Today is a big day.

Our first day learning to cut with Sensei Asaka Motoharu When it comes to practising mokuhanga, cutting is my weakest point. I have some mixed feelings - weak in the knees, but also very much looking forward to it. Then again, he looks pretty serious with that moustache. We definitely want to be on time for our first lesson. The alarm clocks are set early. Vladimir reads the e-mail that our sensei sent this morning, just in time to tell us that we are not expected until 10 am.

We sleep a little more, visit the 7/11 before heading to the studio. We arrive a little early and have breakfast on the bench at the local school. A gang of toddlers in pink hats (most still in nappies) pass us. They look cute. Waving AND walking is not easy. Some of them have obviously had a hard morning. The last four are being pulled along in the pram. One is alert enough to wave back.

We ring the doorbell, take off our shoes and go straight into the studio. The floor is raised. I barely fit under the ceiling. Don’t think too much about it, but it does feel a little claustrophobic. We take our seats at low cutting tables. There are six of them, two at a time, close together. You can barely walk between them.

Shit. We will be on our knees for a week cutting. It will be tough. But no way! Sensei Asaka moves my little table and shows me a hole in the raised floor where I can put my legs. So we are sitting on a kind of chair/floor. Phew!

He speaks no English, which we knew from the Japanese emails. There is no interpreter, so he just starts talking to us in Japanese. Difficult. A little later he picks up his mobile phone and we have to explain exactly what we want to learn to someone who speaks fluent English (It is one of his apprantices,Tarran). He translates.

Meanwhile, Alexandra has arrived, an American lady who is married to a Japanese. She has lived here for four years and talks Japanese. She wants to become a professional carver and will be translating for us all week. The system for becoming a professional is not easy. You can only become an ‘apprentice’ if the master asks you to. Before that, you have to show what you can do, work a lot and keep your fingers crossed that the question will ever come up… Then follows seven years of training.

Each of us is given a board with exercises stuck on it. Sensei shows us how to sit, how to hold our knife and how to cut. We have to show him our knives and do a measurement on our hands. It turns out that they are much too thick and coarse for his job. He thinks it would be better to shorten the handle. He starts to open my knife and wants to put a smaller handle on it. In the end, we both buy a study knife in our own size.

It is difficult. My hands are sweating so much that I can hardly hold the knife. Relax, SoetekinSan he says a few times. It soon becomes clear which one of the two of us is the Sensei. Vladimir gets a few approving growls, Asaka says he has experience. Luckily I chose the easy plank and Vladimir the more difficult one.

We give it our best and go, each at his own pace, according to piety and ability. Our Sensei is a joker, a sweet and very gentle man. He is a good teacher and there was absolutely no need to be afraid of him.

In the afternoon we go to a hotel nearby (which probably flourished during the 80’) and have something to eat. I choose fish with a creamy yuzu sauce. Mmmm. Soup and coffee à volonté. We each pay our share, Sensei goes to pay the bill. There is a small problem: the bill is not correct. On Tuesdays, women get a discount. Yes!

Sensei likes my shoes. Very traditional Japanese ones, he says. He wears socks where each toe is separate. It creates a kind of bond. We become friends. My tabi, by the way, are fantastic to wear.

We keep on going until a quarter to five and have a bit of homework to do. Walking past the Familymart where we buy our dinner, I happen to see two jars of melon ice-cream in the freezer! What a treat! Terry had just such a jar in his studio to use for the nori. He took us to the restaurant where he got it so that we could also have one. Unfortunately, they were no longer on the menu. But as fate would have it, from now on we can put our nori in one of those cool little jars with our kamishibai! The only thing we have to do is sacrifice ourselves to eat the melon ice cream.

After dinner, we work hard on our homework. The only table in our flat is a Japanese one. Unfortunately there is no leg hole in the floor.

Vladimir carves an almost perfect circle. Mine is already showing clear progress. Let’s just say I have my good and not so good moments.