THE STORY begins in August 1996 when Asao Shimura first puts forward the idea of coming to Australia to give workshops, maybe in March 1997, maybe in Adelaide and Melbourne. After much correspondence between Australia/Japan/Philippines, it is finally decided that he will give one five-day workshop in Melbourne in August 1997, and on Saturday, 2 August he arrives at Tullamarine where I wait to greet him.

With so many exotic items in his baggage, the Quarantine officers keep Asao for nearly two hours while they examine every bag. Meanwhile I chew my fingernails, keep looking at my watch, and shuttle between the information desk, Customs and Qantas seeking clues as to Asao's whereabouts. In the end they pass everything except the banana fibre, but in the process of stuffing the contents of seven bags back in place he loses track of his passport and tickets, every travellerās nightmare! Asao joins members at the AGM and listening to John Wolsley talk about his art and inspirations takes his mind off the missing papers for a while. Luckily they turn up after a thorough search later. He has his first view of Melbourneās suburbs as we drive to Marianne's where he stays for the next ten days.

On Sunday we visit the Royal Botanic Gardens where Asaoās interest in plants takes us all over, from the grey garden and the Temple of the Winds to the California garden, twice around the Garden shop at the Herbarium, through the fern gully with its colony of fruit bats, past the grass trees and even into the conservatory where our glasses mist up. In the afternoon it's off to the Queen Victoria Market where Asao buys a couple of much needed long sleeved shirts (blue of course) having forgotten that it's winter here. Still and video cameras are in constant use as Asao absorbs the sights and listens to the sounds of a country that is new to him.

Monday morning we get down to practicalities when Asao sees the venue for the first part of the workshop, and browses through the local Asian shops in Mitcham for various ingredients for Sunday's Kami nabe dinner. We spend the afternoon driving through the Dandenongs, but miss out on the view from Mt Dandenong because the whole landscape is shrouded in fog and smog. In the park a flock of crimson rosellas put on a good show for us, and being crimson and blue they rate quite a bit of video footage. I relinquish my role as tour guide and leave Asao in the care of Marianne and Gretchen until I put on my hat as 'helper' at the workshop.
Valda Quick

Asao Shimura, a slight man with a wispy oriental beard, his age between that of a child and the future elderly Japanese man. Dressed in blue, from jeans to navy jacket and jumper, and with an 'indigo' kerchief about his neck - a walking advertisement with his shifu jacket and shirts. But the surface is deceptive. The many moods of the man are expressed through his mobile face and hand gestures. Astonishment, disbelief, questioning are indicated by a tilt of the head, movement of the eyebrows, etc. His face, a landscape indicating the perceptive and thinking individual beneath.

Gretchen and I got to know Asao on a different level from that of workshop tutor, over meals and in more relaxing moments. His sense of humour and playfulness, even gentle mischief in some instances, came through strongly. His understanding of English was extremely good and he seemed to enjoy testing his use of the language (and his hosts sometimes). His ears picked up any deviations or Australian idioms, which he would then try in a number of versions to ascertain the correct Australian usage. He enjoyed the expression "head off" and the variations of it, considering its literal meaning briefly and mischievously. "Yonks", "yep" and "nope" all became part of his language while here. In the same way that he was curious about our language he had an interest in our culture and customs and related them to other places on his travels.

He enjoyed the relaxed friendly atmosphere of the workshop especially the fact that we had lunch as a group, and commented on the sense of community he found here in Melbourne. Wherever we went, Asao's video went and constantly picked up items of interest to him, predominantly anything to do with numbers and with blue, Tooheys Blue Label Bitter, dresses in a range of blues, a label on some clothes with a designers name of 'Blue', etc. He found things that I had simply never seen. He is a man totally dedicated to his craft. He seems to live and breathe only for paper and then only Pina and Pina Shifu. His mind seemed to be constantly on ways to make it of interest to a wider public from his concepts of 'blue pina' and in future 'red pina'. It was a wonderful experience for me (and for Gretchen also) to get to know Asao on another level.
Marianne Little

Reproduction of a lino print designed by Cher McGrath
depicting Japanese for Aus-shi i.e. Australian paper.

Yarran Dheran is an area of bushland in Mitcham, an outer eastern suburb of Melbourne. Not knowing the area we had wondered what there could possibly be for us to work in, in the middle of the bush. We were very pleasantly surprised to find a lovely stone building at the end of a wooded track that wound quickly into the bush from the car park. Smoke rising from the chimney invited us to enter a place of warmth and shared expectations as we met each other and our leader for the five days, Asao Shimura.

Valda Quick was the important assistant to Asao.

We began by viewing a video entitled 'Pina Shifu'. It told us the story of the pina fibre, of the people who worked on it and produced some stunning woven fabric. What eyesight, what patience and what interesting fibres. The day before the workshop Marianne and Asao had prepared the pina fibre so that we had something to start with on our first day. The fibre was from the leaves of the native pineapple of the Philippines called Pina (peenya). There are several different fibres from the pina leaf.

The green skin is scraped off and becomes the 'green waste'. Behind the green skin lies the 'bastos' fibre and behind that again is the finest fibre 'liniwan'. The bastos can be scraped to make it finer and almost as good as liniwan. The material scraped from the bastos is called 'bastos waste', and this was the material we used.

When it was put into the pot to cook it vaguely resembled greasy wool scraps. One kilogram of fibre was boiled with 200 grams of caustic soda. The caustic caused it to go a sort of tan/yellow colour. After about three hours of gentle boiling the fibre was rinsed five or six times, using a net bag in a large bucket. Between rinsing, the bag of fibre was spun in the spindryer of an old washer. This helped immensely to get the fibre really clean with a minimum of rinsing water.

Asao had also made up the artificial neri (formation aid). This is added to the vat to hold the fibres in suspension and to slow the draining on the mould for the Japanese way of forming sheets. Gampi bark was soaked in water the day before the workshop too. We were extremely fortunate to have had Marianne and Asao prepare the fibres beforehand for us. However, we soon discovered that the beating of the pina fibre was to be done by us all.

Asao gave out a hunk of fibre and placed it on a board along with a solid piece of dowel about three centimetres round and about 330 centimetres long. Up until this point we had all been feeling a little cool, but beating the fibre soon changed that and we shed a layer or two of clothing. There were three 'beating stations' and we took turns in beating and kept going for about 30 minutes.

After lunch Asao showed us a long narrow strip of Shifu (spun and woven paper thread from which we covered our books). We had a group photo taken holding the 20 metre strip.

We were then given some packets of papers. Each set covered one aspect of paper. One was on Kon'nyaku, one was on pina.

Our last activity on day one was to make up the indigo dye. The beautiful blue of indigo is a natural dye obtained from the leaf of the indigo plant, and is the result of a fermentation process. In Japan it is done in July and August and only when the temperature is between 20 and 30 degrees C. We used a synthetic indigo using ten grams of the 'magic powder' with two litres of water to dye 200 grams (dry weight) of pina fibre. The dye may be used to dye the fibre before making the paper, the paper once it is dry, or the thread when making shifu. The fibre was put into the dye for five to ten minutes then squeezed out and spread to oxidise. This process is done several times to darken the thread. The rule is that the same time should be given in the dye as out of it.

Asao formed a sheet of paper from a vat of unbeaten pina. It had long strings of fibre which dumped and bumped and hung over the sides of the mould.

A good vat of beaten pina was set up (without neri) and we each made our first sheets, couching as usual onto cloths. Some had vilene, some pelon and others had cotton, or synthetic washcloths. These were put in the press while we dyed some pulp with indigo. The fibre was finally gathered up into a bag and put away for tomorrow.

