The first day was a dinner with tea preceding. The event was
held in a private club in downtown
Philadelphia, and because they normally aren’t open on weekends we had the
whole place to ourselves. We had usucha in one of the meeting rooms prepared
ryurei style, which means that the host and assistant were seated at a low
table (one designed especially for this purpose) and the guests were seated at
tables with chairs. Here are a couple of photos of the tea setup. The first one is Drew Hanson, one of our teachers, sitting behind the table (misonodana), and the second is Azusa Matono, one of our senior students, making tea there:
In an adjoining room, the Living Room, we had cocktails and
sushi. Like the rest of the club, the Living Room is decorated in colonial
style, with beautiful paintings, mahogany tables, a piano, and other period
furniture. For this event we had a touch of Japanese in that a koto player,
Motoko Yost, very generously donated her time to play for us.
The dinner was held upstairs in the dining room, where
Kayoko Hirota Sensei, of the Urasenke Tankokai North America Head Office in New
York, presented our president, Dr. Frank Chance, with a certificate showing our
new status and also a gift of money from the Sen family – that is, the grand
master of the Urasenke School, Oiemoto Sen Soshitsu (Zabosai) and the former
grand master, Daisosho Sen Genshitsu (Hounsai), and the rest of their family.
We had a full house for the dinner, a mix of new friends and
old, including some former students we hadn’t seen in years, two teachers from
the very beginning of our tea group’s establishment at La Salle (Yumiko
Pakenham and Janet Ikeda), and a group of students from the newly established
tea institute at Penn State University.
On Sunday, we had more formal tea gatherings at Shofuso.
Because the space is fairly small (being a Japanese house!) and we had around
fifty people to accommodate, we broke the gathering up into three separate
groups: Two smaller rooms with koicha (thick tea) and the largest space with
usucha (thin tea). The guests would start with either usucha or koicha and then
switch. Taeko Shervin Sensei was doing koicha in the actual tea room of the
house (also the smallest space); Drew Hanson was doing koicha in a ten-mat room
off of the veranda, and I was doing usucha in the fifteen-mat room, also just
off of the veranda.
Here’s a picture of the usucha space:
We were incredibly lucky in terms of weather. In November
the weather in this area can change very quickly, and of course we had
Hurricane Sandy coming through just two weeks before. It was very cold the
previous weekend, but the weekend of the tea it was not only sunny but in the
60s! The only downside is that the pond off of the veranda, the centerpiece of
the garden, had been drained for maintenance, but the garden was still
beautiful.
I won’t attempt to describe the utensils we used, because
with three separate rooms going there was so much! But for the sweets, in the
koicha sittings we had kooringiku mochi – red bean paste covered with
yuzu-flavored rice dough (mochi), covered with a flaked type of mochi that
looks like large flakes of snow. For usucha, we had a type of sweet that’s made
of sugar and agar-agar with a jelly like consistency (kangoori) in two shapes:
red maple leaves and yellow gingko leaves (which also had white bean paste in
them). The third sweet was made from a green soybean flour (suhamako) and
shaped like chrysanthemum leaves.
We were very lucky to have so many people coming out and
giving us their good wishes, and hopefully they all had a good time!
(And a big thank you to Miyo Moriuchi, who took all of the photos above except for the first one, which was by Keijiroh Yamaguchi.)
