Today is Sunday, but the weather is expected to get worse later, so I came to the workshop in the afternoon. I wanted to install the Aruki panels for the hexagonal boxes while the conditions are still good. This year, Golden Week doesn’t seem as crowded on the roads as usual. I saw a news report about families choosing to stay closer to home and spend time with their children instead of traveling to tourist spots. With prices going up and daily expenses increasing, it seems more people may be holding back on leisure activities.
However, even with that situation, a large festival is being held today in Odawara, where my workshop is located, so it seems many people have been visiting since yesterday. One of the highlights is the daimyo procession that walks through the city. It’s really impressive, and the streets are filled with spectators and tourists. I’ve gone to see it several times since I was a child. The daimyo procession comes from the Edo period, when regional lords traveled to visit the shogun in Edo as part of a system called sankin-kotai. These were large-scale processions with hundreds of people, including warriors carrying bows, spears, and guns, as well as many attendants. It is said they sometimes walked around 40 kilometers in a single day. Of course, the daimyo themselves rode in a palanquin, carried by their retainers. Today, a recreated version of this procession will walk through the streets of Odawara. It’s also well known that famous TV and film actors take part, dressed as daimyo and other figures, which makes it even more exciting. You can see detailed photos on this site (in Japanese). https://www.odawara-kankou.com/topics/article/hojogodai.html So it will be very crowded today, so I’m staying away from the center of Odawara 🤣
After finishing the hexagonal boxes I’m working on now, I plan to move on to the 2-sun cube puzzle boxes. However, the ichimatsu yosegi for the top and bottom panels is not ready yet, so I am making it now in a hurry. The photo shows three types of wood glued together in a block, and I am cutting them into pieces about 5 mm thick. Then I gather 14 of these pieces and glue them together so that the colors alternate, making a smaller block. After that, I line up seven of these blocks and glue them to create a long yosegi sheet, about 30 cm in length. To make an ichimatsu pattern, the colors must alternate, so the number of pieces must be even from the start. If the number is odd, the same colors will line up next to each other. Ideally, the number of colors should also be even, but this time I am using three colors, which is an odd number. So I prepare twice as much of the white wood compared to the red and brown. In this way, when arranging them, the pattern becomes: white, brown, white, red, white, brown, white, red… and so on. It seems that having a bit more white makes the overall color look brighter, which is nice. I will continue gluing these yosegi materials from tomorrow onward.
