Sunday, October 28, 2012
Things I saw in Kyoto over the weekend.
Iwashimizu
Finally, our first kenchashiki (a ritual tea offering). We went to Iwashimizu, a shrine on Otokoyama--male mountain. I made incessant jokes about how weird it was to be going to Man Mountain, but no one seemed to think it was as hilarious as I did.
There turned out to be FOUR bowls of tea and sweets waiting for us on the top of man mountain. First, watching the kencha. It was in here:
We had front row seats, except behind all the Shinto guys and right next to the bugaku guys and the Odaiko -- the really really really big drum. So big that before the event started, the Shinto guy who bangs it came out and apologized to everyone that it was going to be loud. It was loud, and I turned back to watch him just in time to see Mika dai-sempai (Mika, who is a Finnish grad of Midorikai currently in the one-year course and therefore sempai to our sempai) and a few others jump in their seats when it sounded a second time.
It's lucky the Shinto guys (and one girl) who had the seats in front of us wear interesting outfits because after they sat down we could really see nothing else.
Here we all are, taking pictures before the event starts. Lindsey is using her invisible camera.
So, the ceremony begins and the kamisama get all kinds of gifts given to them on matching red elevated trays, including sake, a big gorgeous fish, huge cakes of mochi, a tray full of vegetables, a tray full of fruits, and then a tray full of little sugar sweets of the same kind that we would get to eat later. They are passed along by the Shinto guys, starting with Shinto girl, then guy to guy to guy, and eventually they disappear inside the shrine, like a fire bucket brigade of nice foods.
Then o-iemoto (grand master) goes up to the platform in the front and makes tea. At the key moment when tea is about to go in the bowl, he puts on a face mask, to avoid breathing on anything that will go to the shrine. When the tea is done, he hands it off and the head Shinto guy takes it into the shrine.
Okay, after about 45 minutes of waiting in our seats, then 30 minutes of ceremonialness, it's time for the tea for mere mortals. We have a long sheet of tickets that guarantee our entry into all the events.
First up, the haifuku seki, where we have the same tea and sweets as were used in the initial demonstration.
These are pretty delicious higashi, with a brown sugar interior.
Our gakuensei (Japanese student) colleagues from Urasenke were serving the tea at this seating, just at tables near the shrine.
Now off to the lower area of the complex where gakuensei were also hosting an outdoor nodate seating. We got booted from our assigned seating by the arrival of the iemoto and family, so we went off to eat our tenshin soba lunch (Tenshin is "sky-heart"-- what a nice and nonsensical thing to call a tiny lunch. Or I think that's the kanji. I can't quite remember now...)
Now we entered the wrong seating for the outdoor seating because we'd been unable to enter our assigned one earlier. So we were a bit crowded:
As you can see, although he watched nothing, Hamana-sensei still got good service from Miyazaki-san (3 year at Gakuen). Sitting at the back of this seating was awesome for kimono observation:
I don't have one of these kimono bags. This outdoor seating was lighthearted, with this cool cartoony futaoki, and a big childlike bowl made by Ennosai.
It was the day before October, so they had a wacky pod for a flower:
Fruits and seeds and non-flower flowers are considered appropriate for October, nagori season-- when we use everything up, so things are old and worn and patched and so on. It is obviously the awesomest time of the year.
Then we went to the honseki (the main seating); only the boys from Gakuen can serve at the honseki, which I am not too cool with, but it's not up to me. The honseki seated about 30 people in two rows, and it was in a spectacular old wooden building, with the outer edge wall of windows hanging out over a drop with trees and greenery all around. In the tokonoma there was a scroll by Ito (!!! 8th generation iemoto!) which said Yama wa yobu, bansai koe. (The mountains call "bansai," referring to the old Chinese tradition of going out into the mountains to shout blessings on the emperor where they will reverberate and echo.) Nice for a building on a mountain hanging over the edge of an abyss. (Okay, so there was a parking lot down there if you looked straight down, but looking out was awesome.)
