Yoji Haijima: Gutenberg Charcoal Books/ Toward the Origins of Civilization

Worship the Gods of the Burned Fields

• 1) 12 Offerings to Venus of the Burned Fields
• 2) 12 Iconologies of 12 Venuses

(Ikebana as interface between Nature, the Universe, and the human world)
According to Aristotle, plants have a soul, a psyche that partakes in photosynthesis and
draws nourishment from the earth—that is, they are living beings.
Focusing on plants and their psyches, Ikebana has developed as an encounter with the
natural environment and the forms of production among which we exist.
This installment of the Gutenberg Charcoal Books series revisits the ancient practice of
slash-and-burn cultivation.
Today, through the optics of ecology, we encounter Nature in an entirely new light.
We live in an era when humans and all living organisms, minerals, the air and H2O,
politics, economics, and even war have been subsumed into one vast information system
which we know as Nature/the Universe.
Harbored within the formal/divine cause of all creation, the “ultimate information”…
“The Introduction to New Ikebana-ism.”

The Kan Sumi Studio in Aomori uses specialized techniques to promote the soil-improving
effects of charcoal. Carbonizing books for the “Gutenberg Charcoal Books
Project” in their kiln was a way of reflecting on agricultural ideals in Japan since the days
of slash-and-burn farming. I offer these reflections as an invitation to think about the
present state of development of our human civilization.