Works by Ushikubo Gojū

Ushikubo Gojū.

Ushikubo Gojū explaining his calligraphy to the Japanese emperor and empress.

The awardees included calligrapher Ushikubo Gojū who also received the Imperial Prize in recognition of particularly outstanding achievements. The Emperor and Empress were greeted with a cheery round of applause at the ceremony. In front of Ushikubo’s calligraphy, the Empress commented that it was “powerful.”

The calligraphy Ushikubo continues to write are the characters found in the inscriptions on bronze vessels from the Yin and Zhou periods/dynasties in China, and are still being excavated and studied. Fascinated by these early forms of Chinese characters, Ushikubo has been pursuing the creation of art using the philology of Shirakawa Shizuka as a guide. His efforts have been recognized, and he was asked to create a standard seal-carving and seal-script dictionary [Link], necessary for high school classes and useful for calligraphers and seal carvers. It is so useful that a pirated version was released in Taiwan soon after its publication. It is used in high schools all over Japan. He has also written about 10,000 seal-script characters for a software package called “Konjaku Mojikyo.”

He exhibits the rubbings, books, and calligraphy and paintings which he has collected as part of a lifetime of research into calligraphy whenever he has the opportunity. He feels a sense of discomfort in modern society, where science seems to have advanced too much, and says with a smile that he wants to live a leisurely life while reflecting on whether there are any important things he has forgotten as a human being.

“I want to be possessed by the winds of thousands of miles.”

Ushikubo-sensei’s piece for the 2021 Nitten exhibition.