Many students emerge from the Oomoto Arts seminar deeply inspired. In 1987, seminar alumni Liz Kenner and Linda Richardson took this a step further by founding a school of traditional arts in Marin County, north of San Francisco.
The American School of Japanese Arts (ASJA) is modelled closely after the Oomoto seminar. It offers an intensive summer seminar of 10 days to two weeks, teaching tea ceremony, ceramics, Kyogen comic theater, calligraphy and ink painting, and the martial art Shintaido.
The ASJA draws on the support of a distinguished faculty of Bay Area Japanese arts instructors, and over the past 10 years the ASJA has expanded to offer year-around workshops and traveling college programs in addition to its summer seminar.
A fair amount of cross-over has occured between the two schools, with many students going on from the ASJA program to study at the Oomoto seminar, and vice versa.
The current ASJA Director, Mario Uribe, is a graduate of the 1991 and 1992 Oomoto Seminars. Other board members include Liz Kenner, Kyotaro Deguchi, who joined as a honorary member in 1995, and Bodhi Fishman, who attended the 1991 and 1992 Oomoto Seminars and worked at Oomoto’s International Department from 1993 through 1996.
