By Alan Suemori
Ann Asakura arrives like a fresh wind filling every corner of the room with her warm laughter, endless energy, and kind spirit. Although she is celebrating her eighth decade on the planet, Asakura has no plans to slow down and she is filled with original ideas, brash opinions, and ambitious plans that could fill several lifetimes in the years to come. Her voice and vocabulary draw from the wide palette of influences that affected her growing up in Hawaiʻi during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Switching from perfect English to local pidgin and then back again, everything is spiced with occasional Japanese phrases and a salty, earthy vernacular that reflect the richness of her island home. It is as if one syntax is not enough to hold everything she has to say to the world.
Forty-five years ago, the ‘Oahu born Sansei co-founded Temari Hawaiʻi, a grass-roots, backyard organization that was committed to teaching the traditional arts and crafts of indigenous people all around the Pacific. Named after the treasured Japanese toy ball, Temari also represents the unbroken thread of universal values such as family, friendship, and loyalty that never frays or grows outdated. Originally housed in a private home, the community based non-profit eventually moved to the back of a small Buddhist church on 10th Avenue in Pālolo and then to the Mōʻiliʻili Community Center where it rents space today.
Over the course of its life, Temari Hawaiʻi has offered a wide array of hands-on classes that included making Micronesian lei, Hawaiian hula implements, Indonesian batik, and Japanese kadomatsu. While Temari students learn the fundamentals of the design and construction of each craft, they are also exposed to the unique traditions and history of each culture so that they understand the broader story of what they are creating. “If you have no culture, you have no craft. The craft is just a mechanical expression of the deeper culture,” says Asakura. “How can you create the craft if you don’t understand where it came from? When you create the craft but don’t understand its history, you are only taking but not depositing anything back into the community because you haven’t gone to the source.”
Asakura lives in a simple, wooden house in Kaimuki which sits on the corner of Pāhoa and 12th Avenue. It is guarded by two magnificent mango trees and a renegade mini crown flower bush that is threatening to take over an adjacent sidewalk. Inside her home are well organized plastic trays and baskets of the raw material of her creativity including a wide sweep of colorful fabrics, dyes, buttons, and whatever may have sparked her imagination over the years. “Creativity is as essential to a person’s life as air and water. The Italians say ‘viva voce’ which means ‘everyone has a voice.’ When we don’t animate that voice, our lives contract and disappear,” says Asakura. “By the time some people grow up, they are convinced they are uncreative, but how you choose to express yourself is limitless and can be as simple as gardening or writing a letter.”
Asakura’s home is also filled with dozens of family pictures of her grandparents, parents, daughters and grandchildren giving evidence to a far reaching and well lived life. It is a record of not only her place in the world today but of everything that has come before her and everything that will follow when she is gone. “If we don’t know where we come from, how will we know where we are going,” asks Asakura. “What grounds me is to look at photographs of my ancestors. I study what they are wearing, how they are looking at the camera, where the picture was taken, how they are posing. What is the bigger story they are trying to tell me? That is the inspiration for everything that I do.”
Surrounded by her extended clan, Asakura attended nearby public schools and the University of Hawaiʻi where she studied elementary education. Upon graduation, however, she was seized by a wave of wanderlust and attended graduate school in Illinois and then the United Kingdom where she lived for three years. It was in Britain that Asakura realized she needed to return home and tap into the rich tapestry of island life that had nourished her as a child. “I left Hawaiʻi because I had ‘rock-itis’. The Hawaiʻi I grew up in was extraordinarily diverse and rich in tradition. We walked everywhere and knew everybody on our street. But we were very separated by race, ethnicity, language, and wealth. And then television and Elvis arrived and they all promised a world that was bigger and brighter than my own, and I was hungry to see all of it,” says Asakura. “When I was living in Leicester, I would visit museums in London that featured traditional Japanese textiles, and they were completely foreign to me. Every culture transmits its knowledge and values through what the people wear, and I didn’t know or understand anything of what I was seeing.” Asakura grew increasingly unsettled by the realization that she had little connection to her ethnic Japanese roots. As a young mother at the time, Asakura also worried about what it would mean for her daughter to grow up without the influence of her close-knit family back in Hawai’i. Although she had planned to extend her time in Europe and travel throughout the continent, Asakura made a life changing decision and returned home.
Landing back in Honolulu, Asakura began working in the Hawaiʻi Department of Education’s groundbreaking Artists-in-the Schools program which allowed her to travel across ʻOahu and share her growing love for traditional textiles with children from Waiʻanae to Waikāne. Eventually, she struck out on her own joining forces with like-minded friends to create Temari Hawaiʻi on a zero budget and an enlightened vision for what true learning could be. “The idea for Temari actually began in a YWCA pottery class where I met Reynold Choy and others who saw the world through the same eyes and could hear what I was trying to say,” said Asakura. “We believed traditional craftwork was a bridge to understanding each of Hawaiʻi’s different cultures because it answered fundamental questions like: Where do we come from? Where are we at? Where are we going? At the time there were no classes being offered to the general public that aligned with what we valued so we decided to start our own.”
From the beginning, Temari Hawaiʻi thrived on the kindness of friends, neighbors, and total strangers who volunteered their hard work, time, and expertise. Grant Kagimoto of Cane Haul Road provided business advice and historian Barbara Stephan invited Japanese living treasures to visit the cooperative’s humble digs and share their knowledge on a regular basis. “Barbara insisted that if we wanted to do our best, we had to learn from the best,” says Asakura. “So it was our friends, volunteers, and students who constructed our foundation and clarified what path we would take going forward.”
Unlike some classical models of instruction where students are required to endure long initiations before they can even enter the workshop, Asakura believes that true learning only begins by doing and she encourages everyone to jump into the deep end of the pool from the very start. It helps that she cultivates an environment where mistakes are not only expected but honored. “My job is to open the door for my students,” says Asakura. “They may walk into our classes and walk out in 10 minutes and that’s okay. But so many people struggle with just turning the doorknob and giving themselves permission to try something new. My job is to help them turn that doorknob and open up their lives because their joy opens up my life as well.”
As for the future of Temari Hawaiʻi, Asakura can hardly wait. She is filled with an endless wellspring of ideas to include more Asian Pacific traditions and reach more people. “What excites me is the opportunity to teach a new generation of students that is ageless and hungry to learn,” concludes Asakura. “Sometimes I wonder who do I think I am doing all this work and making all this noise, but if I don’t do it who will? I am 80 years old but I can still keep going, and there is still so much to do.”