We could hardly wait to use this to make lovely blue paper. Finally we hung our first post to dry overnight while beside the pot belly stove was the first sheet Asao had pulled looking like an artwork but not yet dry.
Gretchen Forrest & Megan Coote

A pot belly stove heated the room each day and as the ash was cleaned out this morning, Asao indicated that we could experiment with it in the vat. First the ash had to be mixed with some rum (or other alcohol) as a wetting agent. A soft gold paper resulted from the yellowish briquette ash - a pleasing and unexpected pigment source.

Other dyes which were prepared were indigo, producing various shades of blue, depending on the number of pulp immersions and oxidations, logwood (bark) with alum mordant producing a purple paper, and lac (insect) with tin mordant producing a very pale pink paper. Other decorative additions to the vats were copper foil fragments and fine copper wire.

The first stage of our shifu (cloth woven from paper threads) also got underway. Neri was added to a vat of plain pina pulp and very fine pages were pulled on moulds covered with fine silk or terylene mesh. These were then couched onto pelon, lightly pressed and finally rolled onto plywood boards to dry - a process requiring much patience!

The cutting and rolling of the paper thread is yet to come.

Today's lunch break enabled us to see Valda's treasures and photos from her trip to Asao's project in the Philippines - apparently the weather was somewhat different to that of Mitcham in August!

Cameras clicked and flashed throughout the day to document and record processes, products and 'magic moments'. These included the collective singing of 'I Love Kon'nyaku Jelly' to the tune of a well known commercial and the syncopated rhythms of beating sticks with Marianne breaking into a stomping dance. Asao displayed a table of inspirational materials and tools to be used for our creation moment later in the week. These included special inks, brushes, stones, woodblocks and carving tools.

The working part of the day finished with picking the black bits out of the gampi fibre in preparation for tomorrow. A lovely dinner at Gail's home concluded an extremely productive day of papermaking, information sharing and generally enjoying the company of other papermakers along with the quiet humour and generous nature of our tutor.
Carol Downey

Like the pina, it was time to beat the gampi, and the rhythm was fantastic, great to watch all the different styles of beating. We then made up kon'nyaku paste (12 grams of kon'nyaku powder to one litre of water) each of us stirring for a total time of 20 minutes. Kon'nyaku is a tuber growing in Japan (Amorphophallus Konjac C. Koch) which is processed and made into a jelly. It is served in many different flavours and different ways. It was quite a thick paste and with one weaving stroke our pina sheets of paper were coated in the paste and hung to dry.

Later in the day we pasted the reverse side so they were prepared for boiling in lime solution. Fifty grams of lime powder made from crushed oyster shells was stirred into nine litres of water and left to stand overnight.

After lunch we filled one vat with gampi and fragments of copper foil, another with lac (red) and logwood (purple). Not as much playing as the day before, but a lot of paper made. A great team spirit as we busily went about our business of papermaking.

During the day we watched a video of Asao's Paper Thatched House - a project he had undertaken in 1986 in Fukuhara, Japan. He had made 8200 sheets of paper 4" x 6" from kozo, suksuka and gampi, and dyed them with safflower, kihida, pine soot and various other materials. During the three months from July to September he had made the paper during the day and at night had brushed the sheets to dry on walls, ceilings, floors - every square inch of the old thatched farmhouse seemed to be covered with paper. Towards the end of the video he explained that the lack of income during this time had reduced him to eating sardines three or four times a week as a cheap source of nourishment. The video concluded hilariously with a clip of an old-time vaudeville character dancing and singing... 'O for the life of a sardine'. We fell about laughing!
Helen White and Valda Quick (standing in for Margaret Mason)

Note: By this time we were thoroughly immersed in the 'blue pineapple' theme. Gail brought along a pineapple plant in a pot, complete with a good-sized fruit on it. Asao had found a folding pineapple decoration in a shop and this was suspended from the rafters (on Sunday it was actually sprayed blue). Carol made a hummingbird (pineapple) cake for morning tea.

We then strained the lime which we had dissolved the night before in readiness to cook the paper we had coated with kon'nyaku paste. The sheets were cooked in the lime solution until they were no longer slimy (about ten minutes). We used a range of papers from some very fine New Zealand flax through heavy sheets of ginger lily, wheat and pina to some recycled paper with and without added plant fibre.

