茶時 in the shadow of the paulownia

AT LONG LAST: AN ACCOUNT OF MY SHOGO CHAJI.


On Thursday June 27 I was the teishu of a shogo chaji at Toinseki, a full scale tea room complex built in 1929 at the base of the Hokokubyo, the location of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's grave site. Toinseki was designed by Ennosai but construction was carried out by Tantansai, funded by a group of tea enthusiasts called the Toinkai.

Shogo chaji is the "full" chaji with a meal, two charcoal layings, thick tea and thin tea, with one "intermission" in the middle called nakadachi-- "middle standing."  (Standing up is a big deal when you spend all the rest of that time kneeling! Plus it's bathroom break time.)

My guests were the seven ichi-a students and the kaiseki meal was planned and coordinated by Paivi with Sarah and Damian helping in the kitchen.  I was on the tea-and-service end of things with Sugitani - sensei, Hamana-sensei, and Midorikai-alumni and my friend from Boston, Cone, as the hanto.

>>> ABOUT TIME


The organizing theme of the chaji was Time. I've been sort of obsessed with Time all year, which is a carryover from lots of people at Brown also being very interested in time. To the extent that it's become a joke amongst us to just shout "temporality!" about all kinds of random things. And of course here at Midorikai 'タイミング’ (Timing) is a big concern in Tea, as well as punctuality, and the perception that one year here just flies by.  We have innumerable zen phrases about time.  So time. Even though I talk about it all the time, it took Damian to point out to me that I should use that concept for the theme of the chaji. I didn't want to be too themey, but it was useful to have an organizing principle to help guide my choices in addition to thinking about things the first guest (Lindsey) liked and the other guests' likes and dislikes.

The invitations were wrapped in copies of an old calendar of the moon's phases, held together with paper thin strips of wood that I collected from our field trip to Eizenbu, Urasenke's department of architectural restoration. 

 Inside each one were miniature cards with a poem from the 100 poets collection, because Lindsey the first guest loves the Heian period and the 100 poets.This one is #36 by Kiyohara Fukayabu (fun fact: "Fukayabu" is written with kanji that mean "beautiful foster father.")

清原深養父 夏の夜は まだ宵ながら 明けぬるを 雲のいづくに 月やどるらむ

Kiyohara no Fukayabu

Natsu no yo wa
Mada yoi nagara
Akenuru o
Kumo no izuko ni
Tsuki yadoruran

In the summer night
The evening still seems present,
But the dawn is here.
To what region of the clouds
Has the wandering moon come home?


Getting to Toinseki was a little stressful itself because there was a chaji there the day before our chaji there, by the 2nd year Gakuen students.  We arrived just as the guests were finishing the chaji, and all hid around the corners waiting for them to leave before we could jump out and start cleaning.  The guests had to clean too-- the tatami and the garden, while Paivi, Damian, and Sarah set up the kitchen and tested rice and I made the haigata and then got the mizuya (back) set up with Hamana sensei.

On the day itself, I met Murata sensei and Cone at 6:30am, and then we went to get water from the well I'd chosen: Shigenoi, Well at the former site of the Heian noble Shigeno's estate.  Now the place is a famous old fu shop (a Kyoto speciality made of wheat gluten) with a gorgeous old willow guarding the faucet that dispenses their well water.

The guests were to arrive at 10, when they would enter the yoritsuki, put on hakama and change tabi or tabi covers. Then they go to the machiai.

In the machiai/waiting room, there was supposed to be a shikishi writing done by my friend Aki (the DJ monk from Ehime) but due to some transport mishaps it arrived on the day of the chaji (Timing!). It says　寧空見　(Mushiro kuu o mite）which is a distillation of something Gary sensei once said in class when the projector wasn't working properly:  Shall we just watch the sky instead?  It was sarcastic when the alternative was paying attention to a lecture, but it struck me as an excellent zen phrase:  maybe rather than getting caught up in things, we should at least sometimes just watch the sky.  And Aki pointed out that ”空” means sky but also means "emptiness," so it could also be read as "look at the emptiness instead." But, hilariously, that scroll wasn't there because it hadn't arrived yet, so the guests really were looking at the emptiness, as well as a kazarimono (display thing) spread on the floor of the tokonoma (alcove):  an old style calendar from the first year of the Meiji period (the era I wrote my dissertation on!).
There there was an Indian textile to sit on (I refused to use felt in the heat of late June) and a tabako bon, an old wooden tray from our favorite kimono shop, Modoribashi, a hiire (charcoal burner) with willow on it, and a homemade green bamboo ash container. They got osayu, hot water, from the meisui (famous water) we'd collected that morning in cups from Shimogamo shrine, delivered by Cone. After the osayu, they went to the koshikake machiai (the bench waiting area) outside in the garden where they got the second tabako bon, a bamboo basket with a blue striped hiire and another homemade haifuki.  Here's what I learned about haifuki:  it sounds simple to cut a piece of bamboo to make a single tube, but it is not.  Ours didn't want to sit up straight, because it's really complicated to get a clean 90degree cut on a non-straight pole and the saw hops around and scars the green skin all over.  The simple is deceptively difficult to achieve.  Thanks for that, Japan.

