Smith Club of San Francisco
and Marin
Alumnae Profiles
Barbara Curtis Adachi '45
Fall 2002
Profile by Sarah Cross Mills '66
Part I
It may be no coincidence that someone who felt herself an outsider during her growing-up years would spend much of her life adding to the English-speaking world’s understanding of another culture. Courageous and determined, Barbara Curtis Adachi penetrated areas of Japanese art and craft unknown to most Westerners. In books, newspaper columns, photographs and talks, she offers an inside view of the arts, crafts, theater and foods of Japan. Renowned for her depth of insight in these areas, Barbara continues to share her expertise in engaging lectures. Her curiosity is currently leading her into deeper knowledge of Russian studies, another link to her early childhood. But these are only some of this energetic woman’s interests.
Barbara Curtis’s father was responsible for Japanese and Manchurian Citibank operations in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Barbara was born in Harbin, a city in China’s far northeastern region of Manchuria, which shares a border with Siberia. Russian nurses tended Barbara and her brothers, the Chinese cook prepared some Russian foods, the children spoke Russian – Barbara says she actually thought she was Russian! When she was six, her family moved back to Connecticut and Barbara felt like an outsider for the first time when she was teased about her accented English. Two years later, the Curtises returned to the Far East, settling in Tokyo.
With both parents at least six feet tall, two blond brothers and her own red hair, Barbara and her family were definitely seen as different. Anyone who is not Japanese is always an outsider in Japan, even today, explains Barbara. She felt more like an outsider in her own country again as a teenager, however, where boarding school classmates’ narrow preconceptions of a girl from Japan cast her as “different” from the outset. In hindsight, she feels this may have served her well, as her decision to focus on her studies led to her acceptance at Smith. Barbara’s degree is in Economics, but she concentrated just as heavily on Russian Studies. She chose the former as her major to prove to her father that a female could do well in this male-dominated field. Her first job may have been landed because of this choice, but her Smith education was valuable to her more for its doorways into numerous areas of interest and its tools to pursue them.
Entering in the fall of ’41, Barbara’s college years coincided with World War II. In fact, her father arrived on campus on December 7, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Having been advised two months earlier to leave Japan, he had taken an indirect route to Northampton where he was to speak to Barbara’s house about current world politics.
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Part II - A New Career as a Writer
In May of 1946, Barbara returned to Tokyo and a country suffering from massive destruction. She worked with the Allied Occupation Forces, locating and returning to original owners all manner of non-Japanese owned property: from hog bristles and warehouses full of mother-of-pearl buttons to real estate, all appropriated by the Japanese during the war. After marrying an American attorney of Japanese descent in 1949, the births of her two children brought brief interruptions to her work on this and other post-war projects.
It sometimes happens that, while pursuing an interest, one seemingly minor event can inspire a significant turn in life. For Barbara, a survey class in Japanese art and history was such an event. Excited and motivated by the instructor, Barbara’s energies couldn’t be contained, and she began an in-depth study of Japanese art. Perhaps this was a way of building a bridge from her place outside the Japanese culture.
Once her children were settling into young adulthood in the States, Barbara began a ten-year career (1971-1981) as a columnist for The Mainichi Daily News, an English-language paper devoted to helping overcome language and cultural barriers. Her first columns were about the lecture series on art that she began directing. Soon she was writing a weekly food column and regular reviews of museum and traditional craft exhibits and kabuki and bunraku (adult puppet theater) performances. She avoided critiques in her columns, focusing instead on the background of the art and craft and encouraging people to experience these cultural offerings themselves; she didn’t believe that an outsider should attempt to be a serious critic of work that was so intricately woven into the history and culture of a country not her own.
Based on interviews conducted in Japanese with craftsmen and performers in their workshops or backstage, Barbara’s “Hands of Japan” series of nearly 100 feature articles, illustrated with her own photographs, was immensely popular. Barbara’s first book Living Treasures of Japan (with a foreword by her friend, the renowned British potter Bernard Leach) was published in both English and Japanese in 1973. To honor its 75 years in Japan, Mobil Oil commissioned her to create this tribute to some of the government-designated artists who were preserving the richness and beauty of ancient Japanese traditions.
