Breach of etiquette; fun with futaoki

My first day flying solo as mizuya-chō. Started with a hiccup that wasn’t entirely my fault: Hamana-sensei had asked me to make him a bowl of tea while we waited for Hlawatsch-sensei, but by the time I finished it, the two teachers were sitting down together. What to do? I couldn’t serve Hamana-sensei’s bowl to Hlawatsch-sensei, because I hadn’t served the latter his sweet yet. But if I stopped to do that, Hamana-sensei’s tea would go cold. In retrospect, I probably should have taken care of Hlawatsch-sensei and then made Hamana-sensei a fresh bowl of tea. In the moment, though, without all this clarity of hindsight, I just served Hamana-sensei and endured the gentle criticism for my breach of etiquette.

Hang on–that’s not how the day started. We actually began with a quiz on which I did respectably but not outstandingly. For that I’ll go ahead and blame Ro-sensei. Nice as he is–and, of course, knowledgeable–the language barrier keeps him from imparting to us much in the way of facts of the kind that I needed to know for the quiz. Ah, well–these don’t go on our permanent record or anything.

Hlawatsch-sensei covered the early history of Christianity in Japan, from the arrival of the Jesuits in the mid-16th century to the expulsions, exterminations, and forced re-conversions that virtually extinguished the faith here a century later.

My supervisory duties went smoothly in the afternoon before and after practice. In between, we practiced more with the sugidana, which I’ve quickly grown to dislike, and here’s why. Failing an experienced sense of touch with the sliding middle shelf, the only way to put it where you want it is to look at it, which is impossible for anyone in the class, regardless of size, to do without hunching over and craning his or her neck in a most unbecoming fashion. And I don’t see how mastering the thing blindfolded would be worth the effort. The real point of the practice was to play around with various futaoki, kettle lid rests, on which we also set the hishaku from time to time. For hakobi temae, the futaoki should be plain bamboo, but with a tana, it should be anything but. (Exception: if the bamboo lid rest has an iemoto’s ciper on it.) So they can be metal or glass or ceramic or what have you, and certain shapes have certain rules governing their use and display. Fun fun fun.

Being Dude to Whom the Buck Might Be Passed means you don’t have to do any cleaning or anything afterwards, so I relaxed, had supper, and spent another evening failing to get to the bottom of my to-do pile. I would have made more progress than I did, but a script arrived for my perusal: the predetermined dialogs in which I’d have to participate during the next day’s chaji. I studied until bedtime, and dropped off feeling apprehensive.

Happy reunion

I got up and got out early, because I had quite a ways to go. I rode the subway downtown, transferred to the Hankyū line, and made my way west through Osaka, toward Kobe. At Nishinomiya-kitaguchi I discovered that even an ugly, utilitarian train station can inspire nostalgia: I passed through here every day on my way to and from school two summers ago. I discovered also that I’d allowed far too much time for my journey. I had over an hour to kill, and I knew that here was a better place to kill it than the tiny station at my destination, so I parked myself on a bench and finished the assigned reading for Hlawatsch-sensei’s Japanese history class the next day.

Then I boarded one last train, the local bound for Takarazuka, and got off two stops later at Kotoen for a fresh wave of nostalgia in the station and on the streets outside. Down the railway frontage road and a right turn at the elevated shinkansen track. Left at the end of the street, half a block–and there’s Host Dad waiting for me at the corner. He shakes my hand with a smile but no big to-do, and leads me up to the back gate of the Takada house. As ever, I have to go around to the front door (which is technically on the side of the house, if we reckon by orientation to the street); it opens, and there’s Host Mom, beaming, arms outstretched almost as if ready for a hug, but not really, because she’s Japanese.

I change into tiny slippers and follow Host Parents down the hall to the room that was mine two summers ago. Now it’s a bright and airy sitting room looking out on the front yard, most of which has been converted since my last visit into a simple but pristine rock garden, blinding white in the late-morning sun. I hand over the yuzu mochi to a gratifying round of impressed noises; we have some tea; my faltering Japanese gets the best exercise it’s had in almost two years.

Host Dad asks a question about my parents or something I don’t follow, so he disappears to retrieve something written to make reference to. It turns out to be a binder containing every card and letter and photograph I’ve sent them over the last two years, neatly arranged and preserved. This is so touching that I nearly lose my composure.

I’d told them over the phone that I didn’t need to be back to Kyoto until 9 or 10 at night, not wanting them to feel rushed; now I discover that they mean for me to stay absolutely as long as I can. They’d promised over the phone a tempura lunch, but now they tell me that Host Mom will cook that for dinner; right now we’ll go out for lunch. We walk to the station and they present me with a well-charged train fare card. We ride a few stops to some pricey-looking Hankyū-owned hotel, and dine there on sashimi and salad and a very up-market beef stew followed by a trip to the dessert bar.

On our way back to the house we stop at the grocery store in the basement of the building across the street from Kotoen station. Host Mom buys tempura ingredients and Host Dad decides that I should drink two tall cans of beer with dinner. I see a young woman wearing a shirt that reads:

MAYON

NAISE

IS THE

NEW CORE

We have more tea, and watch sumo on television. Just as I’m about to doze off in the warm afternoon breeze blowing through the sliding glass doors, Host Dad rousts me to accompany him on a walk around the neighborhood. We visit a pretty hilltop shrine I’d totally missed in the six weeks I lived here, and we stop by a schoolyard to watch half an inning of Little League baseball. I see an apartment complex named “Gleen Gables.”