At that point, it was time for me to get ready to go. I came out of the nijiriguchi (the little crawl-in door of the tea room) with a bucket of meisui and went to the tsukubai basin where I threw out half the water, washed my hands and mouth, and then poured in the new water from the bucket.  I made a small miscalculation and dumped too much water so that when I poured in the new bucket, it didn't overflow the basin like it should have.  I hadn't even taken half, so it turns out that basin is misleadingly large. Then I took the bucket back and walked up through the gate to greet the 7 guests with a silent bow.  Then I went back in and into the back to wait for them to enter one by one after using the tsukubai.

I chose the scroll "Mizu kyuu shite, tsuki o nagasazu"-- The water flows quickly, but the moon is not washed away.  I interpreted this to mean that things (time!) move(s) quickly, but some things remain. Some things can transcend the pull of change. For me this phrase speaks to the paradox of time where things are constantly changing, and still staying the same and especially the paradox in tea where we both revere the past and seem to reenact it through learning temae, but also try to grasp each moment as unique and precious by itself.

I waited in the back until everyone had entered to see the scroll and the furo and kettle-- with my new treasure, a square topped kettle with a pattern of the two old people from the noh play Takasago on the front. Takasago not only is about a pair of ancient pines who are incarnated as an old couple-- they remain united even as they stand far from each other-- but also is about the immortality of poetry.  Both themes seemed good to me for thinking about us as a group united who are destined to be parted by geography.

During our opening greetings in the tea room it was so dark that someone joked they could only see my smile shining white in the gloom (which was a good sign I guess that I was at least SMILING!).  After that we went straight into the meal, which was carefully calibrated to the guests' tastes, and featured two extra dishes and two sake varieties, because Paivi, Sarah, and Damian are overachievers like that. From my end, I was sort of a shuttle for trays and dishes, just waiting in the mizuya until a tray would arrive being motored down the hallway by Sugitani sensei or Cone, and filling in any gaps in the service by bringing out more sake and pouring it for guests while we waited. 

This is water. Hydration is very important.

 We also can only serve warmed sake once, which meant sometimes we had to think of something else to do with the sake when the pourer came back not-empty.... because waste is bad.

Cone hanto-ing like a champ.

We invented a new term during the meal, "Stephan-ing" which is when you fill a sake saucer right to the brim so that it's almost impossible to get it to your mouth without spilling.  Because Stephan did this to me.

Hamana sensei and I got our teishu shoban in the mizuya which was most of the food, but not all of it, served in shokudo bento instead of on ozen trays:

It was fun to listen to the guests next door having fun-- we could hear when Lindsey spilled sake on her kimono (a standard peril in chaji) and when Stephan was convinced that we had served eggplant (which he hates) when it was actually tempura fig.  Eventually Kelly identified it correctly, only in Portuguese.
It's a really long time to kneel, and everytime I walked in the room to bring a dish or refill sake, I caught some people up on their knees who popped down the second they saw me like little prairie dogs or something.

After kaiseki came sumi-- charcoal laying, and the beginning of the real work for me. I managed to impress people with my kogo that I made out of a pocketwatch, and then I hope I didn't make too big a fool of myself with the swan wing zabaki-- one scoots backward out of the room sweeping the tatami with a big feather.  We had used extra fat charcoal in hopes that the fire wouldn't go out in the 90 minutes or so of the kaiseki, and luckily everything kept burning, despite my amateurish haigata.

After sumi came the sweets, which were a kuzu sheet with real gold flecks, wrapped around green pea an. Unfortunately despite several okashi trials, on the day the kuzu didn't cooperate too well, so unfortunately some of the sweets didn't want to stay together too well, but I can attest that they tasted really good.  Sadly it was too dark for the guests to realize they were eating gold!

Then out for nakadachi, where we had stationed handpainted fans and cold water for them to have while they waited, and then back for koicha.  In the interval I took out the scroll and put in the flower, which I had searched all Kyoto for ever since I read about it:  Tokeiso.  Clock grass.  It's called passion flower in English, and it's maybe my new favorite flower. (I'm going to make a whole separate post to talk about this flower!)

And then we rang the gong, which I hadn't had time to practice the day before, so my chu's were a little sho, but otherwise tons of fun to do, with me kneeling with the hitter and Cone holding up the gong in the tearoom. They returned.

And then it was showtime.

I had to do kasanejawan (two bowls of koicha) since the max for one bowl is 5 people and we had 7. The koicha was called Heian no Mukashi-- Ancient Heian (like the period about a thousand years ago) an auspicious choice because it was a Daisosho konomi and the first guest loves both Heian literature and Daisosho. The two bowls were a hagi bowl I found at a flea market and a black raku bowl made by Henry Mittwer, Gretchen Mittwer sensei's father, a monk at Tenryuji, and a famous chajin.  That bowl belongs to Gary-sensei.