No pictures in there, but here's the extra space they added to the garden for accommodating everyone's shoes outside:
And now, we saunter down the long path to the fuku seki, in the wacky hotel building:
This seating, in a big tatami room in the basement of the weird hotel, had some really really nice dogu (utensils)-- although (and I hadn't realized this before coming here) the really nice stuff, bowls and chashaku and things, are just displayed and not used. You can look at them in the waiting room, and then totally other really-nice-but-not-as-nice-as THAT stuff is used to actually make tea. There is an interesting surrogation, performance studies thing going on there... Of the actually-used items, what really stands out in my memory is that there was a gorgeous Chinese basket, very intricately woven, with a whopping 9 different types of flowers. They used a fabulous yatsure buro nakaoki, which is an old iron brazier that is so old that its top is rusted away and so you have to add a stand (gotoku) inside to hold your kettle out of the fire. This is super nagori for October, and totally awesome for me with my obsession with recycling.
Hamana sensei ended up shoukyaku (first guest) and did a nice job getting the stories of all the items from the host.
One thing that I didn't appreciate until afterward when we were looking at everything again was the Nintokusai futaoki-- bamboo with maki-e designs added. Totally gorgeous and understated.
Thus concluded, we all gathered upstairs at the weird chrysanthemum couch,
got ourselves in order, got our stuff and the boys changed out of their fancy pants *in public*. [I will not repost the picture here, even though it is totally awesome.] Then back down the cable car
and then, because it was still early (only like 3pm or so) some of us took a little trip to Gion where we saw a real live Maiko and were ourselves obsessively photographed by passersby as we wandered the streets.
But we weren't above photographing ourselves either:
Big day. One of many to come.
There turned out to be FOUR bowls of tea and sweets waiting for us on the top of man mountain. First, watching the kencha. It was in here:
It's lucky the Shinto guys (and one girl) who had the seats in front of us wear interesting outfits because after they sat down we could really see nothing else.
So, the ceremony begins and the kamisama get all kinds of gifts given to them on matching red elevated trays, including sake, a big gorgeous fish, huge cakes of mochi, a tray full of vegetables, a tray full of fruits, and then a tray full of little sugar sweets of the same kind that we would get to eat later. They are passed along by the Shinto guys, starting with Shinto girl, then guy to guy to guy, and eventually they disappear inside the shrine, like a fire bucket brigade of nice foods.
Then o-iemoto (grand master) goes up to the platform in the front and makes tea. At the key moment when tea is about to go in the bowl, he puts on a face mask, to avoid breathing on anything that will go to the shrine. When the tea is done, he hands it off and the head Shinto guy takes it into the shrine.
Okay, after about 45 minutes of waiting in our seats, then 30 minutes of ceremonialness, it's time for the tea for mere mortals. We have a long sheet of tickets that guarantee our entry into all the events.
 |
| Olya models our slip of tickets to all the events. |
 |
| Linda reveals how big these trays really are... |
Our gakuensei (Japanese student) colleagues from Urasenke were serving the tea at this seating, just at tables near the shrine.
Now off to the lower area of the complex where gakuensei were also hosting an outdoor nodate seating. We got booted from our assigned seating by the arrival of the iemoto and family, so we went off to eat our tenshin soba lunch (Tenshin is "sky-heart"-- what a nice and nonsensical thing to call a tiny lunch. Or I think that's the kanji. I can't quite remember now...)
Now we entered the wrong seating for the outdoor seating because we'd been unable to enter our assigned one earlier. So we were a bit crowded:
Then we went to the honseki (the main seating); only the boys from Gakuen can serve at the honseki, which I am not too cool with, but it's not up to me. The honseki seated about 30 people in two rows, and it was in a spectacular old wooden building, with the outer edge wall of windows hanging out over a drop with trees and greenery all around. In the tokonoma there was a scroll by Ito (!!! 8th generation iemoto!) which said Yama wa yobu, bansai koe. (The mountains call "bansai," referring to the old Chinese tradition of going out into the mountains to shout blessings on the emperor where they will reverberate and echo.) Nice for a building on a mountain hanging over the edge of an abyss. (Okay, so there was a parking lot down there if you looked straight down, but looking out was awesome.)