I have time to do some writing on my laptop while Host Mom finishes making supper and Host Dad takes a shower, and then it’s tempura time. I’d remembered accurately: Host Mom cooks exquisitely. I tell the Host Parents how nostalgic the kitchen makes me: the little plastic soy sauce dispenser with the pale green cap; the plate with the little drawing of the sumo wrestler on it; the tacky wall clock that bleeps out a monophonic synthesized snatch of some classical piece I can’t name at the top of every hour. I’d forgotten about the pickles that Host Dad douses with Aji no Moto and soy sauce. I’d forgotten about the little dishes of potato salad on beds of lettuce with cherry tomatoes that Host Mom prepares beforehand and keeps in the refrigerator, plastic-wrapped, until serving.

We eat; I drink. They tell me about the week-long cruise around Southeast Asia they’ll take at the beginning of June. They tell me how happy they are to have me visiting, since mealtimes most often find just the two of them in the kitchen. I promise to come again soon.

The tacky clock reads almost seven and the dusk is well advanced, and I have a not-inconsiderable return trip ahead of me. Host Mom says goodbye to me at the door. Host Dad walks me back to the station and takes his leave there as unceremoniously as he greeted me in the morning.

I make good time back to Kyoto. I go to bed happy and thankful for this auxiliary family of mine, for this odd bond between people who can barely communicate across lines linguistic, cultural, generational–but who are kind and generous and doggedly loyal notwithstanding.

Some purple prose on the subject of summer

Pure, sweet distillation of summer: the blaze of eternity visible through the fissures of our time-fettered world. If we’ll pass into the next life to the strains of some heartbreakingly sweet chord, today I could hear the orchestra tuning up.

Sean and I took a late-morning trip to the post office to send a few things to a few people back in the States, and then we stopped into a famous local sweet shop from which many of Urasenke’s tea sweets come. I’d tell you its name if I could remember or read it. Anyhow, it’s basically the Rolls-Royce dealership of sweet shops: extremely polite and polished staff; lots of empty floor space; a brightly lit glass counter running around the room. Inside of and atop the counter: an immaculate array of things almost too beautiful to eat. Happily, I went in knowing what I’d come out with. The place is known particularly for the mochi it flavors with the Japanese citrus fruit called yuzu. I tried a sample–exquisite–and bought two boxes: one for my Kobe host parents, the other for Anita as a thank-you gift for navigating Sean and I around Osaka the Sunday before. The boxes were bright yellow cardboard pressed into yuzu shape, complete with green leaf, and precision-wrapped in the store’s custom-printed wrapping paper. The sticker holding the folds shut advertises the day on which the sweets were bought.

And the store only gives change in shinsatsu: crisp, clean, new bills.

Then Sean and I biked north and east to check out a department store we hadn’t yet visited, in a fruitless search for matcha Kit-Kats, which seem to have gone out of season. We decided to take the long way home, walking our bikes down the gravel path on the west side of the Shimogawa river. A mild breeze from the mountains to the north blew intermittent refreshment down the river, but mostly the air sat still and sleepy and sun-baked above the tall grass choking the riverbed. A young mother with her two children ate convenience store bentō on the bank. A pale, shirtless gaijin sunned himself on a bench across the river. Children with their pants rolled up waded in the shallow water and hopped across the backs of a family of giant concrete turtles that the city, for reasons unknown, has strung across the riverbed like stepping stones.

Our thoughts slowed with our steps, and finally an unoccupied park bench insisted that we sit down and listen to the birds and the insects and the hum of the ancient universe behind everything. We kept very still in the brightness and swigged green tea from 2-liter bottles. I wasn’t wearing a watch, but if I had been, I’m reasonably certain I could have looked to find it stopped, second-hand twitching like a heartbeat without advancing.

Eventually a cloud passing in front of the sun released us from the river’s spell, and we pushed our bikes up the embankment and back into the world of trade and traffic. Even it seemed to be moving in slow motion. We rode an unfamiliar street west; it took us through a thick stand of trees that concealed a stream winding through green shadow along the boundary of a shrine. Up the gravel entranceway, bright red torī shone through the leaves.

Back in the apartment, noble intentions to be productive proved powerless against the napping impulse. And thus the afternoon slipped away.

Dusk found Sean and I with a certain amount of vigor restored, which was good, because I still needed to buy a gift bag in which to deliver yuzu mochi to Kobe the next morning. We pedaled up to Vivre, stopping by the women’s dorm to give Anita her mochi, quickly accomplished the mission, and were riding back along Karasuma, discussing our dinner options, when some festive lights down a side street caught our eyes.

We parked our bikes in front of a convenience store and joined a stream of pedestrians pushing toward whatever it was. Which turned out to be a little local matsuri–festival–at the shrine for the Officially Designated Protective Deity for the chunk of city in which Konnichian is located. We learned later that we were still a day ahead of the main event–the parading of the deity around the city streets in its portable mikoshi shrine, borne on the shoulders of tipsy men in short shorts–but tonight there was plenty to see nevertheless.

