On 18 May 1916, Mirra and Paul Richard arrived in Yokohama, Japan, after a hazardous two-month journey from England on the Kamo Maru .Two years earlier they had been in India. Together with Sri Aurobindo they had started to bring out a monthly philosophical review, Arya, with an English and a French edition, expounding a new synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. While the Mother and Paul Richard were in India in 1914-15, they were visited by a friend from Paris, the Danish artist Johannes Hohlenberg. He painted a portrait  of Sri Aurobindo. The Mother herself is not known to have done any painting or drawing during this period.
            The meeting with Sri Aurobindo was the turning point in the Mother's life . But Richard was forced to go back to France early in 1915 because of politics and the war, and she had no choice but to go with him. Now, a year later, they were returning to the East. Richard had been exempted from military service on medical grounds and had managed to have himself sent to Japan on business as a representative of certain companies. The Mother explained: "People didn't want to travel because it was dangerous-you risked being sunk to the bottom of the sea. So they were pleased when we offered and they sent us to Japan."
            The Mother knew little about Japan before her visit. An early painting of hers is evidently a copy of a Japanese wood-block print. These were in vogue in France in the late nineteenth century and influenced some artists in search of new ideas. But the Mother's painting does not show that she had any further familiarity with Japan and its culture beyond whatever negligible impressions were current in France at that time. In fact, she once stated, "I knew nothing of Japan. " The Mother went on to recollect that she had seen Japanese landscapes in vision while she was in France, exactly as she would see them later with her physical eyes. But she had thought they were scenes of another world, for they seemed to her too beautiful to belong to the physical world. She wrote in the second year of her stay:
             ...the country is so wonderful, picturesque, many-sided, unexpected, charming, wild or sweet; it is in its appearance so much a synthesis of all the other countries of the world, from the tropical to the arctic, that no artistic eye can remain indifferent to it.
            The Mother plunged, outwardly at least, into her Japanese experience. A remark in one of her talks in the 1950s certainly applies to her stay in Japan: "I have seen many countries, done what I recommend to others; in every country I lived the life of that country in order to understand it well, and there is nothing which interested me in my outer being as much as learning." At the same time, those of the Mother's Prayers and Meditations which were written in Japan show the intensity of her inner life in this period. From these intimate records of communion with the Divine, it is clear that she was far from being fully absorbed in the scenes, contacts and events of the world around her. Her life in Japan had another dimension than that of an ordinary sympathetic European visitor .
            Besides learning Japanese, the Mother began to paint again. The paintings she did in Japan are among her most appealing and reveal her affinity with the land and its people. In a talk many years later, she described in vivid detail the splendours of the Japanese landscape in various seasons and the skill and taste with which human hands have moulded Nature and blended their own constructions with the environment. She concluded: "I had everything to learn in Japan. For four years, from an artistic point of view, I lived from wonder to wonder ."