In the mid-50’s, amidst post-war rebuilding and economic boom, Japan had established this highest award in the arts with its honorable title, Living National Treasure, to show its reverence for traditional culture and the place art and craft hold in Japanese everyday life. It is much to Barbara’s credit that these Living Treasures revealed to an American woman the details of their craft. Early on, she was challenged by the late Shoji Hamada, Japan’s most famous potter to prove herself a serious writer when she arrived for their scheduled interview and found him too busy and angered by the visit. Knowing the importance in Japan of using an indirect approach rather than getting straight to the point, she reminisced about the small clay animals he happened to have given her children as toys many years earlier. He then began pointing out piece after piece of his worldwide collection of crafts, silently awaiting her identification of function and place of origin. Then he did the same with a thick book of photographs of ceramics. Finally, accepted as serious and proficient, she was able to conduct her interview.
The Voices and Hands of Bunraku, Barbara’s second book, was commissioned by Mobil five years later. This time, she had to convince Mobil that she could present an intimate look inside the artistry and traditions of Japan’s three-century old puppet theater and dispel the idea that it was too esoteric for broad appeal. Barbara had already photographed many hours of rehearsals and backstage scenes of the National Bunraku Troupe, so the book contains her own photographs. In a revised and expanded edition titled Backstage at Bunraku (1985), many more of the photographs are hers. Barbara has accompanied this Troupe on three tours in the U. S., lecturing between acts and describing on national TV the world of puppeteers, narrators, musicians and backstage workers who make up a Bunraku performance.
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Part III - Adventures in Food
Since she baked her first cake at age eight in a tin oven over a charcoal fire, Barbara has been fascinated with food and cooking. Some of her first newspaper articles about food were intended to help non-Japanese readers learn how to use Japanese ingredients.
Because she featured only recipes she tried herself, and each article included between one and five recipes, Barbara was as busy cooking as she was writing. Soon after ending her stint as a columnist, she conceived, wrote and edited a cookbook, Recipes from International Tokyo Tables. A two-year project that raised a significant amount of money for Tokyo’s leading charitable club, the book includes recipes from the wives of more than fifty foreign ambassadors living in Tokyo in the early 80’s. Of course, Barbara tested the several hundred recipes given to her for this book.
She spent the next ten years writing a weekly column called “Adventures in Food” for another English-language newspaper. An on-going friendship with Julia Child ’34 began in 1983 when she participated in the first of several cooking courses with Julia. Barbara says, “Julia is a generous, kind, dedicated woman with a superb sense of humor. She hates anything and anyone phony. And as far as food and cooking go, no unnecessary frippery and sprinkles of this and that, just fine ingredients treated with care and respect.”
Barbara belongs to several food societies whose members study trends in ingredients and methods as well as historical and anthropological aspects of food. For one of her most popular presentations, she illustrated the close connection between the Japanese kitchen and art, exhibiting many finely crafted pieces such as grinding bowls, graters, steamers, lacquer bowls, chopsticks – all showing the creativity and versatility of Japanese craftsmen. These items, made for food storage or preparation, dining or tea ceremonies, represent Japanese “living art”, art that is part of daily life.
For years Barbara has shared the depth and breadth of her knowledge through articles, lectures, television interviews and demonstrations, film consultations, even a short-term residency at the Yale School of Drama. She has created not only a wide circle of friends in her areas of interest but also extensive collections (now residing in several museums or universities) of photographic images, performance and exhibit programs, books, crafts, and large pottery pieces made by two of the Living National Treasures.
Today Barbara titles one of her favorite talks “Taste: Past, Present and Perfect” in which she engages her audience in remembrances of foods they were passionate about. The bridge between past and present and between cultures is central to all of Barbara’s work. Her enthusiasm and sincerity have opened doors to learning from those who went before her and have inspired deeper curiosity in those who follow. She has certainly also shown how someone with determination and courage can build a bridge to cross from outsider to insider.
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