we visited beacon hill park.

it’s time to check out wheels with a stick.

whoa~!  super exciting!

and he never forgets to be adorable.

finally we’re back in saskatoon.  it’s good to be home.  i like it here.

during my summer holidays from elementary school, i was supposed to do a drawing every day showing the growth of  a “morning glory” flower i planted in the spring.  it was a combined science and art project.

i always drew the entire made-up 6-week record of the flower growing two days before school started at the beginning of september.  my drawings would end up showing a bigger, more beautiful and impressive flower than actually grew in real life.  a big bloom would show up suddenly in my drawings on august 30th or 31st.

one year, my flower died because i forgot to water it.  i did the same kind of drawings anyway.

someone wrote me an email recently saying my work knocked his socks off, and that people at his work were wondering where his socks went.

i never heard the idiom “knocked my socks off” before, so i took it literally. i wrote back to him and told him to hold on to his feet. i was thinking about that conversation when i drew this.

this drawing is called “meichuu” (命中), which is japanese for “bullseye”. the kanji literally mean “life center”.

i’m showing this as part of a show called “girls at play”, at compound gallery, in portland. this will be my first show in the US. if you live in the portland area, please come to the show. i’ll be at the opening reception, november 1st.

girls at play

four female artists who represent a new movement in japanese art
(show details)

november 1 - 30
reception november 1st @7pm

compound gallery
107 nw 5th avenue
portland, oregon

Update

welcome to people from Digg — i’m your “midweek weirdness“.

if you like my drawings, there are more on my gallery page.

i mean, this drawing…

“shi- shimatta…” (oops…)

“sayonara.”

this is a pala-pala (flipbook) type story that i drew on yellow post-it notes. i felt so embarassed when i realized this, i had to throw my emotion out somewhere.

i’ve been working on a set of drawings for my part of the group show coming up at compound gallery next month. several of them featured roosters. once i realized this, i stopped drawing roosters and started drawing other things, like a heart with legs sitting on a bench and a boy with breasts for his eyes sewing the head back on to a trout.

i’ll put those drawings up here over the next couple weeks. even the ones with roosters.

i just made a birthday card for a seven-year-old boy named shane, from lancaster, ontario. he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the age of five. he made a wish this year - he would like to break the world record for the most birthday cards ever received. his goal is 350 million cards. so far, he has received 125,000 cards. his birthday is may 30th.

i was contacted by one of my contacts on flickr. i thought i should spread the word.

if you would like to wish him a happy birthday, here is the address:

Shane Bernier
PO Box 484
Lancaster, Ontario
K0C 1N0
Canada

for more about his story, visit his website.

i can’t wait to breastfeed poko-chan. i hope my milk is as tasty as a fresh apple.

i spend most of my waking time thinking about poko-chan and our life together as a family of three. i’m really looking forward to meeting poko-chan in seven weeks. people like to tell us horrible stories about giving birth or bringing up children. but i listen to them with a grain of salt. of course it will be difficult because we are new parents and poko-chan is new to the world, but i think our effort will be nothing compared to poko-chan trying to live.

like my dad always says, “you’ll forget about all the hard things that happened when you look at the angel face of your child”.

you can view the progress of this drawing here:

art recipe 1
art recipe 2
art recipe 3

i’m just starting my 21st week. it’s our first baby.

my belly has really started getting bigger recently, so i’m visibly pregnant as well. the baby is already quite active. it started moving in my belly around 17 weeks. at first, it felt like bubbles popping. some pregnancy books describe this as “butterfly flapping”, but i’ve never eaten any live butterflies, so how would i know?

more recently, i can really feel the baby kicking. this involuntary movement (on my end) is absolutely amazing. sometimes, when i feel its kicks, i tap it back around the same area. a few seconds later, it kicks back :) i’m enjoying this non-verbal communication so much. the kicking feels like “poko-poko” to me (the japanese language has lots more sounds to describe things than english does), so i gave the baby a nickname: “poko-chan”.

yesterday morning, i could feel the baby pushing out against my left and right sides at the same time — like stretching out, slowly. the baby is building a new body, and it’s going to be crowded inside me.

just before i found out i was pregnant, i started drawing the baby in my drawing “numb“. after i found out, i went to the doctor and saw the heart beating on the ultrasound, and heard the heartbeat sound with the fetal doppler. i did another drawing: “new heartbeat“.