The street approaching the shrine’s gate was lined on both sides with cozy little yellow pavilions glowing merrily in the night with the light of bare incandescent bulbs. There were food vendors and games of chance; shallow tanks teeming with goldfish for children to net and take home; trinkets of this kind and that. Giddy festival crowds jostled up a short flight of stairs to the gate, where knots of high school girls with bleached-blond hair smoked sullenly in the shadows, and down the other side to the shrine’s courtyard. Here the temporary marketplace widened to three or four aisles up and down which ambled young people and old, families, couples, snacking on okonomiyaki and yakisoba; long grilled sausages on sticks slathered with spicy Chinese mustard; skewered chunks of pork battered and deep-fried; fresh pastries; snow cones; french fries; cotton candy; yakitori hot off tiny charcoal grills; chunks of fried karaage chicken in paper cups; giant fish-shaped senbei crackers drizzled with mayonnaise and okonomi sauce and aonori and katsuobushi.

I turned toward a tug at my arm to see, unexpectedly, Hamana-sensei and his wife; we chatted briefly, then went our separate ways. Just beyond the hubbub sat the shrine itself, filled with fresh offerings of food and drink that glowed pale and white from the shadows. People walked past quietly, respectfully; some stopped briefly to pray.

Then it was back to the light and noise. Sean and I decided that dinner had found us; we filled up on sausage and okonomiyaki and karaage on the way back to our bicycles. “Oishisō desu yo,” I exclaimed to the karaage-seller: “Looks delicious!” “Meccha oishii,” he replied in very casual slang: “Damn good” is close. He added that it would go great with some beer, and he piled my paper cup unusually high with fresh hot chicken, perhaps as a reward for my being a gaijin attempting his language and complimenting his product.

Different language, different food, and a thoroughly foreign religious pretext–but the same energy as any warm summer-night county fair midway I’ve ever walked. We passed through the gate and left the color and light and smells and sound behind, and I went to bed full of good food and pleasant thoughts about cultural universals and the special charm of summer, when the echoes of forever reach us ahead of the sound itself.

Chakai

Another break from the lecture-lunch-practice norm today, because we’d been invited to a chakai hosted by the 3rd-year Japanese students. So we started the day with practice in our auxiliary space up in the women’s dorm while the gakuensei (Japanese students) cooked and cleaned and prepared.

Tana of the Day: sugidana. (Literally: cedar shelf.) Much like the others, except that it has a sliding center shelf that must be slid forward and back to get at the mizusashi sitting below it. Not worth the trouble, in my untutored opinion.

After lunch the Midorikai men dashed back to the dorm to put on hakama. I doubt I can do better than my Japanese dictionary, which defines hakama as “man’s formal divided skirt,” though it does raise the possibly insoluble question of where the line is that separates divided skirts from giant pants. Anyhow, hakama are expensive swaths of pleated fabric that you step into from the top; the seam dividing the skirt pulls the bottom of your kimono up and restores some of your mobility. We only get to wear them for formal occasions, which is sort of a pity, because despite the extra hassle, they look really good. The top edge covers the obi almost completely, and four long fabric ties crisscross around the waist and hips to secure the thing. And then all you have to worry about is stepping on the bottom hem when standing up from seiza, which will happen.

We approached the school again to see the concrete and asphalt outside being watered down in our anticipation of our arrival. In the ideal setting, of course, guests would approach the tearoom through a garden path, which would be likewise sprinkled with water to give a cool, fresh feeling, but tea practice also boasts an ethic of making do with what’s available, and I found charm in the treatment of our unremarkable little urban side street.

We waited in the first floor of the shokudō with the other guests for the chakai, the Japanese 1-year course students, until being summoned. Hamana-sensei explained to us the gifts that guests at such events customarily bring: something edible for the behind-the-scenes helpers in the mizuya, and cash (in uncirculated bills, of course) to help defray the cost of the function. The bills should be put into an envelope with their fronts forward; the envelope can be handed over in a variety of classy ways: on an opened fan, in the fold of a kobukusa, wrapped in a small furoshiki with the folds arranged carefully in a manner traditionally said to prevent good luck from falling out the bottom of the package.

Then we filed across the street to the school building and signed a guest book with brush and ink–as if my Japanese handwriting using familiar media weren’t embarrassing enough. Past the entranceway where we took off our zori and left our bags, the tea rooms where we spend so much time had been made almost unrecognizable. Portable folding walls hid service hallways and mizuya from sight, and the sliding doors separating rooms 5 and 6 had been taken away to create one large, long room to serve first as our waiting place, or machiai.

On the far end of the room, in room 6’s tokonoma, hung a scroll with a spirited painting of the god Shōki, expeller of demons and protector against disease and misfortune, and guardian of children–if I’ve got my facts straight. Here he looked less fearsome than robust and heartily amused: a distant cousin to Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Present, perhaps, sitting with his hands on his thighs and his head tossed back. (Not that I’d swear to the accuracy of my memory of the thing.) In room 5’s toko hung a simpler scroll, with energetic calligraphy that read katsu, according to Hamana-sensei–though which of the many katsus in the language it was, he didn’t say. (And I didn’t think to ask.)

The tabakobon was a tray of unlacquered wood decorated with cut-outs in the tsubotsubo pattern that the Sen family uses as a sub-crest; on it sat a hiire I never got a good look at and don’t remember any secondhand information about either. While we waited, small portions of hot (well, warm, anyhow) water flavored with what I took to be dried plum were served to us in tiny cups of blue and white sometsuke porcelain in which what might have been plum blossoms floated. (If they were, in fact, perhaps they’d been preserved dry; those blossoms were gone from the trees before I arrived here. Anyhow, I liked the effect. Very fūryū.) While we drank our osayu, one of the 3rd-year students sat in the room as hantō, or helper, and held forth on the dōgu.

After which the doors at the west end of the room were opened to reveal that rooms 3 and 4 had been combined just as 5 and 6 had, to make space for the honseki–the main seating. The items displayed in the tokonoma gave us our first overt indicators of the chakai’s theme. (After Hamana-sensei had explained them to us, that is.) At the heart of the theme was an old legend holding that a lowly fish who could swim upstream past three waterfalls would be transformed into a mighty dragon; the gakuensei used the legend to describe our studies at Urasenke. So the single white tessen blossom, sparkling under a fine mist of water, hung from a chain in a boat-shaped bamboo flower holder called a suribune; its bow faced the “lower” end of the toko, an out-of-the-ordinary signifier of departure: here, our separation from homes, friends, family to study in Kyoto. On a sheaf of thick paper on the bottom of the toko sat a red incense box (indicating that sumidemae, the charcoal-laying procedure, would not be performed) in the shape of a koi, the lowly fish. Us. The scroll, written by Daisōshō, read ryūsui kandan nashi: “in running water there are no interruptions,” perhaps. Don’t look to me to explain this one to you. Perhaps its a Zen counterpoint to the fish-dragon legend. (That is, it’s obviously Zen; I’m making up the rest.) The waterfalls don’t actually exist. There is no spoon.

Then the sweets were brought out, and I thought ruefully of my inability, that day at Oimatsu, to consistently do something as basic as pressing sugar into a mold. The gakuensei had themselves prepared gorgeous kuzu manjū, colored bean paste suspended in a translucent hemisphere made somehow of arrowroot starch, I think; these were named ryūmon, “Dragon Gate,” for the three colors in each: pink, yellow, and green–one for each waterfall.

A young woman entered the room next to prepare usucha using the furo and mizusashi that rested on a long lacquered board called, in Japanese, “long board” (nagaita). (With these two dōgu sitting on the nagaita, I’ll add just because I can, the temae is called futatsuoki: “two things put.” Not everything about tea is as impenetrable as the scrolls.) Now, I sat far from the place of preparation, and couldn’t get a close look at any of the dōgu before we were shuffled to the next room, so much of the following is secondhand. The kama itself was a tall, nearly cylindrical one that tapered toward the top (I’m counting on somebody posting the proper name for this geometric shape in the comments) called–because of shape or finish or what, I don’t know–unryū, “Cloud Dragon.” A kettle optimistic that we’ll achieve transformation, it was! The mizusashi was blue Italian glass with what looked from a distance like wave patterns and, it was said, Daisōshō’s crest on the underside of the lid. The natsume was likewise said to bear a wave design. The chashaku was a rather precious (compared to my 500-yen bamboo special) one made of old wood from Kinkakuji; really wish I’d gotten a close look at that one.

While our teishu made two bowls of tea–first in a black raku bowl made by a (current? former?) student’s father (I think), next in a not-black not-raku (I didn’t get anywhere near these, remember) bowl whose name came to me as aokaede–green maple–the smilingest of all the students here (and a real cutie, I think I can add here without creating trouble for myself) played hantō and said stuff in Japanese while somewhere behind me, but unfortunately just out of earshot, Hamana-sensei provided a certain amount of English. I just enjoyed my tea (brought from the back, like all but the the first two bowls; mine came in a chawan with the glaze done, if I recall correctly, in the technique called mishima) while attempting to ignore the mounting agony in my knees.

On the way out of the room I had time enough only to take a quick peek into the black lacquer tabakakon (style: fumibako, because something about it supposedly looks like a letterbox) to see the green-glazed oribe hiire, made by the mother (I think) of the student whose father (I think) made the black raku bowl. But the last stage of the chakai awaited us: a tenshin meal prepared by the gakuensei and served in the room 5-room 6 complex, which had been redecorated in our absence with an ikebana-style flower arrangement (as opposed to chabana–flowers for tea–which have their own rules) with lotus blossoms floating in water alongside some unidentified flowers (meaning, their names were most likely given but I don’t remember them) in toko #5; and a scroll in toko #6 with a painting of a fish mid-flop, which certainly describes me on my way up–or possibly down–the waterfalls.

I won’t lie: by now my knees hurt far too much for me to fully enjoy the meal. Still, I recognized and admired the skill with which it had been executed. Trays were set down in front of us bearing sticky cakes of rice studded with green peas and pressed into the shapes of gourds; the rice was from some student’s rice-famous home prefecture and the peas were just in season. Also there were choice nuggets of tai fish; bites of bamboo shoot and other tasties I couldn’t identify; flower-shaped dishes full of more delicious mystery stuff. And boiled egg halves, each cooked for exactly nine minutes. Sake was served in the small red saucers that always make me wonder who exactly first thought putting liquid in a basically flat container was a good idea. Taking my etiquette cues from Hamana-sensei, I drank three servings. It was good stuff, from some sake-famous prefecture–possibly the same one the rice came from. And then the nimono came out in covered bowls: delicate sōmen noodles in the mildest fish stock, topped with another chunk of tai and exactly two julienned strips of carrot, and concealing a tiny seed-like granule of I-don’t-know-what that had the most remarkably strong, cleansing, and otherwise indescribable flavor. Though maybe Sen-Sen isn’t too far off.

