People who are talking to me about Tea without having any firsthand knowledge of it often say to me, "It's a geisha thing, right?" or "Oh, and it's only women who do it, right?" They say this like it is a cool feminist reclamation project to do tea, like crochet or baking or something. Which would be cool, but that's not really the case. I do totally understand why Tea seems feminine-- it is on the surface of things a practice of hospitality and service, historically feminine undertakings. And today's practitioners are overwhelmingly female-- maybe 90% of people studying Tea today are women (although I feel like the ratios are more even amongst non-Japanese practitioners). And geisha DO do Tea; so did oiran and courtesans in the pleasure quarters of Japanese cities throughout the Edo period. So, to a western eye, of course "Tea ceremony" must seem very feminine. However, today I was thinking that the things that I like most about Tea procedure are actually those which feel least feminine to me. The temae (procedures) of wabicha seem pretty clean, strong, unflowery and unaffected in general--I was thinking today during keiko in Boston that all the directives are simple and to the point-- pick the thing up, hold it in a way that it will properly work as a tool. I know this means that in some ways I've just drunk the koolaid and become convinced that tea is "natural," despite the intense artificiality of laboriously memorizing movements in order to repeat them improvizationally. I also know, and want to emphasize, that I don't mean to elide the "feminine" with the "artificial" and the complicated while an unspoken "not feminine" (read: masculine) maintains its monopoly on the "natural" and "strong." However, I'm engaging such suspect binaries because I think they got here before I did and I hear within those well-meaning comments and questions about the femininity of Tea a presumption that Tea is delicate, complicated, ornate, fancy, pretty, and ultimately shallow.
My impression of Tea these days is that it is none of those things. In fact, the movements feel stripped down, bare, and efficient to me now (for the most part). And yet, I can still see what from another perspective seems like affectation and flamboyance. I suggest that this reveals just how much of "simplicity" or "naturalness" can get lost in translation between cultures. For example, translating Japanese into English often makes Japanese sound just as flowery and ornate as Tea might look: translating the honorific "o" as "honorable" is popular but makes Japanese sound ridiculously archaic and exaggeratedly formal with all their "honorable hand washing places" (bathrooms), "honorable tea caddies," "honorable waiting time," "honorable sweets, ""honorable beverages," and so on. But let me explain:
that's just the way people talk. If everyone wore evening gowns every day, that would not actually be formal wear. It would be everyday clothing. That is what most keigo (formal speech) is like. It's polite. It can be a little laborious, and even Japanese people make mistakes, but it's not outlandishly weird the way it sounds in English.
So Tea isn't girly, it isn't stiltedly formal, it isn't outlandishly ornate, and yet it's clearly not simple to do either or learned quickly and finished. Family friends from Kansas love to ask, "Haven't you LEARNED how to serve tea yet?"
The irony of this question isn't that it misses the point of why we study Tea; the irony is that
no, we haven't. We all still make mistakes even on simple procedures we've been doing for years. We practice movements and steps, tripping all over ourselves, stopping, starting, and second-guessing actually in the hopes that eventually when we're not in practice mode, all those things will come back to us naturally, simply, flowingly.
I often remember one day near the end of my time in Kyoto when I was sitting and watched another of my classmates trying to turn around in the tearoom and walk out always stepping and crossing with the correct foot. I had a brief moment of irritation and thought to myself, oh who cares? Why do we have to trip all over ourselves like this all the time? It's stupid not to be able to just walk gracefully out of the room.
And then the reply to my frustration came to me just as quickly, just as if the teacher had answered me: we trip all over ourselves again and again like this in the hopes that someday all this practice will enable us to stand up, turn around, and walk out gracefully. After so much keiko, and in the face of the fact that we will never achieve a flawless temae, I had lost sight of the fact that the tripping and stop-starting was only a necessary obstacle in the path of doing Tea.
So we get into heavily regulated, you might even say tortured, positions and situations while practicing tea, but those are obstacles to be expected while we attempt to condition the body into being able to do these things gracefully without having to think it through. Just like anything we try the first time-- it goes awkwardly until we've trained our muscles to respond in the way we want.
It's not simple to achieve such simplicity. But neither is Tea an overwrought performance of exaggerated everyday events. I like to think that Tea thus shows up the lie inside myths of the "natural" and the simple. In fact, achieving clean simplicity of effect is slow, awkward, and complicated. It requires bodily discipline, repetition, and practice. We might wonder about that in conjunction with other things in our lives we think of as natural-- what kind of work went in to making that thing seem so "natural"?