No pictures in there, but here's the extra space they added to the garden for accommodating everyone's shoes outside:
This seating, in a big tatami room in the basement of the weird hotel, had some really really nice dogu (utensils)-- although (and I hadn't realized this before coming here) the really nice stuff, bowls and chashaku and things, are just displayed and not used. You can look at them in the waiting room, and then totally other really-nice-but-not-as-nice-as THAT stuff is used to actually make tea. There is an interesting surrogation, performance studies thing going on there... Of the actually-used items, what really stands out in my memory is that there was a gorgeous Chinese basket, very intricately woven, with a whopping 9 different types of flowers. They used a fabulous yatsure buro nakaoki, which is an old iron brazier that is so old that its top is rusted away and so you have to add a stand (gotoku) inside to hold your kettle out of the fire. This is super nagori for October, and totally awesome for me with my obsession with recycling.
Hamana sensei ended up shoukyaku (first guest) and did a nice job getting the stories of all the items from the host.
One thing that I didn't appreciate until afterward when we were looking at everything again was the Nintokusai futaoki-- bamboo with maki-e designs added. Totally gorgeous and understated.
Thus concluded, we all gathered upstairs at the weird chrysanthemum couch,
got ourselves in order, got our stuff and the boys changed out of their fancy pants *in public*. [I will not repost the picture here, even though it is totally awesome.] Then back down the cable car
But we weren't above photographing ourselves either:
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
This rainy Tuesday
It was rainy today. It rained hard in the morning, and we laughed and moaned about the trouble it caused because today was also the day of Olya's chaji. We hated to wear our nice clothes in the rain (even our not-nice work clothes were a problem because we had to go to chorei morning meeting and sit on the tatami and were afraid to leave damp spots, or worse, dye the tatami blue from our wet navy blue knees.
We cleaned the chado kaikan building and then we went off to change. And I checked online quickly when I got home, and the first thing I saw was the news that my dear friend from university, Jim Benton, has died suddenly. He was barely older than me, he and his wife Meredith just adopted a baby girl less than a year ago. It is stunning. Mostly I feel stunned.
I haven't seen Jim in a few years, and it's been awhile since we spoke. And he is one of the best people. The best people. I got to know Jim when we went on the Asia Humanities trip to Thailand, India, and Japan over ten years ago. Which is to say, I was getting to know and love Jim the first time I ever came to Kyoto.
And so now I'm here and he's gone. It rained. It was Olya's chaji, so after I read the news, I got dressed. I didn't feel overtly distraught but every single detail of my kimono fought me. (This is true. This is the sort of thing one would make up, but here's really what happened.) The collar was all wrong, the folds wouldn't lie flat. Every fiber of that fabric rebelled and it took far longer than usual, and midway I had a little cry, and kept dressing, and it felt too tight and all askew, and then there was no more time so I put my things together and I went. And bizarrely, then my clothes calmed down and they didn't keep pulling and bunching in weird ways and it was fine.
We went to the chaji, and because of the rain, all the rooms were intensely dark and often we were quiet. So sometimes I thought about Jim, and I thought about how the death of a friend too young may be exactly what teaches us the importance of ichigo ichie (one time, one meeting)--the preciousness of every moment and the things and people we are lucky enough to know. The chashaku (tea scoop) Olya used today was by Daisosho and it was called Ichie. The rest of the time, I thought about where we were and what we were doing, and it seemed like the right thing to do. To think of Jim when I thought of Jim and to think of whatever else was going on when I thought of that.
It was raining, and as much as it added hassle for us as guests, and surely was a pain for the hosts too, it was also incredibly, indescribably beautiful. And that's another thing that tea and death have in common. They remind us of the inadequacy of words. I think they do this by rehearsing the same cliches and platitudes until either their total uselessness is revealed, or we finally break through their pointlessness and realize, really realize, what someone is trying to say to us.
It was raining, so we used rojigasa (garden umbrellas) and we have to hold them over each other while using the tsukubai to wash our hands and mouths:
The chaji was lovely, although I think with 11 people we were all hurting by the end. I did pretty well, but I had the lucky spot of being last guest, so I was able to get up and walk more often than almost everyone except Mike, the first guest. In our first two chaji I've been first guest and last guest, so so far I've been extremely lucky indeed as far as getting to exercise my legs.