I’m pretty sure that by this time I’d given up on seiza entirely and was just kneeling upright. As is customary, I pulled tissues out of my sleeve to wipe down all of the utensils I’d eaten off of, starting with the nimono bowl’s cover, to put the condensation on its underside to good use. Into the plastic bag in my other sleeve (the left one, where dirty things go) I put the tissues and the only inedible part of the meal, a decorative leaf. The business ends of our chopsticks, having until now rested over the left rim of the tray in a show of cleanliness, were now rested on the flat of the tray; traditionally, the sound of an in-unison chopstick drop alerts the host that the trays are ready to be collected. One last cup of tea (Bancha? Maybe.) and the event was over. I limped home exceedingly impressed with the gakuenseis’ efforts, and looking forward to writing the thank-you letter I now owed them.

Changed into samue and did pitiful battle with furo ash until just before the cafeteria closed. Ate. Had a couple of drinks. Wondered when Friday nights stopped being occasions. Slept.

Aoi Matsuri

Hamana-sensei granted us a last-minute schedule change, canceling morning lectures so that we could walk down to the Imperial Palace to witness the Aoi Festival. This is an ancient Kyoto tradition, one of the oldest festivals in the world, that has been conducted every summer since the year 807 except for a two hundred-year break from the late 15th through 17th centuries. It has something to do with paying respect to certain of the city’s official protective deities, and takes its name from the hollyhock (aoi) leaves that decorate participants’ costumes. There are several days of various old-timey activities–horses and archery and what-not–but the highlight is the procession of some 600 people in Heian-era dress that we saw.

Sort of. Apparently, to actually see the procession you have to pay cash money for a seat on the designated route through the park. We contented ourselves with standing alongside the roped-off staging area in the bright early-summer sun, watching the participants appear around a corner of the wall in front of us and wait for their turns to turn another corner and process for real. The effect was probably about the same, though because we arrived early to make sure we could actually get close enough to see something, we spent most of the time watching a pair of young bulls get progressively more agitated the closer show-time approached. They had been decorated with various fabric hangings and rope headdresses, and would eventually pull a cart down the parade route, but they didn’t share the crowd’s enthusiasm for the festival atmosphere. The calming ministrations of the white-clad Shinto priests handling them kept the bulls from panicking, but they bellowed most morosely for an hour or more until they finally got to discharge their duty.

But then things got underway. There were people on horses and people on foot; priests and archers and children; people carrying things I couldn’t identify–some might have been drums, others were perhaps various offerings to the gods. There were people carrying colossal umbrella-things that looked like big hats made of flowers. (Or maybe they were colossal hats on sticks that looked like parasols.) There were kimono of every bright color imaginable, and elegant ladies with white faces and long straight black hair gliding over the gravel under parasols. There were many, many funny hats.

Finally the saio-dai, the focus of the parade, passed on a palanquin propelled by eight men. (But actually supported by rubber tires.) In Heian days, she would have been a princess discharging her imperial religious duty; now she’s a local young woman chosen to play the part for the duration of the festival. She wears twelve layers of robe, and the end of each is draped carefully over the edge of her seat to display the rainbow of fabric. I read somewhere that she “radiates imperial serenity in all directions.” I imagine that anyone would do the same who was wearing twelve layers of fabric on a warm day and so trying to sit as still as possible. Still, it was a sight worth seeing.

Back at school in hot clothes of our own, we tackled the tsubotsubodana. Tiny variations on the ongoing theme. I felt reasonably good about my temae, but then again, that isn’t too hard when Ro-sensei is supervising; he rarely says much at all, so you’re free to believe whatever you want to about your performance. I have a hunch that he does it on purpose, to let us feel the rhythm of a temae with few interruptions, to let us build confidence and correct our own mistakes without leaning on the crutch of constant interruptions from a teacher. I could be wrong.

I spent the evening trying with limited success to catch up on correspondence and cleaning, until Szymon came home to host a “how to put on hakama party.” More on that in my next entry.

Got to bed later than I should have, considering the early morning following.

Tea minutiae; crazy old dudes on bikes

Off of the busy main street on which I live run countless smaller streets. Because this is Japan, that means much smaller. Like, I’m always surprised when I actually see cars on them. But that’s not a super-frequent occurrence, so if you’re heading up or down Horikawa on foot or bicycle, stopping at traffic lights is sort of optional. I’ll guesstimate that more than half of everyone around here just ignores them.

Well, I was stopped at one today on the way to school next to an old man astride a bicycle, muttering to himself. A gaijin coming toward us on a bicycle slowed at the intersection, checked for oncoming traffic, and pedaled on through the red light. “Aka. Aka deshō. Aka,” muttered the old man. “It’s red, you know.” He said it to himself. I suspect he deals with most of his dissatisfaction with the world this way, sharpening up reprimands but never firing them at their targets.

Today’s tana was the kōkōdana, a favored item of Gengensai (Urasenke XI). It has one shelf more than the marujokudana, and is square instead of round. This adds up to a bit of extra stuff-shuffling and having to remember to set the hishaku on the tana with its mouth facing up at the end of the temae.

Glad you asked. Because tea developed to incorporate a lot of imported Chinese cosmological stuff about elements and yin and yang and so forth, and so the dōgu and temae strive for various balances. Like, we draw a glyph for water in the ash in the furo, because it’s thought to balance the fire that will sit atop it. That kind of thing. Likewise, the bottom of the hishaku’s cup is reckoned the circular part, and because the kōkōdana is square, you want to set the not-square side of the hishaku on it for balance.

Terrific sweets today: kashiwa mochi. Sweet, gooey mochi filled with bean paste and wrapped in an oak leaf. Kind of a hassle to eat, though. I didn’t start early enough when I was guest, so to avoid making my host pause in his preparations, I had to squirrel most of mine away in my sleeve after just a small first bite.

