inkbluesky

yellow flower catching rays

A little tint and some water color effect to give this flower photo a look that brings out the flower color contrasted against the background.

While I enjoy some childlike activities I am a little past playing with mud and water. On the other hand when literary pop culture  icon William Gibson says, ” [A]n artifact of such utter simplicity and perfection that it seems it must be either the first object or the last…” one has to at least look into the whole thing,

William Gibson is describing the haunting elegance of hikaru dorodango. His essay in TATE Magazine, “Shiny Balls of Mud: William Gibson Looks at Japanese Pursuits of Perfection” was my first exposure to this trend sweeping through Japan.

Hikaru dorodango are balls of mud, molded by hand into perfect spheres, dried, and polished to an unbelievable luster. The process is simple, but the result makes it seem like alchemy.

A traditional pastime among the children of Japan, the exact origin of hikaru dorodango is unknown. The tradition was dying out until taken up by Professor Fumio Kayo, of the Kyoto University of Education, as a means to study the psychology of children’s play. In the course of his research, Kayo developed a simple technique for creating dorodango. With the help of Japanese media, Kayo has revived and extended the popular reach of this tradition to the point where it is now an international phenomenon.

After reading Gibson’s essay, I had to try to make a dorodango myself. At first the going was rough - it took over 30 attempts before I created what I considered to be a dorodango, despite having Kayo’s instructions in-hand. However, even my rough, mal-formed first attempts grew precious to me as I worked with them. This curious attachment to the dorodango, documented well in Kayo’s work, is part of what make hikaru dorodango so special.

Then there is the child development angle, Kyoto Professor Taps into the Essence of Play

In the process of making dorodango, the children demonstrated behavior that was surprising from the perspective of developmental psychology. A two-year-old child would walk behind Kayo, imitating his actions. At three, children would come up beside him and snatch his dirt. Four and five year olds pretended to ignore him out of pride, but afterwards they could be seen working with determined expressions on their faces. Children could also be found sharing information about where to find the best dirt and sand for making dorodango or even sometimes keeping such information secret.

There is a very uninspiring photo at the second link. When I was in grade school my aunt was into ceramics so I started a few projects of my own - a baseball glove, a race car, and a few birds and it does get that creative side of your brain going so I can see where kids would take to it, but in no way do I endorse stealing other people’s dirt.

Speaking of thinking about things on a new level, The value of small things

Nonetheless, there are many rationales for keeping a species from extinction. The most commonly cited are its intrinsic right to exist, its functional roles in ecosystems and the potential to provide some value to humans. By these criteria, the tiny, repulsive and multi-legged creatures are just as important as, if not more so than, tigers, condors or whales. But charismatic animals hog conservation dollars; the only ethic that makes the condor more important than its louse is its aesthetic value. “That’s a potentially justifiable reason to do conservation,” said Dunn, who belongs more to the intrinsic-value school, “but if that’s what we’re doing, we need to fess up to it.”

I’m aware of this on a certain level. Most people don’t like insects for instance, but most people like birds. Insects in the wild are just like food in a market to birds, so spraying all the trees and the lawn is in a way destroying the bird’s grocery market. Which in turn effects the birds of prey that feed on those birds. Still That is a relatively easy case to make, sticking up for mites is another matter.