Kakizome Calligraphy Event

January 4, 2025

Kakizome at Arts Mid-Hudson in Poughkeepsie

A New Year started a few days ago with a fresh mind for everyone.  

We were blessed with decent weather for today’s special event, “Kakizome” – the First Writing of the New Year, a traditional Japanese calligraphy gathering. This year, we were also lucky as we had the entire gallery to ourselves, which allowed us to have plenty of space between tables.

We saw some familiar faces from last year. One lady remembered that Kakizome was a traditional “writing a goal or resolution for the new year,” especially for children, in the old days of Japan. So she brought hers and it was exactly the Kakizome’s goal - “Resolution”. 

Many came up with challenging complicated Kanji characters, while some others used the examples of popular Kanji posted on the wall, such as “Dream,” “Courage,” and “Effort”. These are common words that may pop up in anyone’s mind when asked. But when writing them, especially in foreign character(s) with pure black ink, the meaning of the word becomes emphasized and hopefully stays in one’s mind until it is achieved. So Kakizome is not just about writing the words—it also helps you think of ways to work toward the new year’s goal. By explaining the culture to our guests again and again every year, we sincerely hope some of them do succeed in their goal. 

Meanwhile, we have our own goal—to remember those hundreds of Kanji characters that we spent so many hours studying during school since it is now so easy to forget them as we no longer write letters by hand. So for this reason, among others, we’d like to thank Arts Mid-Hudson very much for organizing and sponsoring this great event every year, as well as the guests for their support of this program which gives us the opportunity to keep up with our goal.

This year, we have another organization to thank. The Hudson Valley Press of Newburgh generously donated newspapers that we desperately needed for practice paper during the event. Because the quality of newspaper is similar to calligraphy paper (Hanshi/Washi rice papers) in how the ink appears, we believe it is very important for the Kakizome guests to understand the relationship between the ink, brush and paper, and experience the world of calligraphy.

Last, without our volunteer members, we could never have had this opportunity to share with so many people. Thank you MHJCA volunteers, as always!

I am very happy to report that many of the guests, of about 50+ people who participated, expressed they had such fun.

Midori Shinye

Kakizome program team leader