Ishigawa-sensei tried to improve my hishaku handling today. When picking the thing up from its resting place atop the kama before drawing hot water, you reach across your body with your right hand (the furo sits ahead of you and to the left), palm flat, hand extended straight out from the forearm. The tip of the middle finger lifts the end of the hishaku’s handle from beneath. The handle’s tip should describe a straight line, not an arc, as you bring it up and to the right to get a better grip on it. When pouring water from the hishaku, the joint between cup and handle should remain stationary in space as it pivots.

These are the things that consume me these days. And I’m giving you the irresponsibly simplified version. The hell of it is that I really, truly care about these minutiae.

They say you can spot a tea person anywhere because his fingertips are always in a straight line.

Sean wanted to buy some stationery at Vivre, and I elected to have nothing better to do than go with him. At a red light on the way there, another old man on a bicycle muttered to himself as he nursed a tall can of chu-hi. At least, that’s what I assumed until I realized he was, in fact, addressing me. “Buchō. Buchō. (Boss. Boss.) You teach me English, okay?” he said, in English.

“I cannot speak English,” he continued. I protested that his English sounded fair enough to me, but he ignored me. “Where. From. You come?” he asked. “America. California,” I said. “Los Angeles?” he asked. “Sono tōri,” I said; “you got it.”

“United States is. Greatest country. In the world,” he concluded, and then the light changed and we were off.

What do you say to that? Even if it is just the booze talking?

Tea History; tana

It looked like it might rain, and then it rained.

Hamana-sensei quizzed us on things we should have learned on our field trip to Uji. I got three wrong.

Tanihata-sensei continued his history of tea in Japan, with Gary-sensei translating. We’re up to the Muromachi period (1300s) now. In trade with China, millions of tea bowls came into the country and the idle rich began incorporating tea into their multi-day parties, putting together a predecessor to the modern chaji involving eating, drinking, a walk through the garden, and a bowl of tea. The ancient version was light on tea and heavy on food and alcohol, though; it would be another two centuries before the true ancestor of our modern tea practice emerged.

We’re on to the tana temaes in our afternoon practice now. The tana is a small stand that stays in the tea room itself with certain dōgu–the natsume and mizusashi, for example–so that the host is no longer carrying everything into and out of the room. This requires a few alterations in procedure. And there are many different tana, each with its own protocol for use. Today’s was the marujoku, a round black lacquered stand with two uprights and a flat bottom: a favored style of Sen Sōtan, the 3rd-generation Urasenke Oiemoto.

Hamana-sensei patiently guided us through the temae in the 3rd floor practice hall. We’ve also begun to incorporate haiken–the guest’s opportunity to examine certain of the dōgu used after drinking the tea–so each temae takes longer. My knees are not amused.

Today’s sweets were of a kind called iwane no tsutsuji: bean paste-filled poofs (the kind I’ve described before as Koosh balls, because they’re assembled painstakingly from short strands of paste pressed through a sieve) of kinran colored bright green and dotted with vivid pink accents to resemble azalea bushes. Prettier than they are particularly tasty, in my opinion.

Tatami cleaning, supper, an unmotivated evening inside, out of the rain.

Mommy, where does tea come from?

A chilly morning found Midorikai once again in western clothes and at the subway station on our way to Uji, the center of the Japanese tea production universe–the source, it is said, of the very best green tea in the world.

At a nondescript building in a nondescript suburban neighborhood we were greeted by Mr. Koyama, Important Guy and younger brother of the Mr. Koyama who is the Main Guy at Marukyu-Koyamaen, growers and processors of extremely good tea for around the last 300 years. He sat us down in a tatami room adjacent to the lobby of the facility and began to explain the process by which a humble little tree becomes the remarkable powder around which my life at present revolves.

During the month of May, the year’s tea crop is harvested. Once the picking begins, work continues from dawn to dusk every day until it’s finished. We were served steeped shincha (new tea), bright and sharp in flavor, from the harvest-in-progress, and shown an English-language video explaining the production of tea briefly from beginning to end. Then Mr. Koyama led us out the back door of the facility and just up the block to one of Marukyu-Koyamaen’s tea fields.

“Field,” though, doesn’t quite describe it. First of all, it’s a just a large-ish plot of land bordered by houses and other buildings. Second, it’s covered up. Plants for matcha, you see, are grown in the shade starting in April. Over the field is erected a wooden framework perhaps around seven feet tall; reed mats are unrolled as a roof atop this; loose straw is then artfully piled atop the mats to plunge the plants beneath into a quiet gloom. Besides protecting them from late frost, this forces them to produce more chlorophyll and broader leaves to survive, which makes for more and better tea.

Under the canopy all was damp and still and wholesome-smelling. Women with headscarves and fingers taped for protection moved carefully along the rows of bushes, stripping the year’s new shoots of their leaves with an expert pulling motion that I couldn’t replicate when invited to try. Sencha can be harvested mechanically, but matcha leaves are all taken from the plants by hand. And the plants themselves are the very best, heavily fertilized with fish-meal and bean-meal, harvested only once a year (as opposed to the multiple yearly pluckings of a sencha bush) and decommissioned when too old to yield the finest tea anymore.