The chaire (thick tea container) was a major piece for me: I made it a few years ago in Providence. I had a lid made for it in Kyoto and then I sewed the cover (shifuku) for it in the couple of weeks before the chaji. One of those things I meant to do way earlier, but was instead rushing through within a week before the event. Sanayo gave me lots of help and loaned me a book owned by Moe to help me get through it. I'm not too skillful at pottery and the little chaire looks a normal size, but it's actually really really thick, so in order to get 7 people's worth of tea in there I had to stuff it to the very very brim and even clunk it against the ground to settle the powder and stuff more tea in (big no no!).  But I think it worked out okay. I was so proud to be able to use it. The chashaku was Daisosho's Hassoai- worn out sandal- which I related not only to the passing of time, but to how full we pack our time in Midorikai, how much we try to do.

Koicha had a minor hiccup with timing because the guests weren't too familiar with kasanejawan yet and it's really difficult to figure out how most efficiently time the returning and handing around of bowls. Sugitani-sensei stuck her head in the door and gave the direction to return the first bowl to me.

After I closed koicha and we did haiken, I did gozumi, realizing there were a few finer points of the temae in a daime space that I hadn't really had time to internalize. But hattaraki-ed it.
Then it was time for usucha, which I did with just two bowls so I could serve all 7 people the first time through.
Our higashi were served on a clam shaped tray with clouds from Zohiko and a little paper-covered tray with decoupage karuta cards (with the 100 poets). The sweets were plum jelly in bamboo leaves and little red dice made of suhama to which Damian and Sarah had painstakingly added the black dots with black sesame seeds all morning in between all the other cooking (!!!).
The tea was Choukyuu no Shiro, which simply means "a long long time", which I thought would be nice to remind us that we have a long time to be colleagues in tea, even if our time in Kyoto was short. The natsume was my prized 19th century hiranatsume with chidori on it and a Gengensai kao (probably a fake, I learned after buying, but I still love it).  I used a bowl with Ono no Komachi the poet on it for Lindsey, which made her day, and then the second bowl was a little Mishima-- which were named because the patterns on them resembled Mishima style calendars. Just like for our chaji, Sugitani sensei came in to join the guests during usucha, and Cone came out to help deliver bowls and then to serve from the back the second bowls. Andreea, the last guest, helped too, and then several other people also ended up going into the mizuya, a practice which I dislike a lot, but that I'm sure felt good for their legs and I imagine people like to help.
I had originally selected 7 bowls, but Hamana-sensei wanted to keep the haiken faster since it was already going to be so long, so I used the wave-pattern kazujawan, which belong to Midorikai ever since they did some huge chakai in Tokyo in the early '80s.  They're actually pretty cool. They're one of those things I'd like to just have one of as a souvenir. Ah well.

With the end of usucha, things were winding down and I came back after haiken to do final greetings and then after they all went back past the flower and the furo and left, I scampered out to the little nijiriguchi door, and slid it open to do the final bow--- but when I opened the door Andreea hissed No! No! Go back! because most of the guests had just headed off over the mountain path back to the machiai instead of remembering to wait in reverse order. But I didn't go back, I just laughed and when everyone was back in eyesight, we bowed and then they really were able to head off.

Then comes the part where we wait for them to leave. When we were guests at Toinseki, we'd been stuck in the garden because the machiai door hadn't been cracked open and it sticks, so at first we thought it was locked and we couldn't find a way out of the garden until eventually Sarah pried it open with her fan. Thinking of this, as soon as the bow was done, I ran over to see the machiai door, but it was already open tegakari (yay!) so then we hid and waited for them to go, but they got as far as the yoritsuki and then just didn't go and didn't go until finally Hamana-sensei went to check on them--- and it turns out they were changing into work clothes, aprons and stuff, because they thought they were supposed to help us clean up!! So we laughed about that and insisted that they had to go on home as guests. So sweet though that they were going to help.

After we sent our guests off for real, we cleaned up in double time, packing away everything as fast as possible. I mainly had to connect things to their boxes, and keep my head above the barrage of questions about where things needed to go. So so so much stuff to make a shogo chaji happen. We piled it in the genkan. We discovered a few funny things, like the hi-otoshi I bought for starting the charcoal-- it has an "M" on it for Midorikai, but when I asked for it, Murata-sensei held it up and said look, it says Toinseki, and sure enough it ALSO said Toin in kanji. So we left that assuming some other Midorikaisei accidentally stole it at a previous chaji. The only thing we ended up accidentally switching was one futaoki-- I knew one had been under the lid of the ganro kettle in the mizuya, but I never saw all four together, so when we got home, one of the three I had brought was intensely beautiful, with this old burnished luster, and the other two were much more white and newish and boring. So I knew we'd accidentally switched one. Which we eventually switched back (or more likely we probably ended up donating ours AND giving theirs back. I'm not sure.) It's one of those sad things where it means virtually nothing to Toinseki-- it's just a mizuya utensil, while we could have treasured that futaoki forever, but the rules of hierarchy and scrupulous honesty mean we should give it back where it will be a worthless item, leave our own behind, even though we're always short of simple things like that, and they'll all be worthless items and we'll think of something else.

And then home.

Where we exploded everything back out in the dogubeya to air it out, and then I went to bed.



Later I got the thank you notes, and Natasha's was all scenes from the event: