The Daily Valdemar No. 22: April 3

Valdemar Andersen, sketch for The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzô, 1925.
The sketch is 17 cm. tall. Private collection.

Today's moment of calm is an instance of happy play meant for the cartoonist's own eyes only.

In The Book of Tea Okakura Kakuzô shakes his head at the West and its lack of understanding cultural riches beyond its own boundaries. The Japanese culture for one seems limited to the Code of Samurais, the West basking in hearing the tales of chivalry of death. Note, he writes, our authors described how you Westerners had "bushy tails somewhere hidden in your garments"; it is not as if we were thinking much of you either.

Okakura Kakuzô was writing just after the Russian-Japanese war and accentuated how knowing one other could prevent war. As it happens we humans already share a universal esteem of tea, he highlighted: We have already "met in the tea-cup".

As a Westerner and knowing his readers would expect to find at least one fine prototype of a samurai in a book on Japanese culture, Valdemar Andersen tried out how to draw an elegant warrior showing off his finery. One paper of such sketches contains a number of various examples each on the alert and focused in his own direction. Two heads are drawn on top of one another on how to express fierceness at its controlled maximum. From there on the paper seems to have been used to test the density and position of shadowing for dramatic effect and at some point the strokes have connected the samurais turning them into a tableau.

The finished illustrated book was the epitome of doing more by doing less, of which Japanese woodblock printing has been an important a inspiration to the rest of the world. The road to doing less is testing and trying out many times over. Once Valdemar saw the resulting tableau on this piece of paper, he seems to have added even more dramatic lines just for the fun of the effect.