Time to make the chaji

Most of the chaji work happens well before the chaji. Like lots of practice cooking so that everything comes out right on the day itself:

Here's Paivi chopping corn while simultaneously eating a popsicle (You can see it in her left hand.)

This is Damian scowling because yakimono (roasting fish) is a very private affair.

And he also helped me sift all the hai (ash) for the furo (brazier). And invented that nice plastic bag to help keep everything else from becoming covered with a thin layer of ash.

And we also practiced serving and eating kaiseki beforehand. In the tea room we have sets of shelves. In the dorms we have an ironing board.

Kelly's bowl lid stuck together with suction and wouldn't come off!

rehearsing rehearsing the soup refill.

Hassun!

See, chaji is really really serious.

The most complicated portion of the kaiseki is also probably the funnest.

But it's not all fun and gourmet. We also asked some favors in the form of sewing sarashi to cover the shelves:

 

And making things out of aodake (green bamboo).  Here's Damian working on chopsticks and Sebastian eyeing the levels on a haifuki.

Sarah did finishing work while I sawed most of the haifuki and made the futaoki.

And I made the motobushi chopsticks.

  The last couple weeks beforehand are tiring and stressful on top of the regular school days while we try to get totally prepared to pull together this massive, detailed event we've never done before. Over this foregoing year, I was snapped at on at least two occasions by stressed-out teishu right before their chaji, and I was determined not to be mean to anyone.  Accidentally annoying a touchy teishu seems to me like such an awful irony, since the whole point of the chaji is ostensibly to come together and share hospitality, so sniping at your guests the night before seems to be precisely the opposite of the entire idea.

It's also hard but essential to maintain good working relationships between everyone on the host side -- conflicting ideas, exhaustion, and communication difficulties cause a lot of strain on us all yoked together by responsibility for this big event. As the teishu, I felt like holding everyone together was one of my jobs and I hope I did okay.

The whole undertaking, host and guest side both is sort of an exercise in, as they say in kagetsu, breathing together. We rehearse our parts and prepare feverishly in hopes that on the day we won't just be able to do what we've rehearsed like a play, but that we'll be so well comfortable together that we can also improvise and roll with anything unexpected that happens.
It's a simple requirement-- just all coordinate and do it together-- but as we all know, breathing together, synchronizing, and understanding each other is not actually easy at all.  This is a whole other post, or book, or evening conversation so I'll stop here and move on toward documenting the day itself...