Sometimes this column is credited with far more than it can do. It cannot turn back the calendar to long gone days and bring back the past, except to present it in the form that whatever-it-was has now assumed. Take, for example, traditional Japanese architecture, the lovely old houses we once could see everywhere, rich in tatami, shoji and pleasing forms. Those houses and their carefully crafted gardens are now gone, replaced by large apartment buildings that rarely present a sense of stress-soothing harmony. Of course, we have skipped lightly over much that was built hurriedly in the postwar period, and well we should. It was a time of limited materials of poor quality, of corrugated tin roofs and cheap stucco walls. But the good past is still preserved in odd places, like restaurants, especially those serving inexpensive Japanese specialties, where you will often find the wood-tatami-shoji look we often crave, and the temples and shrines are there as they always have been, small pockets of tranquillity wherever you find them. Our cities change, but there are parts of them that remain the same.
I cannot help a woman who is looking to the past for today's gifts, those she wants to take home to friends. She has searched in vain for Western-style writing kits with "washi" (traditional Japanese paper) envelopes and writing paper enclosed in a heavier washi bag. She has looked at Oriental Bazaar, Fuji Torii, department stores and paper shops but she can't find them. Well, I suppose she won't. However, there are still many stationery sets at the shops she mentioned, some with pleasing Oriental designs, including most of the old favorites, all sure to please those not familiar with what was here before. She can buy sheets of washi and make her own envelope to hold what she buys. The heavy paper embedded with bits of leaves or fiber would be especially appealing. The fact that she cannot find what she wants is probably due to other changes, such as the preponderance of e-mail for personal correspondence and the fact that few printers will accept washi.
She did note that most of the letter-writing sets she saw had B-5-size sheets of paper, much too small for "those of us who still consider letter writing an art." There has been a tremendous change involving the writing of letters, and while I greatly value a personal letter that still has the feel of the sender about it, I also like the quick, conversationlike characteristics of e-mail, and the number of people you can keep close by in your e-mail address book. Finally, she may find a substitute for what she wants at any stationery shop stocking packs of various A-4-size paper that can be used in computers. There is a beige-colored type that is flecked with rice-paperlike fibers that she can use for writing letters either by hand or computer. It may have to do.