who says I can't be domestic??

After introducing myself as a first time attendee, I was assigned a teacher who tried to explain the principles of ikebana to me in limited English and my limited Japanese vocabulary. No matter, art is a universal language, right? I chose a packet of flowers and unwrapped the bundle to find some long wooden twigs, some green leafy things, and some pink um, does anyone know what kind of flowers these are?

Anyway, my teacher explained that there were many, many schools of ikebana. We began with a basin filled partially with water, with a spiky pad at the bottom to attach the plants. I selected a twig and attached it to the pad, then cut a sprig of flowers such that it was two-thirds the height of the twig. My teacher looked on, making clucking noises of approval or adjustments if I was doing it wrong. "So so so so," she said, "Bee-you-tee-ful!"

The other major pointers I learned were that triangles were good and harmonious, and that the tips of flowers should be curved toward the center of the arrangement, as if they were arching toward the sun. Of course, this might be different in another school of ikebana, so don't take my word for it.

After placing a bunch of plants, I stepped back and admired my work. But wait, my teacher pulled out a tall vase and asked me to do something with the leftover flowers. This proved to be a bit more difficult, since I was now working with the discarded flowers from the previous arrangement, and it is hard to adjust the heights of items in a vase. But hey, if you start off with beautiful ingredients, it's hard to screw them up.

The final products:

The MIFA coordinator was pretty impressed that I came all the way out to Meguro for this workshop and snapped my photo before I left. At that point, my teacher had painstakingly bundled my flowers into newspapers, and I didn't have the heart to tell her that I would be walking around the city all day and would probably throw them out at the first opportunity.