Students and several professors from the institute followed practical courses in this Japanese know-how, also known as kadō, organized in partnership with the Japanese embassy in Morocco, and taught by professor Tatjana Felberg who presented in great detail the particularities of Ikebana, considered one of the most traditional ornamental arts in the empire of the rising sun.
According to Felberg, the magic of this art spans generations and centuries. It also differs from the arts of flower arranging in the West on many points. Westerners, according to the professor, rely in their works on the quantity of roses and colors and concentrate mainly on the beauty of the flowers. As for the Japanese, they rely on his explanations on the harmony between construction lines and color.
The Japanese also developed the art of achieving the harmony of the handmade pot with the flower itself, as well as the buds, leaves and branches.
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The art of Ikebana expresses people’s impressions of the nature around them in different ways. The degree of beauty of a branch in a flower, for example, symbolizes the season, a single rose symbolizes nature, bamboo expresses unity, and so on.
The beginnings of this traditional art date back to the 6th century, when a Japanese diplomat named Ono no Imoko visited the imperial palace in China as part of an official delegation. He was then fascinated by the Chinese method of arranging flowers. After his retirement, he immediately began to apply this art as part of religious rituals in Japanese temples.
Many ways of arranging flowers appeared during several historical periods in Japan, the oldest of which was to point the rose and the uppermost branches toward the sky to express devotion. Then a more advanced method of arranging flowers appeared in the 16th century, nicknamed “Rica.” It consists of representing the grandeur and beauty of nature by arranging the flowers in a style embodying Mount Meru, to which ancient Japanese mythology refers.
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Today, there are approximately 3,000 Ikebana schools in Japan where it is taught to more than 16 million Japanese and foreign students.
