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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

MAC’s ‘Samurai, Sunrise, Sunset’ calls on Spokane ties to Japan while connecting community further

By Azaria Podplesky For The Spokesman-Review

Throughout its history, Spokane has had close ties to Japan.

In the early 20th century, more than 1,000 first-generation Japanese immigrants called Trent Alley home (now commemorated by plaques in the Saranac Building after the area was demolished for Expo ‘74). In November, “Woman with Pear,” a piece by renowned Japanese American ceramic sculptor Patti Warashina, who was born and raised in Spokane, was dedicated to be installed at the Saranac Building in honor of that history.

Elsewhere in town, the Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute is a branch campus of the Mukogawa Women’s University, in Spokane’s sister city of Nishinomiya, Japan, and the Nishinomiya Tsutakawa Japanese Garden in Manito Park invites visitors to admire its fall foliage year after year.

Calling to those ties to Japan while also honoring and educating about a part of Japanese culture not found in Spokane, “Samurai, Sunrise, Sunset” opens at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture on Saturday and runs through June 1.

The exhibit features a collection of artifacts including armor, weaponry and personal items from the Azuchi Momoyama period (1568-1600) through the Meiji period (1868-1912). The exhibit is organized by Contemporanea Progetti, of Italy, in collaboration with the Museo Stibbert, also of Italy, in cooperation with the Exhibits Development Group.

“Samurai, Sunrise, Sunset” has been more than a year in the making. MAC Executive Director Wes Jessup learned about the exhibit from a colleague and traveled to Florence’s Stibbert Museum last summer to view the collection in person and speak with Riccardo Franci, curator of the armory at the museum.

Jessup was taken with the collection and saw the exhibit as a way to introduce local audiences to the swords-as-art culture prevalent in Japan.

“Most of what we do is regional, regional history, regional artists,” Jessup said. “Then on some occasions, we bring the world to Spokane.”

The exhibit features about 120 pieces from the nearly 3,000 samurai-related pieces in the Stibbert Museum’s collection, including three of the 20 surviving helmets from renowned helmetmaker Ryoei, swords and a mother-of-pearl-adorned quiver. The exhibit also includes lacquer boxes, sake cups and other personal effects.

Franci said selecting which pieces to include in the exhibit came down to picking objects that, as a whole, would give visitors a complete picture of the world of a samurai.

“There are no pieces that are more important than others,” he said. “All those pieces have their role in telling the story about the samurai.”

The exhibit’s time at the MAC marks the second and final stop for the collection on its current tour following a stop at the History Museum of Mobile in Alabama. A different group of samurai-related objects from the Stibbert collection went on tour about seven years ago, Franci said.

No matter the exact items in the exhibit, Franci said audiences are often excited to see the collection because they think of samurai in the same way they think of knights and gladiators.

“The samurai have something magic in the idea of ordinary people,” he said. “They are in many movies or many animation movies and comics and people know the word ‘samurai,’ but they don’t know so deeply the history of what’s behind the samurai that they saw on the movies, on the comics. The target of this kind of exhibition is to give a more wide vision of what was the world of samurai, especially armor and arts and crafts.”

Running concurrently with “Samurai, Sunrise, Sunset” is an exhibit called “The Evolution of the Japanese Sword,” which opened Jan. 18 and runs through May 4. The exhibit gives visitors a chance to see samurai swords and fittings as pieces of art, not just weapons.

“The Evolution of the Japanese Sword” is organized by Jidai Arts. Kayla Tackett, director of exhibitions and collections at the MAC, said Jidai Arts worked with the MAC to curate a small collection of swords and sword fittings. The exhibit features blades as old as 1000 C.E. and as recent as a contemporary replica of an older sword made in 1992.

There’s also, Tackett said, a sushi-making kit that, when tucked away in its kit, is meant to look like a sword.

“It works really beautifully with the samurai show, because you can do that deep dive into swords and sword making,” she said. “It includes the actual objects in the making of a sword, the sand, the iron shavings, how they melt down the iron a couple ways, all the steps for making a Japanese sword.”

The museum has also created a small exhibit on Ranald MacDonald, a Pacific Northwest-born and -raised man known as the first native English speaker to teach English in Japan.

During the run of these exhibitions, the MAC will offer a variety of educational opportunities, including the Art of Bonsai (Feb. 8), Porcelain and Pagodas: Japanese-Influenced Decorative Arts in the Campbell House (March 1 and April 5), Japanese Calligraphy and Sumi-e: The Art of Black Ink (March 26), Rare Courage: Japanese American Soldiers in WWII (April 10), Beneath the Trees: Watercolor in the Japanese Garden (April 22 and 25, May 1 and 2) and Our Stories: Asian-American Families in Spokane (May 3).

Jessup and Tackett said these events and the exhibits help celebrate and connect further with the Japanese American community in Spokane while also helping to, as previously mentioned, bring the world to Spokane like past exhibitions about Pompeii and the Titanic.

“We’ve done some things that are bringing in and celebrating some amazing things,” Jessup said. “It’s important for us as a museum to remember not everybody in our city can travel to Chicago or Seattle to see exhibitions, so it’s really important that we’re making this accessible to as many kids as possible.”