SEQUIM — “Come upstairs,” says the impish hostess, “and you will understand my paintings.”
A trip to the loft belonging to Ryoko Toyama and her husband, Eckart Mildenstein, provides at least two views: one across Sequim Bay, and another into her artistic process. For five years now, Toyama has lived perched on this hillside, facing water, sky and colors ever in flux.
And Toyama’s home, with its book-lined walls, wide windows and free-ranging conversations, also gives you a fresh view of the modern world, of the joys of a life devoted to the sharing of knowledge.
Toyama has seen much of this world, from inside and outside the great libraries of America.
She was born in Dairen, China, in 1938; her father ran a bakery that supplied the Chinese army.
When he lost his business amid World War II, her father took the family back to his homeland of Japan, where they started over.
He was determined, Toyama said, to give her something that could never be taken away.
“He and my mother believed in art and education,” she added.
So along with her required studies, she took piano lessons. That was a disaster, though, so Toyama, who was 8 years old when she relocated to Japan, switched to basic painting classes.
From the time she was a young teenager, Toyama’s goal was to be financially independent. She saw how other Japanese women had to depend on men for their living, and made up her mind early that she would have a career.
One of a few girls accepted to an all-boys high school, Toyama defied the science teacher who predicted his girl students would soon drop out, since he believed females were biologically inferior to males.
Toyama excelled in English, and by the time she was 16 and in her last year of high school, she was more than ready for something other than her language textbook.
One day, she picked up The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway’s tale of a Cuban fisherman battling a giant marlin, and proceeded to read it in class.
Deeply moved by the story, Toyama started to cry. This got the teacher’s attention, and she was made to show what she was reading — though the teacher didn’t punish her for switching books.
Toyama went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in German literature at Niigata University in Japan; today she still speaks German, Chinese, Japanese and English.
The job she could get after college, though, was accounting machine instructor at National Cash Register’s Tokyo office.
Though the work wasn’t right for the long term, she met people at NCR who helped her emigrate to the United States, where she hoped for a new life as a professional woman.
She started out teaching Japanese at the U.S. Army’s language institute in Monterey, Calif., but the work didn’t suit her. She went back to school and earned a master’s in library science at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. — and began a career that would take her far over the next 40 years.
Toyama went to work at the Library of Congress first, in 1968, as a descriptive cataloger; in 1973 she moved to the University of Oregon Library, where she was head of the Japanese collection and where she would earn another master’s, this time in linguistics.
In 1981, she crossed the country again, to join the team of librarians at Columbia University in New York City — but not until after she spent a year on scholarship at the University of California- Berkeley, earning a third master’s degree in library automation.
Toyama won that scholarship just as she was hired at Columbia. “They waited for me,” for the year it took to complete her studies.
At Columbia, this woman of curiosity and intellect was in her element.
“We librarians are very quiet,” she says. “But our minds are very open. We’re exposed to so many scholars.”
And a library, Toyama adds, is a place where your thinking is unfettered by time or national boundaries. Writers and other explorers from around the world have left their discoveries there so we can delve into them, decades and centuries later.
Toyama believes in free access to information for all, and in careful preservation of materials; to block access, she says, is to delay the progress of humankind.
As a librarian, Toyama was seated in the proverbial front row for the revolution brought on by computers. Columbia University endorsed her pursuit of a degree at Berkeley because it was clear, by the time she went to study there in 1980, that a new, wired world had arrived.
And Toyama knew she needed that third master’s degree if she was to move into the high-tech age.
“My first master’s degree [in library science] gave me a job,” she adds. “My second degree, at the University of Oregon, enriched my life” by allowing her to explore the field of linguistics.
Also while at the U of O, Toyama’s life was changed by a man who came to the library.
Mildenstein, a German-born visiting professor of economics, needed a government document. She helped him find it. They’ve been married 34 years now.
Living in New York City throughout the 1980s, Toyama and Mildenstein befriended artists and attended all manner of cultural events, including a performance by the Sankai Juku butoh dance group.
The performers, known for their shaved heads, white rice powder covering their bodies and slow, contorted movements, took Toyama back to one day in her girlhood.
“I thought: I’ve seen this before,'” she recalled.
The dancers looked like the people she had seen in 1946, when her family stopped at the train station in Hiroshima. Months after the August 1945 atomic bombing of that city, the survivors were like the walking dead, hairless, holding their hands out in silence to the train passengers.
The memory is still clear in Toyama’s eyes today.
Both Toyama’s and Mildenstein’s homelands were torn apart by World War II; in this country, they have found reasons to hope for a better future. For him, this country’s strength is in its diversity of people. For her, it has been a place to fulfill her dream of opportunity.
At 52, Toyama landed the job she had long hoped for: director of libraries at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. She and Mildenstein moved to New Brunswick in 1990, and stayed until her retirement in 2003.
“I am so fortunate,” she said, “to have had a 40-year career” in libraries.
Yet, Toyama is just as emphatic about “opening a new chapter.” After she and her husband arrived in Sequim in 2004, she took art classes at Peninsula College, joined the Blue Whole Gallery cooperative and volunteered as an interpreter — of both language and customs — for Sequim’s Shiso Sister City Association.
Shiso, Japan, a city that’s similar to Sequim in that logging and farming are important industries, has participated in an annual student exchange since 1996. Toyama serves as translator for the Japanese teenagers who come to Sequim, and teaches some Japanese language and culture to the Sequim students who travel to Shiso.
It is a great thing, Toyama believes, to live in a bilingual world. Fluency in English and Japanese helps her understand more people, while sharing her life with a European adds yet another lens.
The Internet has made a tremendous difference in Toyama’s life. She and her husband don’t need a television, she says, since they can use their computers to do research, read foreign newspapers, keep in touch with family members overseas — and live as citizens of the world.
“I no longer think of Japan, Germany and the U.S. as separate,” Toyama says. In our global society, “whatever we do, right or wrong, it’s going to affect everybody.”
At 72, Toyama is also exploring a new life as an artist. Her paintings, inspired by the clouds, water and woods surrounding her home, are odes to sun- and moonlight.
Among the paintings on display at the Blue Whole Gallery in downtown Sequim is “Revive,” a shimmering, emerald green canvas about water’s power to refresh.
The painting “is like a religious experience . . . it glows,” said Terry Grasteit, another artist who displays his abstract works at the Blue Whole.
Making art, for Toyama, is pure joy. “I have no inhibitions when I’m painting,” she says. In her home studio she is free, free to “express my own feeling about the world.”
These days “I have time to think and to feel. And that,” she says, “is something really refreshing.”
Another joy of retirement: “rediscovering my husband. I find him very interesting,” she says, grinning. “Eckart is a fine individual . . . We talk about history, music, the world.”
Their life together, enriched by books, art and a sense of global connection, has made Toyama both philosophical and optimistic. “History may move in a zig and zag,” she says. “But still, I believe we’re getting better.”
