Smelly art

However, after doing some research online and at the public library, I created a list of all of the people in Japan with the surname “Sato”, found their phone numbers and/or e-mail addresses and contacted each and every one of them. Believe me, this was a long list, as the surname “Sato” is kind of like “Smith” in Japanese, so you can imagine.

I inquired of each contact as to whether or not any of them had a relative named Hideki. 15 of them did, but none of them were balloon artists nor, in fact, artists at all. The closest I got was a 75-year-old man named Hideki Kato who made sculptures from fish bones, and it sounded like he, too, had been shunned by his family and by Japanese society in general; another “odu-daku”. He responded personally and said that he would like to deliver one of his sculptures to me but that no courier would handle it due to the odour. Is it just me, or is Japan a global leader when it comes to bizarre and sometimes smelly art? I can attest to the fact that it is the land of smelly food; if you’ve ever been in the same room with a dish of daikon (pickled radish) you’ll know what I mean.