   Perhaps the principal artistic lesson to be learned from Japan, according to the Mother, is the unity of art with life. The Japanese culture, more than any other in recent times, has exemplified this truth:
         True art is a whole and an ensemble; it is one and of one piece with life. You see something of this intimate wholeness in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt; for there pictures and statues and all objects of art were made and arranged as part of the architectural plan of a building, each detail a portion of the whole. It is like that in Japan, or at least it was so till the other day before the invasion of a utilitarian and practical modernism. A Japanese house is a wonderful artistic whole; always the right thing is there in the right place, nothing wrongly set, nothing too much, nothing too little. Everything is just as it needed to be, and the house itself blends marvellously with the surrounding nature.
        But it was not only the landscapes and the aesthetic side of Japan which delighted the Mother. She saw much to admire in the character of the people: the energy, the spontaneous love of beauty found even in working-class people and peasants-not only in an elite as in Europe and the capacity for abnegation and self-sacrifice. The Mother wrote in 1917 about the characteristic restraint, the unselfishness and the hidden emotional qualities of the Japanese when unspoiled by the less fortunate aspects of Western influence:
         But if you have-as we have had-the privilege of coming in contact with the true Japanese, those who have kept untouched the righteousness and bravery of the ancient Samurai, then you can understand what in truth is Japan, you can seize the secret of her force. They know how to remain silent; and though they are possessed of the most acute sensitiveness, they are, among the people I have met, those who express it the least. A friend here can give his life with the greatest simplicity to save yours, though he never told you before he loved you in such a profound and unselfish way. Indeed he had not even told you that he loved you at all. And if you were not able to read the heart behind the appearances, you would have seen only a very exquisite courtesy which leaves little room for the expression of spontaneous feelings. Nevertheless the feelings are there, all the stronger perhaps because of the lack of outward manifestation; and if an opportunity presents itself, through an act, very modest and veiled sometimes, you suddenly discover depths of affection.
        The Mother is evidently thinking here of her own Japanese friendship. She had adopted the Japanese way of life in order to get to know the real Japan.
  She understood the conditions for entering into the heart of the Japanese culture, with its elaborate rules of behaviour:
        If one does not submit oneself to rules there, one may live as Europeans do, who are considered barbarians and looked upon altogether as     intruders, but if you want to live a Japanese life among the Japanese you must do as they do, otherwise you make them so unhappy that you can't even have any relation with them. In their house you must live in a particular way, when you meet them you must greet them in a particular way. ...
                    Mirra and Paul Richard lived in Tokyo during their first year in Japan. There they shared a house with a young couple, Dr. S. Okhawa and his wife. Okhawa was a professor of Asian History who actively sympathised with the Indian freedom movement. Interviewed in 1957, Professor Okhawa recalled his close contact with the Richards: "We lived together for a year. We sat together in meditation every night for an hour. I practised Zen and they practised yoga." A painting of a Japanese lady on a verandah overlooking a lake is said to be of Madame Okhawa in a house in Kyoto where the Mother stayed with her one summer. This painting is dated 1918.
                   The Richards moved to Kyoto sometime in 1917 and remained there through the following year. In Kyoto they came to know Dr. and Madame Kobayashi. Kobayashi was a surgeon by training but had turned to a method of meditation and natural healing taught by a certain Dr. Okhata. The Mother spoke of this simple and practical discipline in a talk on 8 September 1954. The practice, called "still-sitting" , attracted thousands of followers. After Okhata's death in 1921 and Kobayashi's in 1926, Madame Nobuko Kobayashi continued the movement.
                   Nobuko Kobayashi sometimes meditated with Mirra in a small room on the second floor of the house where the Richards were staying, which was later converted into a Tea House. 60 While in Kyoto, the Mother did a painting of her. friend preparing medicine in her room , as well as a portrait of her in ink and a miniature portrait in oil on ivory which she presented to her . They remained in contact long afterwards and Madame Kobayashi visited the Mother in Pondicherry in 1959.
                   Among a number of drawings done by the Mother in Japan we find a pencil sketch of Rabindranath Tagore dated Tokyo, 11 June 1916 . Tagore had come to Tokyo a week earlier, a few days after his arrival in Japan for a three-month visit which was his first to this country .On the afternoon of the 11 th, the date of the drawing, he delivered a speech at the Imperial University in Tokyo, "The Message of India to Japan". The Mother's pencil drawing of the poet was later rendered in ink, of which there are two versions . The Mother met Tagore again in 1919 in Kyoto. She is seen with him in a group photograph taken there.
                   One of the Mother's outstanding portraits is the one of Hirasawa Tetsuo , a poet and an artist. The circumstances of their acquaintance are not known. The Mother said the portrait was done in one sitting.
                   The Richards visited the Daiunji temple in Sarashina, Nagano prefecture, about 200 km northwest of Tokyo, between 12 and 15 September 1918. The Mother must have been especially struck by the beauty of this temple and its surroundings, which she depicted in some pencil drawings , a  couple of oil paintings , and a long scroll on paper in India ink . This scroll is dated and signed in Japanese in the lower right corner:

"15th September, 1918
At the Daiunji Temple
Mirra".

       The scroll contains some other calligraphic writing in Japanese in spaces not occupied by the painting. This writing is by two persons whose names are given, presumably monks of the temple. In the central part of the scroll are some lines "written by Shu Ogawa" , who took them "from a composition by Rihora". The writer declares, "Cod makes his temple with heaven and earth."
 He exhorts people therefore not to shut themselves up in their temple and think of it as their heaven and earth. In the lower left corner of the scroll is a somewhat longer passage "written by Kyozen Fugai when Master Caji Rishi visited the Daiunji Temple". The name "Caji Rishi" is puzzling, but it must refer to Paul Richard. The Japanese verses compare the people scattered over the earth, who are in their origin "celestial people", to "the seeds of millet sown in a ploughed field". The writer concludes:
       Likewise, whoever visits this thousand-year-old temple, from however far-off a country he might come, has the same mind as I have in the Dharma of the universe .
      The Mother brought with her to Pondicherry another scroll with Japanese writing signed and dated by the chief priest of the Daiunji temple. This scroll praises the beauty of the temple in various seasons and invites the visitors to return at any time. Before leaving, the Mother made an ink sketch of Paul Richard in the temple's visitors' book and signed it in Japanese . Richard wrote a message in French.
      The Mother's sojourn in Japan approached its end. For all the beauty which attracted the eye in this country , and for all the virtues of the national character, she felt that something was missing. "Not once," she remarked about Japan, "do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organised mental-physical domain. "The very efficiency of the organisation seemed to exclude the possibility of a higher spiritual freedom. The Mother's stay in Japan could be no more than an interlude and a period of preparation for her real work. Having already met Sri Aurobindo, she knew that her destiny lay in India. She and Paul Richard departed as soon as circumstances allowed, arriving in India on 24 April1920.

see also

Early Art Studies

Years in the Studio

Life among Artists

Théon and Algeria

Pondicherry
The Later Paintings and Drawings