Empowerment

I was talking to a member of a local taiko drumming group the other day, and she mentioned that a lot of American women tend to become interested in taiko because it makes them feel empowered. That really made me think about tea ceremony in comparison, because I honestly believe that no one, anywhere, in the entire history of the practice we know as chado, has ever come out of a tea room and said, “YES! Today I feel powerful!”

Part of that is by design. The philosophy of chado puts a lot of stress on the virtues of humility and self-discipline. Students are taught, from their very first lesson, to sit quietly, to follow a very specific set of rules, to keep your mind on what you’re doing and treat practice seriously. Some teachers are stricter about enforcing discipline than others, but ultimately, it’s about more than rules, it’s about an attitude. At its heart, tea ceremony is about achieving a state of tranquility – inner balance, if you will – by taking your focus off of yourself. At first, you focus on the rules. Then, on your state of mind. Then, on the other people in the room. Ultimately, the goal is to forget yourself completely.

That’s pretty much the opposite of empowerment, if you think about it, and in Western culture we tend to think of that as a bad thing. But maybe the real message of tea is that there are other goals one can pursue. Harmony. Tranquility. Respect. Purity of spirit. I guess that’s tea in a nutshell, ne? The pursuit of inner peace, even if only in moments.

(Not that I don’t enjoy a good drumming session now and then – it does get the adrenaline flowing!)

Happy Anniversary, San Francisco!

I was privileged to be able to attend the joint anniversary of two Urasenke institutions in San Francisco: The 60^th anniversary of the San Francisco Tankokai (Urasenke chapter) and the 30^th anniversary of the official branch. Being celebrated on a tight schedule, they had a day packed full of wonderful tea events.

The day started out with Zabosai Oiemoto, the 16^th generation head of the Urasenke school, preparing kencha at a local Buddhist church. Kencha is a tea ceremony where the tea prepared is offered to someone who has passed on, usually a family member, although last year Daisosho (the former head of Urasenke) did an offering tea in Hawaii for the people who died at Pearl Harbor. Oiemoto does these on a regular basis in Japan, but it’s very rare to see one in this country.

It’s really amazing to watch his temae, the way he prepares tea. It’s hard to put into words, because it’s not just about the movements, but the way that he moves, and the focus and mental attitude he maintains. I think it’s really the sum total of a lifetime of doing tea, the way that the practice just sinks into every part of his body and comes out whenever he prepares tea, without him having to think about it. (We weren't allowed to take photos while any of the tea gatherings were actually going on, but the organizers had a professional photographer taking pictures, so I'll post some when I get them.)

After the kencha we had sweets, thin tea, and thick tea. Not necessarily in that order, because, at a rough estimate, there were about 350 people in attendance, and that’s a lot of tea! I was in the first thick tea sitting, which was preceded by sweets. Because it was the first sitting, Oiemoto was there, and he acted as the first guest, drinking the tea prepared by the host and asking questions about the utensils. He got to drink from a bowl by Ohi Chozaemon IX (the past head of one of the branches of the Raku family), but the rest of us got a treat, too. The person who did the temae, Kinoshita Michiko, made 30 different wood-fired bowls specifically at this gathering.

The organizers of the event made a special effort to choose utensils that reflected the local area, especially for the thin tea sitting. There was a wonderful moment during the preparation of tea, which I need to take a moment to explain for those not familiar with tea ceremony. When the host begins to prepare tea, the front of the bowl is facing the host. (Some bowls, as with the one used for this particular gathering, have designs painted on them with a distinct front and back, and the bowl is intended to be viewed from the front.) So throughout the beginning of the tea, up to the point where the host whisks the tea in the bowl, the front was hidden, and then, just as she was preparing to serve the tea to the guests, she turned the front to face the audience – and we could see that the bowl had a design of the Golden Gate Bridge on it. The bowl was commissioned especially for this gathering from the artist Nakamura Shuho. The association also commissioned a number of copies of the bowl (I would estimate somewhere between 20 and 30) for the guests to drink from.

Here's a picture from the thin tea setup:

The calligraphy for the scroll was done by Zabosai Oiemoto; it reads "Shosei keion o fukumu," which means "The pine wind contains auspicious sounds." The incense container (below the scroll and to the left) depicts a Victorian house in San Francisco; the flowers were red camellia and white dogwood in a glass vase made by a studio in Berkeley. In the foreground is the mizusashi (cold water container) in the shape of a bag of treasures.