paul and i went to get an ultrasound last week. the radiologist gave us a 3D image of one of the photos, which shows our baby’s face, with the right hand held up shyly in front of it.

mmm~~ good looking. as you can tell, i’m already starting my “oya-baka” (foolish parents) plan (親ばか実行計画）. :D

during the ultrasound, we saw our baby open its mouth and wave its hands around. the baby got much bigger since the last ultrasound. now it actually looks more like a human. it’s got fingers, toes, ears, eyes, and a cute bum. at first, i thought i might give birth to some sort of animal, but now officially it’s a human. :)

i knew something was living inside of me… no wonder my belly is getting so much bigger. i’ve never experienced this type of rapid physical transformation before, except in my mind. it’s interesting — all the changes seem to happen according to a schedule. it’s like my body is a machine. but i’ve never felt so human before.

some other time, i’ll post about my early pregnancy experience, and my weird “morning sickness” behaviour, which lasted about 8 weeks.

in a meantime, this is me with our baby inside. :)

16 weeks 2 days

20 weeks 1 day

(paul took the photos of me)

many canadians ask me if i miss japanese food for the past six years. my answer is YES. but when i say “japanese food”, i’m not talking about sushi, or tempura, or green-tea ice cream. they are japanese food and i like them, but i don’t miss them, i guess. i like sushi, but i’m saving my sushi-craving for edohei japanese restaurant in winnipeg. edohei is the best sushi on the prairie.

anyway, when i say “japanese food”, i’m talking about umeboshi. if i could have umeboshi for breakfast every morning, i might not miss japan… as much. umeboshi are pickled plums (”ume” means plum and “hoshi” (”boshi”) means to dry). they are sweet and extremely sour. mmm… just to think of umeboshi makes me feel sour. most commonly you eat umeboshi with rice. you can put it on top of a bowl of rice or you can put it inside of an onigiri (rice ball).

i had a huge craving for umeboshi a couple weeks ago. i needed to eat something sour. i could have eaten lemons, but i didn’t want to eat rice with lemon — too weird. i went to the asian market here in saskatoon, but they don’t carry umeboshi. it’s really more like a chinese market, they only carry a handful of japanese foods. i guess there probably isn’t a big enough japanese population here to support a japanese market.

my craving grew and grew…

so i phoned up my mom :D my parents live in wakayama prefecture, which is famous for… UMEBOSHI! they make the best of the best umeboshi in japan, more sweet and sour than salty. they make a special type of umeboshi with honey in it, that we call 優しい味 “yasashii” (kind + gentle) flavour. i love them. i asked my mom to send me some umeboshi along with some of my other favorite japanese foods.

a few weeks later, the package arrived! actually, i just got the notice from the post office to come pick up the box. the notice said that i wasn’t at home at the time of delivery, which is not true — i was home all day that day. i guess the mailman would rather make me carry the big box in my hands than put in on his nice red truck.

anyway, picking up the package and running a couple of errands was just enough time to make some rice. so i put the rice in the rice cooker and went out. it was a cold and snowy winter day, and when we got back, paul and i were ready to cuddle up and have some warm rice with umeboshi. this must have been the best umeboshi i’ve ever had. thanks mom!

this is a drawing for an exhibition in spain in 2007. this exhibition is called “dreams” organized by roger omar in spain.

In 2002 I started a project of dreams. I ask kids from
different countries to write their dreams during 2 weeks.
From hundreds of dreams I made a selection of 60 very short
dreams from kids of México, Spain and Brasil.

he invited artists to select and draw one kid’s dream, to make an artbook of 60 dreams/artists. from the interesting children’s dreams, i chose #32.

32. (SPAIN-GIRL) - Yuka Yamaguchi
I dreamed that I married my dog. I was in the altar, dressed in white, with my fiancé. When the priest said “Kiss the bride”, I saw that my fiancé was a boy with my dog´s face.

usually i’m not good at drawing with a theme in mind. but to my surprise, i had a good time drawing this :) i hope the girl who dreamed this dream will like my drawing.

this result of this project will become an artbook. The exhibition of the project will take place in Cadiz-Spain, 2007. The kids dreams and the images of the book will be exhibited, as well as some other things related to the project, like photos and some original kids-written dreams.

