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One thing I have learned from talking to calligraphic artists and visiting their studios is to never underestimate the hours, no years, of time and concentrated effort that go into the creation of their simplest strokes. Kana calligrapher Seiho Hirano would have to be a model for what I mean: now 70 years old, there has barely been a day in her life since the age of six when she has not lifted the ink-soaked brush to practice calligraphy.
 I don’t want other people to know about the practice I do.” It is a private ritual and she asks me not to write about it, but I have already decided that there is no way I could write about Seiho Hirano and not tell how she still gets up and devotes one or two hours to copying the Lotus Sutra and other classic exts every day. Not being a calligrapher, all that practice for the sake of the perfect brushstroke sounds fanatical, but like most true devotees, Hirano says that the more she practices, the more inept she feels, and she will happily push her limits forever.
As I enter her studio I am hit by a waft of incomparably beautiful fragrance. Incense is Hirano’s other passion. She collects precious aromatic woods – kara and jinko – and indulges in their fragrance as she works. I once read that incense-burning raises the frequency of atomic vibrations in the atmosphere and has the power to
lift consciousness to higher levels.
Hirano does not know about that but says she chooses a different fragrance to suit her mood each day. I know enough about incense to know that what she is burning today is the equivalent of the costliest of scents, but she reassures me that it is not uncommon.
I was immediately attracted to Hirano’s work. The uninitiated might see it as something a child could do, but if I may be brave enough to compare it to abstract oil painting masterpieces like Jackson
Pollock’s Blue Poles, it is not something“anyone can do.” I watch Hirano execute one of her pages of scribbles. She is standing in stockinged feet on top of a 2-meter-long sheet of paper. Next to it is a substantial looking ink stone where she has ground a small pool of ink. She takes a favorite brush from her calligrapher’s rack – not particularly special bristles – something cheap from China . As I watch her execute the whole page of writing from one dip of the brush, I can’t help thinking of a concert pianist in the way that her movement seems to be guided by a deep emotion that puts cadence into each press of the brush.
Hirano stresses that her calligraphic works are not meant to be read, but what she writes is most  definitely “something.” For my demonstration she wrote Tomioka Tessai’s poem “Father’s Death.”
Only a child (artlessness intact) or someone of tremendous experience—artlessness lost and regained—could have done what Hirano has just executed. Scribbles are scribbles? No Hirano is very particular about the quality of the strokes that make up those scribbles. I wanted to delve deeper into what some of them were better than others and some of them she would never want to be seen by anything more than the bottom of the wastepaper bin. The subtle levels of refinement are what makes the difference between her work and a novice trying to copy the same effect – making her work inimitable.
Her latest works overlay her unreadable scribbles on Lately she has been marrying abstract art in the form of blocked colour as a background to her calligraphy in a way that is soft and subtle and inimmitable.
At 70 Hirano looks like she is 50 – creation of beauty is an elixir of joy for her. She teaches kana calligraphy, is an active member of an association of calligraphers influenced by abstract Uno Sesson and also learns abstract art from a leading practitioner whose name she refuses to divulge, which is helping her combine elements of abstract painting with calligraphy.
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