Following the teas was a lecture from Oiemoto where he talked a bit about the philosophy of tea. Afterward, his daughter, Makiko Sen, prepared tea for the audience, with his nephew, Koichiro Izumi, and his cousin (I’m sorry, I didn’t get a chance to write down his name) as guests. I had seen Makiko Sen do tea in Washington DC, but it was wonderful to see her do it again – like her father, she seems to exude tea ceremony in a way that’s at once beautiful and effortless. While she was doing tea, Oiemoto was providing a commentary on the finer points of temae.

The whole day was capped off by a wonderful banquet, where we had a chance to catch up with old tea friends and meet up with new ones. I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone in the San Francisco tea community who worked on this event, particularly Larry Tiscornia of the San Francisco Tankokai and Christy Bartlett of the San Francisco Urasenke Foundation. I know it must have been a huge amount of work, and I think everyone really appreciated it!

Even More Sakura!

This was a busy weekend for our entire tea group, but an exciting one.

At Shofuso, they’ve just celebrated the opening of the Sakura Pavilion, which consists of two outbuildings that date back to the 1876 Centennial celebration. One of them was renovated into a classroom, and the other will be a storage room. They’ve been working hard to get the area ready for the dedication this weekend, and the classroom is still missing some finishing touches, but it looks lovely. On Saturday they had a sake cask-breaking with the mayor in attendance. The weather took a turn for the colder and it was rainy, but there was still a really good turnout.

Today, however, was the big tea day. Based on the early cherry bloom times and the weather, we’d figured that this would be a good weekend to hold our sakura hanami, our cherry blossom viewing tea. As it happened, the cherry trees around the Hort Center hit their peak last week, but there were still a lot of blossoms holding on in the area. It wasn’t as cold today as yesterday, but we decided to hold the gathering indoors at Shofuso, since the ground was still wet.

We did, however, try to position the guests so that they could still see some cherries. This is the view from the spot where the guests were sitting:



The gathering itself was very simple. I did a temae called hana chabako, which is intended specifically for sitting outside under the trees for a flower-viewing, especially at cherry blossom time. It’s a “picnic-style” tea where all of the utensils are smaller than usual, and they’re packed into a little box that can be carried around easily.

Chabako is a casual type of tea ceremony, so you can only prepare thin tea (usucha), which is less formal than thick tea (koicha). Because this was a special gathering, though, we had a couple different types of sweets. Brandon Forsht, one of our association vice presidents, made a sweet that looked like cherry petals on the grass (it was very beautiful!), and I made a dry sweet (kangoori, which is jelly-like on the inside but has a crunchy exterior) that was also cherry blossom-shaped.

The chabako set I used was a combination of old and new: The box itself, along with two of the lacquer pieces, were ones that I had never used before; they were a present from my mother, and I was saving them for a special occasion. The ceramic pieces, however – the bowl, the sweet container, and the container for the wiping cloth – were all from a set that I had gotten from one of my teachers, that had originally belonged to her grandmother. It was an honor to have the set, and to be able to share it with tea friends.



But that wasn’t the only tea event to happen today. Only a few days ago, Taeko-sensei was asked to prepare tea for a member of the Japanese House of Representatives who was in town visiting. It turns out that he went to Drexel University in Philadelphia, and so he comes back every once in a while.

As one of my fellow tea people said, we’re beginning to feel like an official Urasenke chapter already!

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.

Waiting for Cherry Blossoms

I don’t know how many of you are in the Philadelphia area, but if you are you’ve surely noticed how incredibly warm this winter has been. We’ve had a little snow, and short bursts of cold weather, but the majority of January and February has been like today – sunny with high temperatures in the 50s.

As you can imagine, this has all kinds of implications, but for tea people the big question is what’s going to happen with the cherry blossoms. The mid-Atlantic region has a climate very similar to Kyoto’s, which is great for tea ceremony because our seasonal changes track pretty well with the traditional tea calendar. So at the same time that the cherry trees are blooming in Japan, they’re also blooming here. Of course, cherry blossoms are a much bigger deal in Japan, but we have celebrations here also.

The biggest celebration in the region is actually in Washington, D.C., where they have a lot of cherry trees and a huge annual festival. Philadelphia also has a respectable-size celebration, which I’ve talked about in previous posts. The planners of those events just have to use past bloom times as a guide – in Washington it’s around April 7^th, and a week later in Philadelphia. But there can be a huge variation in those dates depending on the weather, and calculating bloom times is quite the science. (If you want an idea of how much of a science, check out this open-access research article on calculating bloom times in Washington DC.)