We ate tea leaves right off the plants. They tasted alright, but nothing like tea. So we followed the path of the full baskets of leaves back to the processing facility, where immediately following picking they are fed up a conveyor belt into the steamer. In the clattering din of the warm brick building it got difficult to hear Hamana-sensei’s translation of Mr. Koyama’s explanation, delivered, though it was, through a megaphone. Steam billowed from the machine as flat wire baskets of moist leaves were retrieved from it for us to smell and taste: at this stage, they smelled like spinach. The tea is steamed just after picking to arrest the oxidation process and maintain the leaves’ color, flavor, and aroma. Without prompt processing, they will oxidize and begin to ferment, which is how oolong and black teas come into being. The exact length of the steaming varies according to batch, so the experience and expertise of the processor is indispensable.

Next, the steamed leaves are dropped into floor-to-ceiling mesh cages where they dance in columns of hot, dry air like butterflies before entering the drying oven. Three long passes through the heat later, they emerge flat and dry and crispy and delicious, tasting at last like tea. Traditionally, at this stage in the processing, the tea would be packed into the big ceramic jars called chatsubo for storage and transportation, to be opened in November at a kuchikiri chaji. Nowadays, the tencha, as it’s called in this form, is put into crates and refrigerated until it’s ready to be ground.

Mr. Koyama next led us from the older part of the facility to the newer, where the tencha becomes powdered matcha. After removing our shoes, donning hair nets (I put one one over my bald dome just for fun) and washing our hands, we got to watch a series of devices go to work on tea from last year’s harvest, as this year’s hasn’t reached this stage in the pipeline yet. One machine chops the dried leaves into uniform little bits about the size of fish food flakes; the flakes blow through a wind tunnel that allows the heaver pieces of chaff to fall away from the desired pure leaf matter. Another set of machines uses static electricity to extract any remaining veins and whatnot; at this point the tea weighs something like a tenth of what it did when it came out of the field. And all the automation in the process has been introduced within the last century. As time and labor-intensive as it is now, the processing of tea used to really be a pain in the ass.

At long last, the tea is scissored into matcha between grooved granite millstones that haven’t changed in centuries, except that now they’re turned by electric motors and so can be made bigger and heavier. Even in the corridor outside the glassed-in sterile milling room we could smell the tea in the air as we watched dozens and dozens of mills in neat rows chew away at their hoppers of tea flakes under fluorescent lights: it was like looking into a hospital’s nursery–proud parents marveling at newborn tea. The stones turn at 55 revolutions per minute–only as fast as they would have been turned by hand–to generate tea particles measured in microns that float gently from between the stones and coat the surfaces of the receptacles beneath. Any faster and the tea would be too coarse to achieve optimal suspension in liquid; the old saying was that matcha should be able to fit into the ridges of one’s fingerprint. At this speed, one mill takes around an hour to grind 40 grams of matcha, the standard small-sized can. Which helps account for the price of the stuff.

Our tour ended with sweets and tea, of course. The sweets were dark green matcha dango balls on wooden skewers. The tea was new matcha from one particular grower who has figured out how to prompt his plants to mature far earlier than any others: the resulting shincha tastes, to the palate with some tea experience, exactly like that palate would expect brand-new tea to taste, strong and a little brash, and quite tasty. The good folks at Marukyu-Koyamaen weren’t stingy, either; they kept bringing bowls of well-whisked tea until we ran out of time to drink it. Sean, Szymon and I made it through four bowls apiece. We didn’t walk away from the table so much as we vibrated away from it, in the direction of the display of tea and sweets made from tea available for sale. I didn’t buy anything myself, as my cash supply for the rest of the month has dwindled alarmingly, but over lunch–obentō we’d bought on the way from a convenience store and were permitted to eat in a tearoom in the facility–we learned that we were being sent home with goody bags: a variety of steeping teas and a little can of the powdered shincha each. The whole tour was like Building Brand Loyalty 101. Not that I needed much convincing; we drink almost nothing else back in Hawaii, and M-K routinely wins awards for quality in the annual competitions that Japan holds for tea manufacturers. (If that gives you any insight into the country.)

But there are, as it happens, other manufacturers–really really good ones, even–in the business, and next we were off to visit one of them. Kanbayashi has been in the tea business since forever also, and we were greeted by the 14th-generation Kanbayashi himself, not at their modern production facility, but at an ancient facility that’s been converted into a small museum, where we saw many of the implements used in the production process back when it was all done by hand. Kanbayashi provided tea to the Tokugawa shoguns back in the day, and the museum features also a small but impressive collection of dōgu, drawings, and letters dating at least back to the 16th century: one was a missive from Toyotomi Hideyoshi scolding the Kanbayashi-in-charge of his day for what Hideyoshi thought was some sub-par packing work.

By this time of the day, even the massive amount of caffeine in my system couldn’t keep my syapses firing fast enough to process all the information that old Mr. Kanbashi was giving us via Hamana-sensei’s tireless translation work, but a few things stood out. One was the story of the tea guy, a student of Rikyū’s, who got so nervous once out of his desire to perform a pleasing temae that he ended up fumbling certain steps in the procedure. When onlookers scoffed, Rikyū is said to have gotten angry, declaring that the temae was one of the best he’d ever seen, as it came from a pure heart and the noble impulse to be perfectly hospitable. This gives me hope.

