Mino City, a small, traditional municipality of approximately sixty thousand inhabitants, is in the Central Highlands of Honshu, the main island of Japan. Forty-five kilometers north of Nagoya, on the Nagara River, Mino has been an important area for hand papermaking since the eighth century. The Japanese government recognizes Mino paper as an Important Intangible Cultural Heritage. Kozo, cultivated in local fields and harvested annually, is the main fiber used for Mino paper. This kozo and the sus made in Mino may be the finest in the world. In the 1960s more than three hundred master papermakers regularly produced handmade paper in their home studios in Mino. Today that number is greatly reduced as machine paper manufacturing has taken over, but local governments and institutions are trying to encourage and preserve the hand papermaking tradition.    During the residency the artists spend ten days at the Mino Washi Museum learning to make paper from master papermakers on the staff. The artists then use their own paper to create art. At the end of the residency an exhibition of works by the artists is held at the Museum, a striking modern building with three floors of exhibitions about papermaking history and techniques, and a gallery devoted to changing art exhibitions featuring works made with washi. The Museum has a large well-equipped workshop area where papermaking classes are taught and visitors can make a sheet of paper. The Museum opens its workshop and research facilities to the Paper Art Village Project's artists, another example of how closely these two organizations work together.    A committee of art professionals selects the artists for the Project each year, based on applications and slides. The residency award provides travel expenses, accommodations in Japan, studio space and materials to make artwork, and a stipend. Artists donate at least one work made during their residency to the Project's permanent collection. The participating artists represent all media, but all use paper in some way in their work.   Artists selected for the first year of the Project, 1997, were from Costa Rica, France, Japan, Iceland, Norway, and Venezuela. In 1998, the participating artists came from Croatia, the Czech Republic, Iceland, Italy, Russia, and Spain. I was selected as one of the artists for the 1999 Paper Art Village Project, which lasted from early September to early December. The other artists participating with me in 1999 came from Croatia, France, Italy, Japan, and Paraguay.    Communication and language posed the biggest challenge for the 1999 artists. Only the Japanese artists spoke Japanese. Each of us had a volunteer translator who spoke our language somewhat, but communication was still difficult. Few people in Mino speak English, much less Italian or French. The artists from Italy and France spoke only their native languages, which only a few of the other participants also knew. When we were having lessons from the papermaking masters, who spoke only Japanese, it was hard for everyone to understand. We used many hand signals.   The studios for the artists in downtown Mino are historically inspiring and provide atmosphere, but they have some limitations. They are far away from the Museum, lack good lighting, have no white walls for hanging works, and have poor heating and cooling systems. The studios have minimal papermaking equipment and few basic tools, but they have plenty of space, indoors and out, and the artists in the Project can also make paper at the Museum. In the studio garden area, I taught the other artists my somewhat unorthodox method of making large sheets by pouring the pulp onto large screens suspended over the backs of chairs. I use a pitcher and squirt bottles to design unique sheets with different colors of pulp. I found that mixing already prepared and beaten kozo, which we were able to purchase, with a little tororo-aoi as a dispersion agent helped to distribute the fibers evenly. We left the sheets to dry on the screens. In this way the other 1999 artists and I were able to make large sheets at the studio without any special equipment.    Lucy Yegros, from Asuncion, Paraguay, has been working with handmade paper and woven textiles for a number of years. She makes paper from cotton and other fibers from Paraguay. She liked the unique transparency and texture of the Mino papers. During the residency Lucy created a shrine-like installation recalling South American native altars, with bamboo, handmade paper, drawing, and painting. Many of the objects she made with the Japanese paper were goddess figures, reflecting her strong interest in feminism.   Mejra Mujicic, from Zagreb, Croatia, also used handmade paper in her work before coming to Japan. She had imported paper from Thailand and other Asian countries, but had not previously made her own. In Mino, Mejra made soft, white, lace-like paper to create an installation for the Museum exhibition: multiple paper pillows that seemed to float in space. Mejra also worked on another installation, which she took back to exhibit in Croatia. In this work she used sheets of thin, lace-like, black and white paper that she painted and printed on with rubber stamps, creating fields of obsessively repetitive patterning.   