Then in the main seating the brazier was a yatsure buro-- an iron brazier that is so old its top has rusted off (or has been made to look that way.) Yatsureburo is perfect for the nagori feeling of October--the month for using up all the old stuff before "Chajin no shougatsu"-- Tea people's new year-- at the beginning of November, when we open the new jars of tea and change to the sunken hearth (ro). As you can imagine, I love nagori season. My whole life aesthetic is nagori.
And of course the wistfulness of the end of a summer, the chill, the dark, and the ends of things before a bright new beginning, is a feeling commensurate with mourning a friend.
The scroll was by Itsugai roshi, the zen teacher of Daisosho, and it said "The bamboo has nodes above and below." Olya described the year at Midorikai, now just a little over halfway done, as like this bamboo. They've learned a lot, they have a lot to learn.
Considering my particular circumstances, perhaps we could also say that just as the nodes in bamboo are ends and beginnings and neither ends nor beginnings all at the same time, we too will go on, past these big life events. We can only learn how to keep growing past these tragedies, and we know there will be others. We can try to make every moment one we would not regret if it turns out to be our last one.
As much as we'll fail at this often, we can hope for many more moments to do better with.
...
It is quite strange perhaps to mix up a description of a chaji with a memorial to a friend, but I have two reasons. One is that this is how life is. This is what my day was like. I learned that I lost a friend and life went on its scheduled course. The big and the small events are jumbled up together.
The second I will explain by describing an epiphany I had today at the chaji: There's always this strange paradox where we (at least in English) always talk about tea as something quite meaningful but then sit around fetishizing really expensive objects. But as Olya gave the descriptions for the items she'd chosen, they were all stories emphasizing various aspects of her relationship with the guests (especially Mike the shoukyaku), things about Midorikai, things about herself. Each of the items was itself a beautiful thing arranged well with other things and it was a physical manifestation of the relationships in the room, of our shared endeavors and passions. I don't mean to suggest that we could crassly turn every physical object into a symbol, but to imbue all these items with the full richness of their own thingness is also to appreciate how they can materialize all kinds of things about us too. Here I am in the world with all these things and all these people. We're all in it together.
This was how my day went. This day was a strange day, and if Jim ever inspired me to anything, it was to try to do my best by those around me, whatever that might be. And that's what people are trying to do in a tea room too. If I can inspire the same in any person once, then that's the best tribute to him I can think of.
We cleaned the chado kaikan building and then we went off to change. And I checked online quickly when I got home, and the first thing I saw was the news that my dear friend from university, Jim Benton, has died suddenly. He was barely older than me, he and his wife Meredith just adopted a baby girl less than a year ago. It is stunning. Mostly I feel stunned.
I haven't seen Jim in a few years, and it's been awhile since we spoke. And he is one of the best people. The best people. I got to know Jim when we went on the Asia Humanities trip to Thailand, India, and Japan over ten years ago. Which is to say, I was getting to know and love Jim the first time I ever came to Kyoto.
And so now I'm here and he's gone. It rained. It was Olya's chaji, so after I read the news, I got dressed. I didn't feel overtly distraught but every single detail of my kimono fought me. (This is true. This is the sort of thing one would make up, but here's really what happened.) The collar was all wrong, the folds wouldn't lie flat. Every fiber of that fabric rebelled and it took far longer than usual, and midway I had a little cry, and kept dressing, and it felt too tight and all askew, and then there was no more time so I put my things together and I went. And bizarrely, then my clothes calmed down and they didn't keep pulling and bunching in weird ways and it was fine.
