Serendipity and ‘A Kyoto Romance’

By Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi

From New York City, the ink barely dry on a master’s degree in arts administration, I’d come to Tokyo to try my luck as an arts writer. My self-assigned beat became the top floor art galleries of Tokyo department stores, purveyors of some of the finest nihonga paintings in the nation. Nihonga, which are classical Japanese paintings created with a lush palette and nature-inspired motifs, depict temples, sprawling castles, tea houses, and just the right proportion of matsu pine trees or kimono-clad beauties to hold a scene together. 

My friendship with artist Teruhide Kato began in a corner of a pin-hole lit art gallery in Wako department store in Tokyo, where the artist was determined to redefine traditional Nihonga with a fresh contemporary look. Not a single pine tree could be found in his paintings. He went for microscopically thin lines worked with ultra-fine brushes. His striking paintings in black and white could easily be mistaken for woodblock prints. 

A Wako department store curator stepped out from a discretely placed door in the gallery wall. He ushered me into a small reception room, where Teruhide Kato sat facing me in a double-breasted dark blazer and gray pants. As we got to know each other over rounds of green tea, Kato Sensei moved me with his readiness to speak from his heart about the soul connection he felt with Kyoto, even though his family members were considered relative newcomers who traced back their Kyoto history “only” five generations. 

Kato Sensei had become famous for his hand-painted kimono, worn by elite Gion district maiko-san. An enka singer sent Kato Sensei into early retirement when she sang her heart out in a kimono confection on NHK’s New Year’s Eve program, Kohaku Utagasen. At the age of 52, with a deluge of requests for replicas of that kimono, Kato Sensei fulfilled the orders. Then he retired to devote himself to painting.  This was a dream that he had kept alive since entering Kyoto College of Art decades earlier. 

I mailed Kato Sensei a copy of The Japan Times Weekly article.  With the interview published, I thought I was ready to move on in my search for the next rising star in the contemporary Japanese art world. But Heaven Above had other plans. In April, a few months after the interview, my mother had flown from New York to visit me. We traveled to Kyoto, aiming our cameras at the pink blossoms saturating the skies over the temples. We followed the tourist route to the Kyoto Handicraft Center so my mother could pick up a few souvenirs. Standing by the door was the director of the Handicraft Center, and it was none other than Teruhide Kato. How extraordinary to have run into him. He asked me to wait, returning moments later with a letter of invitation he had received from the San Jose Museum of Art in Palo Alto. The letter was an offer to hold an exhibition there. 

A lightbulb went on in my head. It sounds cartoony to say this, but at that moment, Kato Sensei’s dream of exhibiting in the United States and my eagerness to introduce him to a sliver of the New York art world merged, overriding the fact that I had never actually organized an art exhibition anywhere before. Over the next few weeks, I let passion rule over doubts, got in touch with my alma mater, Columbia University, and somehow arranged for Kato Sensei to exhibit his paintings in the East Asian Institute’s faculty lounge, where the academic giants of Japanese literature and culture sat to drink their green tea—including the esteemed literary translator Donald Keene. 

In preparation for this exhibition, and another one downtown at the Cast Iron Gallery in Soho, Kato Sensei and I would collaborate. Over the next two years, we worked on producing a book to introduce the four seasons of Kyoto through his paintings. Kato Sensei loaned me those very same paintings that had hung in Wako department store just months earlier. It was a remarkable show of trust on his side. This is how Teruhide Kato’s vision of Kyoto came to decorate the earthy stucco walls and tokonoma of my Taisho-era bungalow in Tokyo, and how I ate, drank, and breathed in Kato’s paintings while nature filtered in through the sliding glass doors that ran the full length of the bungalow. 

We had hoped to have the book ready for the New York exhibitions. But when the time came in 1992, luckily we didn’t. Donald Keene’s office was down the hall from Kato’s exhibition at Columbia’s East Asian Institute, making it virtually impossible for the revered professor not to see the exhibition. Kato Sensei struck up a conversation with Donald Keene that led to a most unexpected turn of events. Professor Keene generously offered to write the Forward to Kyoto Romance. 

After we visited New York together to hold these two exhibitions, Kato Sensei and I parted on separate flights to resume our very different lives, his in Kyoto and mine in Tokyo. It seemed that our destiny was to exhibit together and we had fulfilled our mission. 

But I suppose intuition knew something else was in store for us. Literally, in a store. About a year later, a Fernand Leger exhibition was being held in Tokyo and I was curious to see what the great French modern painter’s art would look like on the top floor of Mitsukoshi department store. I assumed that an artist of Leger’s stature would be shown in the flagship Nihonbashi branch of Mitsukoshi. But I was mistaken. Leger was being exhibited at the much blander Shinjuku branch of Mitsukoshi. When the Nihonbashi store elevator doors opened, my mouth dropped open. I had stumbled upon an opening night party for an exhibition of Teruhide Kato’s paintings from Kyoto Romance. The publisher and Kato Sensei had created a Japanese version of Kyoto Romance without telling me. The artist offered a sheepish look to his uninvited guest and his co-author. The publisher’s smile was—how shall I put it—reptilian. 

I’m not sure why art galleries became the stage where Kato Sensei acted out our gallery karma: a chance interview in a Ginza gallery, authoring a book together, traveling to Kyoto for another serendipitous gallery meeting. After an adventure in New York, Mitsukoshi department store set the stage for a pivotal life lesson in trust, betrayal, and the long road to forgiveness.

The years rolled by and I got busy having children and raising them. I lost touch with Kato Sensei and his underhanded publisher. I unwittingly become a painter myself, took what I’d learned about organizing Kato Sensei’s exhibitions, and applied it to organizing my own. Eventually, I published a deck of cards called The Genesis Way and developed an intuitive system of drawing and painting known as Genesis Art. It was time to mend fences. I worked up the courage to call Kato Sensei and arrange to take the shinkansen down to Kyoto to show him my art. 

It was as if the past was so far behind us that what remained were only the good and sweet memories of our collaboration. He expressed it. I felt it too. Kato Sensei paid me a compliment that I return to my students every chance that I get—that the mark of a true artist is to reach a place of comfort in expressing how you see the world in your own way. Kato Sensei told me that I had, but in Kyoto language, a far more elegant equivalent of “you nailed it.” Something to do with fuzei—catching the atmosphere of a place and a situation.  

That day trip to Kyoto in 2015 would be the last I saw of Kato Sensei. He died from cancer not long after. The paintings from Kyoto Romance continue to be sold in Kyoto galleries and high-end gift shops as limited prints.  That’s good, but it’s not enough. I have a nagging feeling that there is still much more to do to make sure that Kato Sensei’s work is not forgotten. His wife, Keiko, holds in her possession both the original artwork and the copyright to release his paintings. Kyoto Romance remains out of print, unavailable on Amazon except on rare occasions when it’s offered at exorbitant prices as a collectible. It’s my deepest wish that a publisher with integrity will be found to bring Teruhide Kato back out of obscurity so that he can be loved and enjoyed by generations to come.

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Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi is a journalist and artist based in Jerusalem. In 2021 she published a memoir, The Wagamama Bride: A Jewish Family Made in Japan, in which she describes how she stumbled upon her intuitive approach to drawing and painting. For more information: see http:www.goshenbooks.com and http://www.genesiscards.com.