Tea Ceremony for Foreigners

Saturday two other AKP students and I went to a tea ceremony (or Ochakai) hosted by the Urasenke school which was for and by foreigners in Japan. It was held at their headquarters about a 15 minute walk away from Doshisha and was moving through over 400 guests that day. The tea ceremony itself was very nice, and the snack that they served us was a sort of fluffy crepe filled with only mildly sweet roasted chestnut paste. Unfortunately, it seems to be the custom here to narrate tea ceremonies to those who might have never seen one before. Personally, I find it hard to concentrate on the carefully practiced and almost ritually exact movements of the ceremony when I’m having someone tell me ‘and now she’s adding the water…’ which I am certainly capable of seeing for myself. After the ritual, we picked up our gift and looked in some shops around the area, most of which are either tea ceremony implement shops or little tea cafes attached to shops that sell sweets that are used in tea ceremony. At one of these shops, directly by next to the tea school, we mentioned to the owner that we were studying at Doshisha. When he heard this he said ‘I went to Doshisha too!’ and told the shop girls to bring us tea and lovely hand-painted envelopes of the papers that tea ceremony guests use to eat their snacks. The tea actually wasn’t tea, but a tasty drink made with hot water, shiso (beefsteak plant, I think, but a very strong flavour) and sour plum. After that we toured around the quarter some more looking at things that we could not possibly afford (but then, is $100 really that much to spend on a ladle rest?) and got some food of both lunch and dessert varieties. When I got home and shared my gift from the tea school with my host family, they told me that it was from a rather famous traditional Japanese dessert store called Tsuruya that was in the area. All in all another great day, especially since it stayed sunny, cool, and crisp the whole time.
-There is a style of tea ceremony invented by the Urasenke school in order to make foreigners more comfortable that uses stools and little tables.
-The whole area reminded me of the novel ‘The Tea House Fire’ which was quite a good read.
-Tea ceremony is an amazingly expensive hobby, but also rather like collecting art, since the finest implements are one of a kind, often antique, and seemingly always produced by workshops that have been producing for over 300 years.
-I’ve had yet another experience with a very generous person here in Kyoto.