Visit to a New Chashitsu

This weekend several members of our tea group were privileged to be invited to the opening of a new tearoom in Washington, D.C. The tearoom is located in an office building in the downtown area, a few blocks away from the White House. From the outside it looks like any other office, but once you go down a long hallway and into the tea space, you’re greeted by an open area where they can (and did, while we were there) have a ryuurei tana set up. (Ryuurei is a type of temae where tea is done sitting at a low table, with the host and guests sitting on stools. Because of the weight of the table and chairs and the potential for damage to a tatami mat, this is usually done in a room without tatami flooring.)

In a traditional tearoom, the guests will travel from the waiting area through a roji, a path leading through a garden, and then into the tearoom itself. In this particular arrangement, we stepped outside onto a deck overlooking the city, where a roji-style space had been set up (with the path but no living plants). We walked down the path and then entered the tea space from the outside, coming in and viewing the alcove with the scroll and the kettle and other utensils that had been set out.

The tearoom is set up in two parts; a main eight-mat room with the tokonoma (alcove) and the hearth at one end, and a six-mat room at the other. Removable doors either separate the two rooms or are removed to create one, as they were for the opening tea.

Urasenke provided the resources to build the room, and as a further show of support the head of the school (Oiemoto) sent his wife, daughter, and nephew to celebrate the opening – he himself was unable to come because it’s Rikyuki, the time when tea people remember the passing of the founder of our school (his ancestor, going back sixteen generations) and he’s not allowed to leave Japan at this time. (Someone said that he’s prevented from leaving the country by law, but I’m not certain about that.)

During the opening, we were honored to have Oiemoto’s daughter prepare tea for us, while her mother sat in the room and acted as assistant, and explanations were provided by a gyotei (high-level sensei) from Kyoto who also flew in for the event. In addition to everything else, Oiemoto personally wrote the calligraphy for a scroll that was given as a gift to the Washington tea association.

After being served tea and sweets, we were given a chance to take a closer look at the details of the room. One very nice touch was that on the crossbeam dividing the room, there are five types of wood. One type of wood was used to inlay cherry blossoms into the wood, so that anyone who visits the room will remember that the room was completed at cherry blossom time.

Speaking of, I also got a chance to visit the Tidal Basin area, where the Washington D.C. cherry blossoms are planted. They were just past full bloom when we got there – starting to shed their petals, but still very beautiful. Here are some photos:

I’m not sure what type of cherry trees these are, but they’re a bit different from the type we have planted in Philadelphia. Take a look. This first photo is from Washington:

And this is from a previous year’s bloom in Philadelphia:

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend, and we were all thrilled to be invited to this opening and very jealous of the Washington group’s beautiful new tearoom! Hopefully they’ll be able to use it in prosperity for many years to come.

A Memorial Tea

On Sunday we held a memorial tea in honor of Brother Joseph Keenan.



Brother Keenan was a member of the Christian Brothers and a professor of religion at La Salle University. In the 1980s, he became interested in tea ceremony and began studying at the New York branch of Urasenke, and spent a year studying in Japan. He was so passionate about tea ceremony that he convinced the university to allow one of the historic buildings on campus to be converted into a tea house, for which the Urasenke headquarters in Kyoto and the branch in New York donated the labor, the construction supplies, and the utensils. In the following years, hundreds of La Salle students and several dozen more members of the public got a chance to learn tea ceremony thanks to the university’s tea program, and countless more experienced demonstrations either at the university or performed by members of the tea program.

I was one of the La Salle students who took his class, and so he was my first tea teacher. I’ll never forget his sense of humor. It’s traditional at the end of each lesson to thank the teacher; he always used to joke that we had to thank him “whether you want to or not.” He started tea late in life, and after a while he had to have a knee replacement, but that didn’t stop him; he just sat on a hassock and kept going. He even took on extra hours of teaching and bought tea utensils with his own money to keep the program going.

In 1999, Brother Keenan died, the victim of a hit-and-run car accident. Teachers and students banded together to keep the program alive, and even after the university decided to end the program in 2007, we moved to Shofuso and kept whisking.

This year was the 10th anniversary of Brother Keenan’s death, and so we had a memorial tea for him. There were a number of students we couldn’t find, but our first guest was one of the early teachers at Urasenke La Salle, Yumiko Pakenham, and another one was the first student, Mariko Ono.

The gathering was very similar in format to a normal tea gathering, except that the tokonoma (the alcove where the scroll is hung and flowers arranged), there was no only a scroll but a portrait of Brother Keenan. On a small stand in front of the photo there was a vase with a flower arrangement and some space where tea and sweets would go later.

It was raining early in the day as everyone gathered. We started with hanayose, in which people who knew Brother Keenan came up and took flowers from a tray, arranging some in the vases that lined the tokonoma. We skipped the formal arrangement of charcoal in front of the guests (although we did use charcoal for the fire) and went straight into the food. Once the guests had eaten, there was a short break, and the sun actually came out! The air started to warm up and dry all the puddles, and it turned into a beautiful day.

After the break, Taeko-sensei made koicha (thick tea). The first bowl was presented to Brother Keenan (placed on the stand in front of his picture) and then she made tea for the guests. After koicha, usucha (thin tea) was prepared by Mariko-sensei, with some extra whipped in the kitchen by the assistants.

At the end of the gathering, we all took a little time to share memories of Brother Keenan before we went our separate ways. It was wonderful to be able to spend the time with some old friends, and also to share the memories. Without him, there would be no tea ceremony in the Philadelphia area. I hope he was looking down on us today and happy to know that the tradition is still strong.