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context: calligraphy
Difficulty
I went to the library at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, which contains around 1.2 million books, and I imagine it has one of the best collections of books about Japanese art in the West. It has many hundreds of books about Japanese painting - and a tiny handful specifically about calligraphy. My favourite book on Asian art has 20 pages on Chinese jade - and less than 7 on Japanese calligraphy.
I am making that traditional western error of emphasis on this site. I can look at Japanese paintings more or less as well as a Japanese person can, but I can't read Japanese, so the poetry is lost on me, and someone once suggested that you could define 'poetry' as 'that which cannot be translated', so I'm buggered there too. This means the words could say 'Ha ha this is nonsense stupid barbarian foreigner screw you u r all gay' in childish scrawl for all I know.
Sorry - I am doing my best, but this section will be very inadequate.