The recycled paper without the plant fibre started to fall apart as soon as it was put into the boiling lime but all of the other sheets survived the cooking process (termed Kyosei-shi), finishing up very strong and leathery. These sheets were dried in readiness to serve as cooking pots for the Kami nabe dinner the next day.

In the afternoon we did suminigashi - traditional Japanese marbling. Cher ground sumi ink on a stone and we used this in combination with other inks. We tried Indian ink, food colour, and other dyes with varying degrees of success. We worked with Chinese bamboo paper and our pina paper. Although pale when dry, the patterns were lovely. We finished off the day by making some thread from the pina paper we had made earlier in the week.

From one A5 sheet we made about ten metres of thread. (I've used a couple of metres of mine to bind a couple of the little booklets given to us on the first day - Gail.)
Gail Stiffe & Cher McGrath

A bookbinding 'limbering up' exercise was the first task. Asao handed out some paper, which we tore and folded into pages for a small book. We added a cover, selected from the leftover sample pages that we had made earlier in the week. With needle and some pina thread, we sewed a Japanese four hole binding. There were variations on variations done here, but I think that we all ended up with much the same result.

Lino cuts and wood cut blocks made by participants earlier in the week were produced. Pineapples of all shapes and sizes predominated, so it was out with the blue printing ink and print rollers to plaster our books, ourselves and anything else that we could find, with blue pineapple prints.

With Asao's help, Cher had produced an Aus-shi logo linocut, the Australian equivalent of Washi. This logo also graced our book pages. Meanwhile, Asao had been carefully putting out piles of pages for the limited edition Blue Pineapple book. The President reluctantly produced the paper samples, which she had been sitting on all week to flatten the creases, and gave them to Asao.

The vultures began to gather and to eye up which pile of pages and fancy Shifu cover they were going to stake a claim on. After much checking and double checking, Asao announced that we were to sign his register, before we took the corresponding numbered copy. This was to ensure fairness all around and the vultures dispersed without a murmur.

After everyone had got their papers, Asao demonstrated an account-style binding and we proceeded to sew up our own Blue Pineapple book. What fun to be a part of a limited edition, of which only twenty copies had been produced.

By now, it was getting late in the afternoon and it was decided that we had better pack up, go powder our noses and put on our glad rags for the Kami nabe dinner (cooking in paper); cooking the dinner, that is, not ourselves. On my return, the cooking was already in progress. The chicken-wire baskets had been fashioned, lined with kyosei-shi (paper strengthened with lime, that we produced earlier in the week) and the chopped produce of fish, leek, radish, mushroom, seaweed and sauce placed therein. Two zealous fire-watchers set off the smoke alarm twice by fanning the coals too vigorously.

Meanwhile we indulged in an entree of raw salmon, soy sauce and ever-so-hot horseradish. Very tasty. Soon, the main course was ready , done to perfection and only a few small cracks in the ;cooking pots;. Asao did the honours, deftly serving the main course with chopsticks and we, not so deftly with chopsticks, shovelled the goodies into our mouths.

After a short respite, it was time for the ice cream! You could take your pick of mango, green tea or powdered yam flavours. All made with cream, yoghurt, egg and sugar. The mango flavour was probably the favourite, v-e-r-y nice! Unfortunately, somebody had been a bit heavy handed with the green tea flavouring and this ice cream tasted... well... different. And the powdered yam? It was unusual to say the least. But we certainly pigged out on the mango stuff.

The evening was rushing by and we had to finish things smartly. Asao held an 'auction' to get rid of his excess bits of gear that he didn't want to cart home. Speeches were made and Asao presented Papermakers of Victoria with two copies of the Blue Pineapple book and some paper samples. It had been a great workshop and a great opportunity to work with Asao, who was extremely generous in sharing his knowledge. We hope to see him back in Australia for the IAPMA conference in 1998.