Wendy Jones Nakanishi

CURIOUS FACTS ABOUT
WENDY JONES NAKANISHI

Unlike most Americans, Wendy has never possessed either a dishwasher nor a clothes drier, and has no desire to purchase them. She lives in the prefecture in Japan blessed with the most sunlight and likes hanging her clothes outside on a line, so they can be perfumed by fresh air. She also believes it is easier and faster to wash dishes by hand than by a machine.

The famous Japanese-American sculptor, artist, landscape and furniture designer Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) spent the thirteenth year of his life in Rolling Prairie, Indiana, the tiny town Wendy called home from the age of three till eighteen. He had been sent to an experimental school on the outskirts of the town by his American mother and then, when the school abruptly closed, after he had been there only a month, he lived in the town itself, where he was reportedly bullied by some natives for being half Japanese. Coincidentally, Noguchi spent most of the last years of his life in Mure-cho, a suburb of Takamatsu, on Shikoku Island, creating his sculptures in a studio and garden that now has been opened up to the public as a a ‘garden museum’ in his memory. Wendy also lived in Mure-cho for two years, and at the same time as Noguchi, working at a university nearby, shortly after her arrival in Japan. But she was unaware at this time of the Rolling Prairie connection that linked her to this remarkable individual described, in his New York Times obituary, as ‘a versatile and prolific sculptor whose earthy stones and meditative gardens bridging East and West have become landmarks of 20th-century art’.
She keenly regrets this missed opportunity to meet Noguchi and reminisce about Rolling.

When Wendy was eighteen, she had her heart broken at college. A sympathetic and wise friend suggested the perfect solution: Wendy became a camp counsellor for a summer at the ‘Foundation for the Junior Blind’ established in the late 60’s by a Californian businessman, Norm Kaplan, who had noticed, when he drove around LA, a puzzling phenomenon: many young African Americans sitting on their front porches all day, looking blankly forward, listening to the latest pop hots on huge ghetto-blasters. He learned that a disproportionate number of young African Americans contract an eye condition that leads to blindness. Norm wanted to give these children an escape from the city, a true holiday, so he established a camp (Camp Bloomfield) in the Santa Monica mountains near Malibu complete with a pool, a kitchen for learning how to cook, horseback riding, baseball (the ball emitted a sound, so the batter could aim), trips to the nearby ocean, lots of barbecues and parties and even the occasional excursion to Disneyland. Wendy found that the majority of these disadvantaged youngsters were cheerful, even joyous, without a trace of self-pity, and it was the perfect cure for her own despondency. She was there the summer of ’73.