Nakashima Foundation for Peace - Pacific Citizen 1987

'We had a fair amount of difficulty transporting it—it was a wide load,' the 81-year-old master woodworker said of the three-quarter-ton heart-shaped walnut altar, which made the trip from Nakashima's workshop in Bucks County, Pa., to Manhattan in a 40-foot flatbed truck.

Concert for Peace

About 5,000 people gathered in the cathedral, where they heard the blessing and dedication of the altar as part of the cathedral's fourth annual Concert for Peace.

Nakashima said that the symbolic genesis of the altar "was perhaps a thousand years ago in Japan, the time when the great forests with huge trees existed and the spirit of union of man and nature was deep and real."

Having heard that the vast Gothic space was a bit drafty, Nakashima was atypically clad in a three-piece suit rather than his traditional Japanese coat.

Among those accompanying him were his wife Marion, son Kevin, daughter Mira Nakashima-Yarnall, her husband Jon, and their children Maria, Misha, Satoru and Shanti Amagasu.

Financed largely by Nakashima, the altar, which cost about $10,000, is the final chapter of a saga that began three years ago, when one of Nakashima's loggers procured the tree from a Long Island estate.

Lengthy Process
The tree was hauled to North Carolina and back after a mill there informed Nakashima that no saw on the East Coast could cut the 125-foot tree into boards. Nakashima's friend Scott Wineland flew from California to Philadelphia to cut the log with an eight-foot chain saw—a process that took a week.

After two years of air- and kiln-drying the logs, Nakashima spent another two-and-a-half months building the altar, which was carefully planed and sanded and then finished with his trademark butterfly rosewood inlays. "I felt the peace movement needed a symbol, something tangible, something you can put your hands on" said Nakashima in an interview last year. "It was a great tree. Trees with this character should have a special meaning and special use."

Religions Represented
The altar, on top of which rests a bonsai tree, is flanked by two menorahs, a Moslem prayer rug and two Shinto vases, in keeping with the cathedral's mission as "a house of prayer for all nations." Also dedicated that night were an eternal flame from Hiroshima and a 14-foot painted cross by Carlos Sanchez Arias entitled 'The Crucifixion of Nicaragua."

The concert featured a prayer read by actress Ellen Burstyn, remarks by composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, and music that included Schubert's Mass in G, two meditations for cello by Bernstein and "Amazing Grace," sung by Odetta

"Let us commit ourselves, yet once again, to the vision of racial harmony and justice in this city," the Very Rev. James Parks Morton, dean of the cathedral, said in a prayer for peace. "We know by now where such discord can lead. We know by now that we must overcome. We must be one people in the city of New York Let this Continued on next page be a special message from this gathering to our fellow New Yorkers on this New Year's Eve."

The cathedral's non-sectarian nature provided "an interesting sort of ambiance" and was "quite unusual in our society ...anything goes," Nakashima later told the Pacific Citizen. Although he originally wanted the altar to be in the United Nations building, he found the UN "very political, you don't get anything done there." Furthermore, the building didn't have any "nice, open spaces... that are attractive."

Steven Rockefeller, dean and professor of religion at Middlebury (Vt.) College and Nakashima's friend and client, served as an intermediary between the woodworker and the cathedral, and headed a fund-raising committee for the project.

With the stock on hand to build other altars, Nakashima is considering Nagasaki as the site for the next project 'There's no starting date," he said. "We're just talking about it."

As with the UN, he discovered that the idea of placing the altar in Hiroshima "didn't work" because that city is "much more political than Nagasaki," due in part to factionalism among peace groups there.

Mentioning the Soviet Union and Jerusalem as other possible altar sites, he said, "I think we have enough material to do several extraordinary tables." The Seattle-born Nakashima, who describes himself as a "Hindu Catholic:' earned an architectural degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied in Paris, Tokyo and Pondichery, India, where he lived in a Hindu ashram. After wartime internment in Idaho, he moved to New Hope, Pa., where he has been practicing the craft of furniture-making ever since.

Nakashima's works are included in the permanent collections of the American Craft Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the National Museum of Modem Art in Tokyo, and elsewhere. He summed up his philosophy and technique in the 1981 book The Soul of a Tree.

JACL named him JA of the Biennium in the arts-literature-communications category in 1990.

Contributions Accepted
Nakashima said that contributions are still being accepted for the first altar. "If we have any surplus, we'll just put it into the second altar," he added.

Tax-deductible contributions can be made in the following "Honorary Woodworker" categories:
East Indian Rosewood—$1,000;
Persian Walnut—$500;
English Oak Burl—$100;
Claro Walnut—$50;
Black Walnut—$25.

Send donations to:
Nakashima Altar for Peace
Office of the Dean, Cathedral of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10025.

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