There is a Saturday Japanese private class in Cambridge, and I was invited to be a teacher for one day to try out Japanese calligraphy with children.
They are mainly 5 or 6 years old, some 2, some much older. Some are Japanese, some are Japanese-English and many of them never tried Japanese calligraphy before.
It is our custom to do your first calligraphy in the new year to wish the success of your study for coming year. Normally in the first three days of New Year. My area used to do it on 2nd Jan.
But they don’t know anything about this custom, nor Japanese calligraphy, so I showed the tools and explained what they are, what they made of very briefly. They loved touching the brushes and smooth surface of ink stones.
And after that they just had a go.
I made some sample models but they were so free, some did their own names, some copied letters from the old new papers that we used for covering the floor.
We only had an hour but they had fun. Some of them loved it, kept coming back for more, some didn’t. I had fun with them of course.
What a nice way to start the new year.
Calligrapher in London 