We went to the chaji, and because of the rain, all the rooms were intensely dark and often we were quiet. So sometimes I thought about Jim, and I thought about how the death of a friend too young may be exactly what teaches us the importance of ichigo ichie (one time, one meeting)--the preciousness of every moment and the things and people we are lucky enough to know. The chashaku (tea scoop) Olya used today was by Daisosho and it was called Ichie. The rest of the time, I thought about where we were and what we were doing, and it seemed like the right thing to do. To think of Jim when I thought of Jim and to think of whatever else was going on when I thought of that.It was raining, and as much as it added hassle for us as guests, and surely was a pain for the hosts too, it was also incredibly, indescribably beautiful. And that's another thing that tea and death have in common. They remind us of the inadequacy of words. I think they do this by rehearsing the same cliches and platitudes until either their total uselessness is revealed, or we finally break through their pointlessness and realize, really realize, what someone is trying to say to us.
 |
| Olya leaves from filling the tsukubai basin. |
Then in the main seating the brazier was a yatsure buro-- an iron brazier that is so old its top has rusted off (or has been made to look that way.) Yatsureburo is perfect for the nagori feeling of October--the month for using up all the old stuff before "Chajin no shougatsu"-- Tea people's new year-- at the beginning of November, when we open the new jars of tea and change to the sunken hearth (ro). As you can imagine, I love nagori season. My whole life aesthetic is nagori.
And of course the wistfulness of the end of a summer, the chill, the dark, and the ends of things before a bright new beginning, is a feeling commensurate with mourning a friend.
The scroll was by Itsugai roshi, the zen teacher of Daisosho, and it said "The bamboo has nodes above and below." Olya described the year at Midorikai, now just a little over halfway done, as like this bamboo. They've learned a lot, they have a lot to learn.
Considering my particular circumstances, perhaps we could also say that just as the nodes in bamboo are ends and beginnings and neither ends nor beginnings all at the same time, we too will go on, past these big life events. We can only learn how to keep growing past these tragedies, and we know there will be others. We can try to make every moment one we would not regret if it turns out to be our last one.
As much as we'll fail at this often, we can hope for many more moments to do better with.
...
It is quite strange perhaps to mix up a description of a chaji with a memorial to a friend, but I have two reasons. One is that this is how life is. This is what my day was like. I learned that I lost a friend and life went on its scheduled course. The big and the small events are jumbled up together.
The second I will explain by describing an epiphany I had today at the chaji: There's always this strange paradox where we (at least in English) always talk about tea as something quite meaningful but then sit around fetishizing really expensive objects. But as Olya gave the descriptions for the items she'd chosen, they were all stories emphasizing various aspects of her relationship with the guests (especially Mike the shoukyaku), things about Midorikai, things about herself. Each of the items was itself a beautiful thing arranged well with other things and it was a physical manifestation of the relationships in the room, of our shared endeavors and passions. I don't mean to suggest that we could crassly turn every physical object into a symbol, but to imbue all these items with the full richness of their own thingness is also to appreciate how they can materialize all kinds of things about us too. Here I am in the world with all these things and all these people. We're all in it together.
This was how my day went. This day was a strange day, and if Jim ever inspired me to anything, it was to try to do my best by those around me, whatever that might be. And that's what people are trying to do in a tea room too. If I can inspire the same in any person once, then that's the best tribute to him I can think of.
I lost a friend
Half a world away
the sound of rain
Friday, October 19, 2012
On 'Yoroshiku'
"Yoroshiku" is one of those untranslatable words we use all the time in Tea. It literally means something along the lines of "please be kind to me" and connotes something more like "I'll do my best, so please help me or be kind to me."
It's so overused (or at least widely used) that in my Langenscheidt dictionary it's just listed as "well" or "pleased to meet you." It's true we say this unfailingly upon meeting someone. Conjugated in different ways, people of all ranks say it to each other, all the time, and that goes triple in Tea. One internet commentator states, it "implies your respect and politeness to the people you meet, your good will and determination" (KEC Journal).
What a great way to start and end conversations, events, group endeavors of any kind. Here's the thing: we say it so much no one means it.
I was struck by this thought tonight while talking with my colleagues. We are all having a great time, this is an amazing opportunity, AND at the same time, there are certain things that are really hard. I mean, look at us. We are spending every day doing affective labor designed to make other people feel nice and to erase how much of our own work and suffering went into that. This is an interesting thing to do with our time, and (perhaps not surprisingly) we can get hung up on the suffering, or hung up on the work, and forget about the feeling nice. Or we worry only about the nice feelings of the guest or the teacher (I mean, it's still an exceedingly hierarchical society) and trample everyone else (EVEN OUR GUESTS WHO ARE FELLOW STUDENTS) if they appear to get in the way of the form of things.
