Okura began to use wood as a sculpture material after a momentous visit to the United States in 1969, several years after he had completed a post-graduate course at Kyoto Kyoiku University. As he recently recalled, he studied and trained in a Zen temple trying to attain what Zen Buddhism calls a “pure emptiness” of spirit. The “pure emptiness” of spirit that he had tried and failed to attain in his youth in Japan, came years later while driving across the vast, empty expanses of desert in Arizona and New Mexico. Soon after his return to Japan, a carpenter in his neighborhood unexpectedly gave him a piece of wood, camphor laurel. He hadn’t been thinking of making anything out of wood and moreover, he didn’t know the first thing about wood carving or carpentry. As he began to work with this piece of wood, all this changed: “I was hooked on wood. By working with wood, I discovered a way to confirm not only my own existence, but also the vast presence of nature, of the entire cosmos, surrounding me.”42 In this piece of wood his experience of vast, empty space was fused with material substance into a powerful metaphor for a consciousness of existence.

Because Okura’s Zen-like “discovery” of the symbolic importance of wood came after his fortuitous visit to America, it is hardly surprising that he would want to continue working with wood when he came to Mountain Lake. During the first week of January, 1990, eight black walnut trees from the Jefferson National Forest at Little Stone Mountain in Wise County, Virginia were selected to be cut for the workshop.43 This was done in cooperation with members of the local community, including the National Forest Service, Louisiana-Pacific Corporation, and the Brooks Wood Products Research Center at Virginia Tech. Black walnut was chosen because it is a wood very like Zelkova, Japanese gray-bark elm, which is traditionally used for sacred objects in Japan.

Before the trees were cut, however, it was arranged by special permission from the Ujigami Shrine near Okura’s home in Uji City, Kyoto, Japan to perform a traditional Shinto ceremony. According to Shinto beliefs, trees in nature are understood as a part of the “universe outside;” once they are cut for the artist to use, they become part of the artist’s “universe within.” A blessing honors the living spirit of the trees and releases this spirit to the artist to make something beautiful.