When Still Online — Carrying the Practice Forward

My hesitation about teaching ikebana online was never whether a camera could show someone how to place a branch. Technique can be demonstrated through a screen. The more difficult question was whether the parts of ikebana that are less visible could travel with it.

Ikebana has been transmitted through people for generations. I learned from my sensei, who learned from hers, and behind that relationship is a much longer chain of teachers receiving a practice and becoming responsible for passing it on. Technique is part of that exchange, but so are habits of attention, cultural understanding, philosophy, language, correction, and small pieces of knowledge that are difficult to separate from the person who gives them to you.

This is why I have sometimes thought of ikebana teaching as a conversation extending across generations. Each person receives something inherited and then carries it forward through their own time. My concern with online education was whether the screen might reduce that living exchange into something purely visual: watch the demonstration, imitate the arrangement, move on.

A screen can bring people together across enormous distances while still making everyone feel strangely far apart. When I began designing When Still Online, the question was therefore not how to reproduce a physical classroom exactly. It was which parts of the classroom were essential enough that we needed to find another way to preserve them.

The requirement to photograph each arrangement from the front, left, and right came from something very simple: ikebana is three-dimensional, while a photograph is not. One beautiful front view can conceal structural or spatial problems that become obvious the moment we move around the work. Three views do not replace standing beside an arrangement, but they allow the instructor to reconstruct more of its physical presence and respond to the composition rather than only its most flattering image.

The live sessions address a different kind of distance. If a student makes the effort to show up, I want When Still to show up too. Each week creates a specific time in which teacher and students are once again gathered around flowers, even if the room is digital. Moribana, nageire, and freestyle are demonstrated together so that students encounter both the foundations of practice and the possibilities that grow from them.

All levels attend the same sessions for a reason. Beginners can see where continued study may eventually lead, while more experienced students are brought repeatedly back to ideas they once struggled to understand. In a physical studio, this happens naturally when different levels share a room. Online, it has to be designed deliberately.

The same is true of the slower certification periods. Digital education tends to reward speed: finish the video, complete the module, move on. Ikebana asks for something else. Books 1–4 retain a minimum four-month study period, and Book 5 requires ten months, because time itself is part of the education. Technique needs repetition, but perception also needs time to change. A student may return to an early lesson months later and suddenly recognize something they were unable to see the first time.

Cumulative access to earlier books is built around that same idea. The foundations are not something to discard once a certificate has been earned. They are material to return to, and the more experienced the student becomes, the more those early forms can reveal.

The written evaluation may be the most important part of the system for me because it preserves the reciprocal nature of teaching. Every student submits their work, and every submission receives a response. When something is successful, I want to identify it so the student understands what they have done well rather than arriving there by accident. When something feels unresolved, the purpose is not to declare the design right or wrong. It is to describe what I see, offer direction, and give the student something specific to reconsider the next time they work.

Ikebana is a conversation with flowers and materials, and every student develops that conversation differently. My role as an instructor is to guide rather than standardize it. I cannot stand beside every online student while they are arranging, but I can look carefully at what they made, respond to the choices in front of me, and continue the conversation from there. The 1:1 Studio sessions create another space for that relationship when a particular design or question needs more individual attention.

Throughout the process, I have kept returning to Principle 3 of the Fifty Principles of Sogetsu, which considers the continuity of ikebana’s spirit even as the form of its expression changes with time. I have been thinking about what that principle means when the change is not only in the arrangement itself, but in the way the practice is taught.

If ikebana is to remain alive, its spirit must be capable of moving through new circumstances without losing its center. Online education removes one of the most conventional conditions of practice: teacher and student no longer need to occupy the same physical room. That change can create distance, but it can also remove distance as a limitation. A student who may never be able to enter the HCMC studio can still receive instruction, show their work, ask questions, return to earlier lessons, and become part of an ongoing exchange.

The success of When Still Online will not be measured by whether it makes ikebana faster or more modern. I would rather know that something older has been carried successfully through a newer form. If a student can understand not only where to place a stem, but why the decision matters; if they can encounter some of the philosophy and cultural depth behind the practice; if they can develop an eye, receive guidance, and eventually speak about their own work with greater clarity, then something meaningful has crossed the screen.

There does not need to be an old spirit of ikebana and a new one. There is a practice continuing through time, taking different forms as circumstances change while asking the same fundamental thing of us: to pay attention.

Perhaps online learning is simply another point in that continuation. Distance becomes less important, the means of teaching change, and people who once seemed too far away can enter the same conversation.

What remains is the quality of attention we are willing to give one another when we are all still.

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