This may happen all the time no matter what you do with your days, but here we have the bizarre luxury of thinking about it all the time, without much distraction from doing anything, you know, material. I don't need to produce anything at the end of the day except a person who can create more nice feelings. So I have time to think about where I am creating good feelings and where I am creating bad. Or where my colleagues and sempai are creating such good or bad feelings.
This is not to say that anyone has bad intentions. Only that there are innumerable things happening at every moment and the impossibility of perfection has already been realized and simultaneously the impossibility of giving up an attempt at perfection has also been realized. So far, same-o same-o. High pressure situation like many jobs people do everyday, and the stakes are low yet we let them become high (ie, in other situations, it is not a massive deal if towels are not neatly folded and stacked in a back room. Not so here.) Add to this also that here we are not individuals. We rise or fall, succeed or fail as a group, so people put pressure on each other, because one person's mistake will be everyone's fault. And yet how to make eight disparate people (and sometimes nine, and sometimes twelve) into a cohesive whole (who are imparting simultaneous correction AND good feelings to each other) is an unperfected science. Sometimes we do okay, sometimes it's a real mess.
Some would say this is a Western problem, but I don't buy it. Japanese sociologists invented a whole schema for this: Honne and Tatemae (true inner feeling and exterior). A whole canon of Kabuki plays are about characters torn between following their individual desires (running away with a geisha) and their duty (working and being good rather than getting into run-ins with the rich older guy who also likes the girl). I suspect us foreigners just talk about it more.
But, to go back: we say "yoroshiku" to each other all day long. We ask each other to be kind to us and we simultaneously promise to do our best. And still sometimes although we promised to be kind, we're not. It may of course be that someone else is not doing their best, but I've been around long enough to realize that I have no idea what it's like to be someone else, and I don't know what that person's best looks like from the outside. I have no idea how someone else is feeling, so it's better (and kinder) to abstain from judging whether or not someone deserves the kindness of the yoroshiku they asked for. I would rather be kind and let the other person deal with whether or not they have earned it. Even though we succeed or fail together, and someone else may cause my embarrassment or my discomfort, that is when we have to hold up our end of the yoroshiku.
The kindness of yoroshiku may also be correction, but HOW the correction is done is the key, and it's probably the hardest way to successfully be kind. We do succeed at it-- flipping down each others' obi tails when they go wonky, telling someone of some mistake they've made so that a teacher or sempai doesn't see it (and perhaps correct with less kindness), but it's awfully easy to correct someone less than kindly, no matter how well one means.
And let's face it, sometimes it's hard to mean it kindly when we're all so tired, we're all so rushed, we're all in a position where we can't do everything just so-- because gravity actually still exists and causes something to fall over or not lie right, because there's no time, because my legs will actually physically, seriously not fold up and then extend again to sit down completely properly and stand up again just to take one thing that's right there. While I was still in New England, I swore to myself I would not pick up and put things down from a standing position (it's extremely frowned on) but would always get down and pick it up and get up again. What I had not counted on was the amount of physical pain I would be in. It's beyond the laziness and minor discomfort I occasionally succumbed to before coming here. It's that I really can't do it sometimes.
So, how do we remember what yoroshiku means when we say it, rather than just remembering when to say it?
It's so overused (or at least widely used) that in my Langenscheidt dictionary it's just listed as "well" or "pleased to meet you." It's true we say this unfailingly upon meeting someone. Conjugated in different ways, people of all ranks say it to each other, all the time, and that goes triple in Tea. One internet commentator states, it "implies your respect and politeness to the people you meet, your good will and determination" (KEC Journal).
What a great way to start and end conversations, events, group endeavors of any kind. Here's the thing: we say it so much no one means it.