along with their drawing, the artists are asked to submit one dream that they had in 2006. oh boy… i have tons of dreams to choose from. i dream a lot, or so it seems. after seeing my drawings, some people have asked me if i have nightmares. i really don’t. i have some scary dreams featuring cats (i’m scared of cats), but i’m not sure if those are in the nightmare category.

i have some of the same dreams over and over again. here are my recent dreams:

• i enter Nijo castle (in kyoto) at 2am and have to run around and around the castle 10 times before dawn without being caught by the security guards. it’s hard, because Nijo castle has special “nightingale floors” that squeak when you step on them (protecting against ninjas!). cats keep getting in the way and i can’t run past them…
• i’m on an escalator with hundreds of steps, and it’s not moving. i need to get to the top of the building because i need to buy a toy from the toy department of this department store. but by the time i get to the top of the stairs, a different dream starts…
• i’m riding on the electric streetcar in kyoto, but i’m on the wrong train, going in the wrong direction. i’m carrying a suitcase that i have to keep secret and safe.

none of my dreams are really nightmares but they’re pretty stressful. maybe i’ll draw them someday.

i’ve been wanting a good size tote bag but i haven’t found one i like enough to buy. so when i went to the downtown public library the other day i didn’t have anything to carry my books home in. as usual, i got carried away and took out more books than i could carry in my hands. the library gave me some recycled plastic grocery bags, but they weren’t strong enough. the bags ripped and my books fell onto the street. so i decided i’d better design my own tote bag.

i bought a canvas tote bag at a craft shop yesterday and hand-painted 宇宙人 (”uchuu-jin”, meaning alien) on it in kanji. you might remember that “uchuu-jin” was lesson one in my quasi-calligraphy series. one good thing about writing in japanese in an english-speaking country is that not so many people understand what it actually says. they just see the kanji and think “ah, japanese — how beautiful”. or maybe they think it’s chinese — same thing, right? either way, it’s easy to have a secret meaning in public. this is the mystery of the orient.

i have another bag that says in kanji: 回収 (”kaisyuu”) and underneath it says “recycle” (in english). i bought it at an artsy gift shop in kingston. it’s kind of funny because kaisyu doesn’t mean “recycle”, it means “collection”. maybe there’s confusion because you can see signs saying “kaisyuu” at garbage collection areas or recycling collection areas in japan. there are several kanji that mean “recycling” in japanese, including 再利用 (the kanji mean “repeat use”) and 再資源化 (”re-resourced”, more or less), but the most common word is リサイクル which is written in the katakana alphabet, because it’s the english word “recycle”, borrowed into japanese (”risaikuru”).

it’s kind of funny to have 回収 “collection” written on a bag in a thick font. when i was travelling around japan with paul a couple of years ago, i carried this bag around with me. i remember seeing some japanese people looking perplexed and obviously thinking it weird to see that written in beautiful calligraphy. i enjoyed the reaction.

that gift shop in kingston (where i used to work, until i quit) sold “japanese” calligraphy greeting cards and framed calligraphy. but the calligraphy itself wasn’t very good. it looked like my ten-year-old nephew’s writing. some of the word choices were interesting, like one that said “horse, tiger, dog….” — the chinese zodiac animals. nothing amuses me more than seeing “dog” in calligraphy. imagine someone writing “dog” in english in beautiful gothic calligraphy — what’s the point?

i guess these things are the equivalent of the weird english you see in japan. when i was in elementary school, i had an “english newspaper print” shirt. it was a white button-up bowling shirt with fake newspaper printing and newspaper photos all over it (even on the collar). hey, it was the 80s. to me, any english writing seemed cool. i knew a few words of english, but not enough to read my shirt. later on, as my english improved, i started to notice mistakes in the english phrases you can see around japan. in college, my foreigner friends would point out “funny engrish” to me. they would have a good laugh about it.

i don’t mind people noticing mistakes and finding them funny. but when i find canadians making mistakes about japanese, it’s hard for me to point them out, especially when the mistake is impossible to correct. in kingston, i once saw a pretty girl at the gym who had a tattoo of the kanji 太 over her shoulder blade. i was speechless, because that kanji means “fat”. maybe it was a mistake, since 大 (without the little dot at the bottom) means “big” and 犬 (with the little dot in the top right) means “dog”. i don’t know why she would want a kanji tattoo saying “big” or “dog” either, but it actually said “fat”. she was working on her upper body in front of me. as the kanji for “fat” stretched across her shoulder, i decided not say anything. too painful.