After a very cold christmas, my first back in the UK for 9 years, me and our lass flew out to Japan for yet more festivities.
New year is a busy time for the bonsai world, exhibitions, sales and preparation for the all important Kokufu exhibition. As is expected of me as the most recent "graduate", I have come back to help the Chief and teach the current apprentices a thing or two. Sadly their heads are so hard and unable to comprehend the simplest things that it makes life hard. I blew a fuse today at them today for poor watering technique. It is really difficult to allow them to make mistakes in order to correct them. I sat watching it for an hour, my blood boiling until they finally finished. After they had gone back to their normal work I quite politely asked them to explain what they had done and just how stupid they were. It is at times like this that I am so grateful to my senpai Akiyama-san for being patient and understanding with me when I was just that stupid.
I am still in debt to Akiyama-san as he pulls me up through the bonsai world, involving me with being a normal professional in Japan. He keeps telling me that I should become a Japanese citizen and work here full time. As much as England disappoints me, there is no way I could give up my passport. We went to a Shohin Auction the other day, some of the items may be for sale on my shop soon, I am going to try and sell them here to existing customers first. I bought specifically to order as I am broke due to the exchange rate. It was my first time at a shohin auction, a very different occasion to the normal one I go to where everybody knows me now and lets me have stuff cheap. Walking around before the auction, looking at what was coming up, one tree took me and I just had to have it. I mentioned it to Akiyama-san and he just laughed and said I was sick, I showed it to Taiga Urushibata and he said I was mental...still it didnt come up until the end of the auction and I was ready and prepared, I had a limit, which was the money in my wallet and there was nothing going to stop me. The auctioneer started the bidding and I immediately jumped in. One other fool decided to bid 500 yen more than me so I topped that by another 1500. There was a second of disbelief when everyone realised it was me shouting. They soon realised that there was no way they would win against me...I was dragged up on the streets of a fighting market town. A shohin auction stand-off doesn't scare me.
Looking at it objectively, I am in fact sick and mental, but by god, this is a superb little tree. I will get a pot for it at the kokufu and it shall be on display at the BSA show up at Willowbog.
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