This past Saturday, I filled in for one of my coworkers as the narrator (or commentator, as they seem to have listed me in the program) for a tea ceremony demonstration. Our department cosponsors this event with the university gardens every year in honor of the height of cherry blossom season. The ladies from the Triangle Chanoyu society did the demonstration and prepared the tea for tasting afterward.
Because I hadn’t really seen a tea ceremony with an explanation of what I was seeing before, I was given a script written by the person who normally does the commentary for the group. Since she does it a lot, the script was full of options and suggestions for what to say, but no exact directions. Fortunately, my coworker and I were able to go to another demonstration the week before for another college’s culture class. After that, I was able to rewrite the script with precise instructions to myself about what to say when. (The tea ladies later told me that they’re going to keep it for next time, too.)
The demonstration went very well. Despite the rainy weather, there was good attendance, and even the microphone I had to use worked on the first try! First, the ladies of the chanoyu society did a demonstration of the thin tea, the final portion of a full tea ceremony, for which a sweet and whisked matcha is served. One person was designated as the host, to prepare the tea. Two others were acting as guests, and as I said in my narration, they also have an important part of the ceremony, in that they must express the proper appreciation of the host’s efforts in choosing the art or flower in the tokonoma (presentation alcove), the tea bowl, tea container, and tea scoop. After the tea has been drunk, it is the first guest’s role to ask about the tea container and tea scoop, which have usually been made by descendants of very old tea artisan families. The tea scoop in particular is given a poetic name by a tea master, and it can be revealed at this point.
The second part of the demonstration was when volunteers were called up to be guests. As a special treat for this occasion, a visiting chanoyu student from Japan acted as the host this time, and it turns out that she studies a different school’s style. There truly were a great many differences in the movements that she made, such as the way she folded her tea cloth to clean the implements, and the way she used the dipper to pour water into the bowl. At the very end, all the ladies came out together to be recognized and answer audience questions.
As it turns out, I didn’t need to be quite so nervous about feeling unprepared. In one of those strange twists of synchronicity, I’d recently read two books about tea ceremony culture and history.
The first one was given to me by a teacher I worked with in Japan, but I didn’t pick it up again and read it all the way through until this January. The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura, was originally written in 1906. Interestingly, it was originally written in English while Okakura was living in Boston, specifically as an effort to help Westerners understand Japanese culture. This remains an interesting perspective for such a book today, but it was pretty much unheard of in that time. Okakura’s writing is excellent and clear, and while he doesn’t delve too incredibly deeply into the history and philosophy of tea, nor really describe all the aspects of the tea ceremony itself, he does provide an overview to whet the appetite. Instead, he spends most of his time trying to give his unfamiliar readers the beginnings of an understanding of the cultural aspects of tea ceremony, including the architecture of the tea house and the particular style of ikebana flower arranging used to decorate the tokonoma.
The second book I read I found incidentally in the bookstore the day before I went to see the first demonstration. The Teahouse Fire, by Ellis Avery, is a fictional story set at the turn of the Meiji Era in the city that would soon become known as Kyoto. The narrator, Aurelia, is a young girl at the beginning of the book, recently orphaned and sent to Japan with her missionary uncle as a servant. On their first night in Miyako (Kyoto), the mission house catches fire. Aurelia runs away, and eventually falls asleep in a small building in someone’s back yard. It turns out to be the tea house of one of Kyoto’s preeminent tea families, the Shins. Aurelia is found by the daughter of the house, who convinces her father to take Aurelia in as a maid. (Strangely, because no foreigners were technically allowed in Miyako at this point in history, and because Aurelia had pale skin, black hair, and dark eyes, everyone assumes that she is actually Japanese, but somewhat stupid, because she doesn’t speak properly.)
In this manner, Aurelia grows up with an inside view into the life of a tea family at a very precarious point in their history. The new emperor is determined to make Japan more modern, so he cuts nearly all funding for the traditional arts that had previously relied on imperial and noble patronage. From the author’s essay about the writing of the book, I now know that the other heroine of the book, Aurelia’s mistress, Yukako Shin, was a real historical figure, who did indeed rescue the art of tea from fading into obscurity by convincing the new emperor’s ministers to include tea ceremony lessons in girls’ newly mandated education. (And this is how I knew how to answer the audience question at the end about why tea used to only be practiced by men, but is now almost always practiced by women. There’s also a lot of incidental knowledge to be picked up about the different parts of the tea ceremony itself.) Besides the desire to follow Aurelia and Yukako’s story, I was fascinated to read something set in this part of Meiji society. So much of what I knew of previously was from the perspective of Westerners wishing to take advantage of the opening of Japan, or more related to military and political implications of the societal changes (ex: The Last Samurai, etc.) Having Aurelia narrate allows the reader to see events from the perspective of a person with an outsider’s understanding of what’s going on, but with an insider’s privileged point of view.
Both books are highly recommended, and if you ever have a chance to participate in a tea ceremony, you should!
[...] 2, 2008 by Dana Even though our tea ceremony programs kindly provided us with a map of all the different cherry trees in the university gardens, [...]
[...] as the commentator for a demonstration. You can read about that experience and see some pictures in my original post. Strangely, I had actually recently read two books on tea ceremony, one non-fiction and one [...]
[...] The Teahouse Fire, by Ellis Avery, was a fascinating piece of historical fiction that worked in details about the beginning of the Meiji period in Japan, tea ceremony, and the main character was a foreigner learning to fit in in Japan, so I was more or less destined to like it. I talked about it in my tea ceremony post. [...]