Masao Kawasumi: How a Japanese Bonsai Master Sold Time for Millions
Seventy-five years. Think about it. That's a whole human life. We manage to be born, study, change five jobs, get divorced, raise children, retire, and grow old. And Masao Kawasoe has simply watched a pine tree grow all this time. And sometimes, once every couple of years, he would pluck off an extra needle.
They say his works are now auctioned off for sums comparable to the budget of a small African country. Millions of dollars for a piece of wood in a ceramic bowl. Madness? Perhaps. But only if you've never stood next to a plant that remembers the Edo era.
The Japanese have a strange relationship with time in general. For us, time is something we constantly lack. Water slipping through our fingers. For people like Kawasoe, time is a tool. As tangible as a coil of copper wire or steel root cutters.
The Art of Doing Nothing
People come to bonsai for peace of mind. And they are cruelly deceived. Because bonsai is violence. Slow, aesthetically refined, brought to absolute perfection, but violence against nature. Kawasoe understood this better than others.
His hands resembled the roots of an old juniper. Gnarled, with small scars from sharp branches and pruning shears, with soil ingrained under his fingernails. The smell of moist akadama — a special Japanese clay — seemed to permeate his very skin. He didn't look like an enlightened sage from Hollywood movies. Just an ordinary grumpy old man in a faded work jacket, muttering through his teeth when a student mixed the soil incorrectly.
Forming a trunk has nothing to do with magic. It's physics and hellish patience. You take stiff copper wire, carefully, coil by coil, wrap it around a branch, and then bend it so that it crackles, but doesn't break. And you leave it for two years. The tree resists. It wants to grow up, towards the sun. And you force it to spread over the ground, imitating resistance to the winds on the edge of a cliff.
"You know what the beginner's biggest mistake is?" the master once blurted out in a rare interview. "In the rush. You want to get a ready-made masterpiece by next Friday. But the tree lives for centuries. It doesn't have Fridays."
Copper, Steel, and Silence
Buying a Picasso painting for a couple of million, you hang it in the living room with climate control. It doesn't ask for food. Buying a Kawasoe bonsai for the same money, you're buying yourself hard labor.
In the morning — watering. In the evening — checking the needles for spider mites. In winter — protection from freezing roots, in summer — shading from the midday sun. One step to the right, one step to the left — and your multi-million dollar Sotheby's lot turns into dry firewood for kindling a fireplace. Ironic, isn't it?
That is why wealthy European and American collectors, when acquiring Masao's trees, often hired one of his students. The Japanese guy would move to, say, California, live in the guest house, and get a great salary just for looking at the tree every day. Because only he knew when the soil had dried out just enough to be moistened again.
Kawasoe was a genius of dead wood. Sounds creepy, but in bonsai there are "jin" and "shari" techniques. This is when part of the trunk or branch is intentionally cleaned of bark and bleached with sulfurated potash. The result is a contrast: a living, sap-pulsating green vein winding around a dazzlingly white, dead skeleton. A symbol of the struggle between life and death.
A Scar as Decoration
Masao found his main masterpiece — a Shimpaku juniper, which, according to biologists, was more than 400 years old — in the mountains of Shizuoka Prefecture when he was just a boy. The tree grew in a crevice, ravaged by avalanches and parched by winds. It was ugly. Almost dead.
It took thirty years just to accustom him to life in a pot. Another forty to form the crown. Kawasoe didn't try to make it beautiful in the classical sense. He just emphasized his scars. He showed that survival itself is beautiful.
This juniper was never sold. The master refused a check for one and a half million dollars, dryly replying to a buyer from the Emirates: "It is not finished yet. Come back in fifty years."
Passing on the Scissors
This is the main secret of the old Japanese masters. They are well aware of their mortality. You cannot own a tree that lives five hundred years. You can only be its temporary guardian. A nanny.
When Kawasoe's fingers began to cramp with arthritis, and he could no longer tighten the copper on thick branches with the necessary force, he did not become depressed. He simply passed the heavy cutters to his eldest student. Silently. Without pompous speeches.
Frankly, we fuss too much. We seek purpose, try to leave a mark on history, write memoirs, buy up concrete boxes. Or you can just take a piece of clay, plant a pine tree in it, and every day, for seventy-five years, remove the dry needles. And in the end, leave behind something so piercingly alive that people will be willing to give fortunes for it.
The master leaves. The tree remains. And if you listen closely, standing next to his works in some private gallery, you can hear how slowly, millimeter by decade, the root grows, hacking time.