Another artist in the group also uses only black and white in his work. Pino Barilla, from Rome, is primarily a sculptor who creates large geometric constructions of painted wood and rope. Before coming to Mino, he had made large textural paintings on thick, sturdy, Italian-made papers. He typically puts a layer of black or white acrylic on the heavy paper and then, before it dries, uses a scratching tool to dig out linear patterns, creating a relief surface. During his residency in Mino, Pino made many paintings with white and black paint and acrylic gel on the handmade Japanese paper. These minimalist, hard-edged, geometric paintings deal with stress and balance between opposing forces. A similar concern with the changing forces of gravity and energy is evident in his sculptures.    Pino made two large sculptures using Mino paper. He constructed a wooden framework and covered it with paper and with string manufactured from strips of paper. He painted these paper-covered frameworks with white and black paint and used his scratching technique to create a richly patterned surface on the severe geometric forms. Pino's sculptures were so large that they almost did not fit through the doorway of the studio, and moving one work to the Mino Washi Museum for the exhibition required several strong volunteers and a flatbed truck.   Another sculptor in the 1999 Project created bamboo armatures in the shape of boats and covered them with Japanese handmade paper. Louise Giamari, from Paris, usually makes earth-covered burlap figures and animals that she groups and displays as installations. Her most recent series of sculptures was inspired by the poetry of Antoine Fouco; during her stay in Mino she continued to work with images suggested by his poetry. She created an installation of three ethereal paper boats suspended in space, which was exhibited at the Museum. Louise also made many small drawings and paintings on the paper she learned to make in Mino.    Yumiko Yamazaki, from Osaka, had never made paper before this residency. Her previous work was sculptural, usually abstract organic forms constructed from plaster and painted black or white. She also made abstract black and white paintings on paper. During the residency, Yumiko spent many hours at the Museum making paper. She did an extensive, time-based project that included making at least one sheet of washi each day. She used the handmade paper to represent a remembrance of a particular time and place. The paper became a repository, literally and figuratively, documenting what transpired during a given period in a specific plot of ordinary earth. Her art work, Plants, was the presentation of this documentation in three forms: a video she made to show the story of the project; handmade paper sheets she formed and exposed to the weather of each particular day; and handmade paper sheets in which she embedded plant specimens collected at regular intervals.   The other Japanese artist in the 1999 Project was from the nearby city of Gifu. Yoshihisa Hasegawa paints abstracted landscapes, portraits, and figure studies. Because he teaches traditional Japanese painting at Gifu University, he did not have much time to participate in the residency, but he shared with us his skill at preparing and sizing washi for painting with acrylic and other wet media. He had not made paper before but regularly used Japanese handmade paper as a painting surface. He had two large paintings on washi in the Museum exhibition: one a brooding surrealistic self-portrait, the other an abstracted landscape with leafy plant forms.    Although I normally use only Western methods and fibers for papermaking, I gained some experience with Japanese papermaking during a 1996 residency at the Duntog Foundation in the Philippines. In Japan I wanted especially to experiment with the transparent qualities of Mino paper. I used very thin paper sheets with bits of horsehair and horsehair string to create an installation called Different Views, composed of multiple suspended maps showing the world from different perspectives. The map on the wall in my bedroom in Mino inspired me. Instead of the world I was used to seeing, with America in the center, this view had a very large Japan in the center with the United States very small, almost off the map. I drew the map images in my installation with acrylic paint; light coming through the thin collaged papers illuminates the subtle colors of the dyes and the contrasting transparent and opaque areas.   I also made another, larger installation work, called Turning Over a New Leaf, in which I used Japanese handmade paper, acrylic paints, horsehair string, and mesh fabric. For this participatory installation work I created more than two thousand handmade paper leaves, which I painted red on one side and green on the other. Viewers were invited to participate in the work by turning over a leaf, continuously changing the work from red to green and back again. Viewers could also write a promise or resolution in the handmade paper books I made for the installation.   Continuing my Bird Watching series, I made a public art installation, twenty-eight bird sculptures arranged as a site-specific installation on the Mino Bridge. The oldest suspension bridge in Japan, it is now used only for pedestrian and bicycle traffic. I made my birds of kozo fiber paper over a wire armature, painted them with acrylic paints, and coated them with SculptorCoat and outdoor-grade polyurethane. They remain on view indefinitely.    Living and working in Japan was a rare experience that gave me new insights into my own culture and my identity as an American, as well as lasting influences from Japanese culture. I appreciated the opportunity to be with interesting artists from other countries; working so closely with them for three months made them seem like family, even though we did not all speak the same language. Above all, I now have a greater appreciation for the beauty and strength of Japanese paper and will continue to use it in my work.