I was struck by this thought tonight while talking with my colleagues. We are all having a great time, this is an amazing opportunity, AND at the same time, there are certain things that are really hard. I mean, look at us. We are spending every day doing affective labor designed to make other people feel nice and to erase how much of our own work and suffering went into that. This is an interesting thing to do with our time, and (perhaps not surprisingly) we can get hung up on the suffering, or hung up on the work, and forget about the feeling nice. Or we worry only about the nice feelings of the guest or the teacher (I mean, it's still an exceedingly hierarchical society) and trample everyone else (EVEN OUR GUESTS WHO ARE FELLOW STUDENTS) if they appear to get in the way of the form of things.
This may happen all the time no matter what you do with your days, but here we have the bizarre luxury of thinking about it all the time, without much distraction from doing anything, you know, material. I don't need to produce anything at the end of the day except a person who can create more nice feelings. So I have time to think about where I am creating good feelings and where I am creating bad. Or where my colleagues and sempai are creating such good or bad feelings.
This is not to say that anyone has bad intentions. Only that there are innumerable things happening at every moment and the impossibility of perfection has already been realized and simultaneously the impossibility of giving up an attempt at perfection has also been realized. So far, same-o same-o. High pressure situation like many jobs people do everyday, and the stakes are low yet we let them become high (ie, in other situations, it is not a massive deal if towels are not neatly folded and stacked in a back room. Not so here.) Add to this also that here we are not individuals. We rise or fall, succeed or fail as a group, so people put pressure on each other, because one person's mistake will be everyone's fault. And yet how to make eight disparate people (and sometimes nine, and sometimes twelve) into a cohesive whole (who are imparting simultaneous correction AND good feelings to each other) is an unperfected science. Sometimes we do okay, sometimes it's a real mess.
Some would say this is a Western problem, but I don't buy it. Japanese sociologists invented a whole schema for this: Honne and Tatemae (true inner feeling and exterior). A whole canon of Kabuki plays are about characters torn between following their individual desires (running away with a geisha) and their duty (working and being good rather than getting into run-ins with the rich older guy who also likes the girl). I suspect us foreigners just talk about it more.
But, to go back: we say "yoroshiku" to each other all day long. We ask each other to be kind to us and we simultaneously promise to do our best. And still sometimes although we promised to be kind, we're not. It may of course be that someone else is not doing their best, but I've been around long enough to realize that I have no idea what it's like to be someone else, and I don't know what that person's best looks like from the outside. I have no idea how someone else is feeling, so it's better (and kinder) to abstain from judging whether or not someone deserves the kindness of the yoroshiku they asked for. I would rather be kind and let the other person deal with whether or not they have earned it. Even though we succeed or fail together, and someone else may cause my embarrassment or my discomfort, that is when we have to hold up our end of the yoroshiku.
The kindness of yoroshiku may also be correction, but HOW the correction is done is the key, and it's probably the hardest way to successfully be kind. We do succeed at it-- flipping down each others' obi tails when they go wonky, telling someone of some mistake they've made so that a teacher or sempai doesn't see it (and perhaps correct with less kindness), but it's awfully easy to correct someone less than kindly, no matter how well one means.
And let's face it, sometimes it's hard to mean it kindly when we're all so tired, we're all so rushed, we're all in a position where we can't do everything just so-- because gravity actually still exists and causes something to fall over or not lie right, because there's no time, because my legs will actually physically, seriously not fold up and then extend again to sit down completely properly and stand up again just to take one thing that's right there. While I was still in New England, I swore to myself I would not pick up and put things down from a standing position (it's extremely frowned on) but would always get down and pick it up and get up again. What I had not counted on was the amount of physical pain I would be in. It's beyond the laziness and minor discomfort I occasionally succumbed to before coming here. It's that I really can't do it sometimes.
So, how do we remember what yoroshiku means when we say it, rather than just remembering when to say it?
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
A brief note on the mystery of kimono colors
We also buy komono (the little bits and bobs necessary to keep a kimono on) in all kinds of bizarre colors and it's always the neutral white tones and primary colors that never go with anything. The wilder colors (like mustard, very close the the French's color I'm wearing above) seem to go with all our combinations while cream never works.
Also, Japanese tastes in matching colors and patterns tends to be very different than Euro-American ones (pink and orange! Blue and black!), so we're also thinking through those combinations and retraining our eyes. Although I'll admit, I've been retraining my eyes to like bizarre combinations for a long time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)