Depending on other events, our group will try to set aside some time to get together for a little tea under the cherry blossoms, so right now I’m eyeing our local foliage for blooming clues. I keep a cherry blossom log. There are cherry trees blooming all over our area, especially around the Horticultural Center, where the Philadelphia Cherry Blossom Festival is held, so as I see trees in different areas blooming I make a note of the date and any unusual weather that may have affected them. I haven’t been doing this very long, so I can’t even claim to be scientific here, but my guess is that we’re going to see peak bloom in the third or fourth week of March. Let’s see how I do!

Kimono Season

Tea lessons are done for the year, and we’re on our annual New Year’s break, visiting family and preparing for our first tea of the New Year (Hatsugama), which we hold in late January.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do during this time is get caught up on altering my kimonos. I’ve talked before about wearing kimonos for tea ceremony, how the tea ceremony was designed to be done in kimono, and even today we practice certain moves and hand positions specifically to accommodate the wearing of kimonos. At the Urasenke head school in Japan (either Midorikai, which is for foreigners, or Gakuen, which is for Japanese), even beginning students are required to wear kimonos every day. Outside of Japan, customs vary by tea group; in our group, students are not required to wear a kimono to class (although some choose to), and those who have kimonos will usually wear them to gatherings like Hatsugama. I always wear a kimono when I teach, and of course to gatherings and demonstrations, so I need kimonos for a variety of different occasions.

This is one of those occasions where theory and practice collide. In theory, every kimono I own should be custom-made for me so that it fits properly. In practice, to get a kimono custom-made for you costs anywhere from several hundred dollars (if you have a friend in the business who gives you a huge discount) to several thousand dollars (middle range; of course, a high-quality kimono can cost a lot more). On the other hand, you can buy a used kimono with little or no visible signs of wear for under a hundred dollars.

Now I am – shall we say, a tad cubby? Pleasantly plump? Or, as my sensei never hesitates to remind me, in need of some serious dieting? Let’s just say that my body type is far different from most Japanese women. So while I’m short enough that I have little trouble finding a kimono long enough for me, anything I buy needs to be widened before I can wear it properly. This is actually not difficult at all; in fact, kimonos are designed to be easy to widen, and when they’re made there’s usually plenty of extra fabric in the side seams. However, it’s pretty time-consuming, especially with lined kimonos, because they’ve got an extra layer of fabric on the inside that also needs to be resewn. It’s a good winter activity, with it being so cold and dark outside, and it’s always nice to be able to add another kimono to my “wearable” pile. (I probably have about 40 kimonos at this point, but a lot of them still need to be altered.)

Hope you’re enjoying your winter projects too!

Robiraki

We had our Robiraki gathering, celebrating the beginning of the winter season, at the beginning of November. (Yes, I’m a little late posting… but look, photos!)

As with previous gatherings, we met at the Horticultural Center meeting room, which is far from being a traditional setting for tea, but in November the weather is so uncertain that we wanted to be sure everyone has a warm and dry place to enjoy their tea. As it turned out, the day itself was beautiful, sunny and warm, and there were still a lot of leaves on the trees, so it made for some beautiful scenery as people were coming in.

We were also very lucky to have a number of friends from different places join us for the gathering, including a group from New Jersey, some students from Penn State who are working on setting up a tea ceremony program at their school, and of course a number of tea people from our local area. We had sixteen guests in all, which made it one of the largest single gatherings we’d ever done! Luckily, we also had some great help in the kitchen, which is really the key to making everything run smoothly.

For this gathering, we served a meal as well as koicha (thick tea) and usucha (thin tea). The main part of the meal consisted of rice, sashimi, and seasonal foods in a bento box, and we also served soup with grilled tofu:

Because we weren’t in a traditional tea space, we had to improvise in a number of ways, one of which was to put the machiai (where the guests gather before going into the room) in one of the greenhouse spaces. Usually the machiai has a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement; there was no place to hang a scroll, but we put a flower arrangement on the path that guests would take to the meeting room, where we had put down tatami mats and set up an alcove space with a scroll:

In the tatami space we had a tana, which in this photo is set up in preparation for laying the charcoal fire. This is a Ryuseidana, and if you look closely you can see that the gridwork on the left side is made from used handles from hishakus (the ladles we use to scoop water). The mizusashi (cold water jar) on the bottom is a black Oribe-style, and on the top of the tana is a feather (used to brush stray ash from the sides of the hearth) and an incense container. The incense container was made by Saeda Makoto, one of the artists who exhibited at the Five by Eight exhibition in Philadelphia last month.

In this picture, Drew Hanson, one of our teachers, is making usucha for the guests:

All in all, it was a wonderful day, and as always we hope that the guests enjoyed it too!