Life Size

Konnichian is the home of the Ura-sen-ke (the back door Sen family), the leaders of the largest tradition of Tea in the world. There is an irony, because the "ura" or "back" part of their description comes from the fact that this lineage is descended from Sotan's youngest son, not the elder two who also founded tea dynasties. So, we're kind of the upstart, smartaleck kid brother who goes on to become the heavy hitter in the family business. Anyway, the point is, Urasenke is the big fish in the tiny pond of Japanese tea and a big business to boot. And the iemoto (head of house/"hereditary grand master") system means that there is real hero worship of the Sen family. They are tea royalty. And kind of real royalty, because the current okusama (wife of the grand master) is an actual imperial line princess type. They are a big deal.

We had a multi-part lecture series on the architecture and tea rooms and gardens of Konnichian. The house--I feel I should call it a villa or a manor or something-- is so important and so synonymous with the Sen family that their actual nonprofit is CALLED Konnichian. You can even refer to the members of the family as Konnichian, as in "Konnichian has scheduled the event for this day."

But here's what's crazy about this vaunted estate: it's tiny. All these rooms that we've had lecture after lecture describing with exhaustive descriptions of the wooden beams, the paper screens and doors, the stones in the garden--- it's really small!  The big entrance hall, that famously has a removable pillar so fancy people could be carried right inside in their palanquins, it's maybe 12 feet across, and 10 feet deep. The rooms have low ceilings, narrow hallways--we're talking more hobbit hole than Rockefeller. This is one of the most important cultural landmark homes in Japan!

However, this is not a sign of poverty: in the wabi-sabi tea world, the small is highly valued. In fact, the name "Konnichian" actually is the name of the smallest room in the entire complex: Sotan's under-two-mat-sized tea room--under 2 meters by 2 meters in area, with a sloping roof that makes it impossible to stand up straight in some areas of the room. Apparently in tea society, people had a habit of calling each other's houses, and even each other, by the names of their smallest tea spaces (which were the wabi-est and, paradoxically then, the most culturally refined.)  [Sidenote: the reason why Konnichian is called Konnichian--literally today hut-- is because of an apocryphal story wherein Sotan invited his Zen teacher Seigan Soi to tea at his brand new tea room, then Seigan was late. Finally, Sotan gave up waiting and went out, leaving a message that Seigan should come tomorrow. When Sotan got home again, there was a scrawled message from Seigan: "A lazy monk knows nothing of tomorrow." I love this story. It requires a whole other post. It's time and time again.]

Okay, so Konnichian is the smallest room in a complex of small rooms. Even the big rooms are small compared to even my middle-class family home in Kansas-- the biggest room at Konnichian is probably about the size of our living room, although you can open up the spaces by removing the sliding fusuma doors to make a big open space that's much larger. And this I totally love. It feels very small and human sized. Tea architecture is clearly not meant to overwhelm a person with a sense of her smallness like a big medieval cathedral or a Victorian monumental public space, like libraries or government buildings. Instead, the person seems quite big in these spaces.

The classic entrance to the standard size (4 and a half mat) tea room is the nijiriguchi--the crawling entrance.  It's a little square door that you have to squeeze yourself through to get in. This definitely helps give you the Alice in Wonderland feeling of being quite large.









A few years ago, I saw a Japanese architect, Fujimori Terunobu, give a lecture on some of his tea house designs. He's a contemporary architect who hasn't ever really studied tea, but made some amazing teahouses, like this one for himself called Takasugi-an (too tall tea house):

In his lecture (which was part of a conference celebrating the opening of a tea utensil exhibition at Yale University in 2009) he spoke about how Japanese architecture is based around the tatami mat, and how tatami is approximately human scale.  One tatami: 191 cm by about 95 cm fits most adult people lying down pretty well. And one half of that fits a sitting person pretty well. Here's a shot of his drawing explaining this:

Here's proof of the human-sizeness of tatami:

This is me and Damian warming up the tatami before a weekend practice.

And he went on to talk about the ro sunken hearth in tea rooms as like a heart in a person, a warm center roughly in the middle of the 4.5 mat room. (That's there in the bottom right.)
Here's a picture of Tai-an, Rikyu's two mat space that Fujimori has drawn in the lower right, just before the person lying in a two mat space.)

As an unabashed humanist, meaning a person who is really into thinking about and considering the lot of humans, I am into this idea of architecture and thus, I also really love Konnichian and its tiny spaces, punctuated all winter long with little glowing hearths here and there:

Here is a clandestine shot of people waiting to go into the tea room at Hatsugama. This is one of the bigger rooms, but it feels very cozy. Of course, extra cozy because lots of people are stuffed in.


Anyway, the thing I've been trying to get at is simply, isn't it nice to build a space around a person in a way that has the effect of making the person central and that feels tailored to people and making people feel like they are the point?  I also enjoy being humbled sometimes by the vast and lofty, but I think there's a distinct value to some spaces which, no matter their lofty reputation, like Konnichian's, turn out to be humbly proportioned toward people, just people, for doing an everyday thing like making tea for each other.  This series of thoughts segues with my thinking on comfort, but that will have to wait for another post.