Mr. Kanbayashi also regaled us with details of the yearly procession of the chatsubo from Uji up to the bakufu goverment seat in the city now called Tokyo. Up to a thousand people might be involved in a banner year, and by all accounts the occasion was terribly unpopular with the common folk. Not only was the labor required drawn from the farming populace just when it was needed for harvest, but the passage of the procession meant that the hoi polloi had to stop what they were doing; reschedule funerals; remove the stones holding down the thatched roofs of their houses, lest one break loose and fall in the direction of a chatsubo; stay indoors. After 230 years, the Meiji overhaul put a stop to the custom, and nobody seems to lament the loss.

Old customs echo on, however, in the yearly ritual deliveries of each year’s crop by the heads of the tea manufacturing houses to the heads of the tea whatever-it-is-I’m-up-to houses. Jars are packed, if I understand this correctly, much as they always were: the best tencha, destined to become thick tea, in cylindrical paper envelopes in the center of the jar; the rest of the space filled with loose tencha for thin tea to cushion the primo stuff from shock and moisture. The chatsubo‘s mouth is pasted over with paper and stamped with the Main Guy’s seal, then covered again with thicker paper and tied with special cord made from twisted paper, using knots that can’t be surreptitiously untied–the cord has to be cut. (Have I made it clear that the Japanese have long taken tea very, very seriously?) Particularly noteworthy new blends may be favored by the iemotos of the tea houses with poetic names issued in pairs: one for the thick tea and one for the thin.

Oh, yes: blends. Before the grinding into powder, each tea manufacturer’s Main Guy is responsible for blending batches of tencha in proportions that will yield exactly the same flavor as all the previous years’ named brands. Traditionally, and apparently, to some extent, to this very day, much of this work is done in rooms with north-facing windows, where color, aroma, and flavor are deliberated upon carefully to get the mixtures right. In certain modern facilities, though, computerized machines that can sort tencha by color are also employed in some capacity.

If your brain aches now, please try to imagine how mine feels.

We finished our field trip with a visit to Byodoin temple. Sean and I had been particularly keen to see it because the island of Oahu boasts a reproduction of the ancient Phoenix Hall with its big gold-plated Buddha under a brilliant canopy of lacquered wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. (If I ever start a speed metal band, I’ll name it “Nacreous Layer.”) The landscaping is quite different, but otherwise the buildings are startlingly alike, except that the original looks as old as it is, and the copy looks as new as it is.

I was too overwhelmed by everything that had come before to much enjoy the temple and its evocation of the Pure Land Buddhist paradise, though the building, its parklike setting, and pond lined with pebbles in Heian-era landscaping style to add up to some undeniably charming vistas. There’s a museum on-site, too, but I enjoyed the modern architecture more than the displays, which illuminate the temple’s construction and restoration techniques and present many of the original exquisite carvings at close range. I should probably visit again sometime with a fresh mind.

We left the temple to walk down a tree-lined riverbank and across the famous old Uji Bridge to the train station. Hamana-sensei treated us to matcha ice cream before we rode back to Kyoto. Doesn’t seem to matter what ridiculous quantities of the stuff I consume in a day: my capacity to enjoy tea has no limit.

Supper at the shokudō, tatami cleaning. A phone call from my Kobe host parents inviting me to lunch on Sunday; elated that my Japanese was sufficient to get me through it, and really looking forward to seeing them again soon.

And the long bout of key-tapping that has resulted in this short dissertation.

Class dismissed.

Electronics-shopping in Ōsaka

I hadn’t quite forgotten Osaka, but it’s been about two years, and I’ve gotten somewhat used to the rhythms of Kyoto, so today’s trip caught me just slightly off guard–and we only saw very little of the town.

Sean has been wanting to buy a new digital SLR camera, and he’s a dedicated comparison shopper, so he asked Anita to accompany him as translator to a few of the biggest electronics stores in the region; I went along for the ride. The train dropped us off at Osaka station and the station emptied into the melee of restaurants, shops, and game centers across the street from Yodobashi Camera and in the shadow of the big red rooftop Ferris wheel a few blocks away.

The commercial riot of Shijō street is like a preview of coming attractions for downtown Osaka, which is so much bigger, taller, busier, brighter, and louder than Kyoto that it makes the latter seem a quaint little burg. The station and its environs, ugly as they are, sparked a certain amount of nostalgia in me for the weekend trips I took to Osaka during my first summer in Japan. I quickly re-calibrated myself to adjust for the heightened energy level, and we crossed the street via a pedestrian overpass and one of the godawful-est intersections I know to go shopping at Yodobashi. (After all my visits here, it took until the last leg of this one to discover that the store connects directly with the station underground.)

Every big Japanese electronics store is arranged as a stack of riotous floors of merchandise. The mobile phone industry usually dominates the ground floor, with every provider’s handsets laid out in candy-colored digital tapestries presided over by cute girls in transgalactic flight attendant attire chanting sales spiels, often through microphones. One floor will house camera and video merchandise; another audio equipment. Video games often get a floor of their own. A floor of washing machines and other household appliances isn’t uncommon. Yodobashi also shares space with a multi-floor clothing retailer that plays nothing but Beatles music over their sound system. (And has for at least the last two years; my several visits here in 2006 linked “Paperback Writer” with the store in my head forever.) And the top floor is all restaurants. (Yodobashi also has a commercial jingle, played at frequent intervals throughout the store, set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.)

The electronics-store sales strategy centers on maximum visual volume. Signage abounds. Halos of price tags, feature lists, and discount notices hover around every product, and the ceilings disappear above cascades of signs pointing the way to this or that, or enticing shoppers with special offers, or reminding you to sign up for a point card so that a percentage of your purchase will be returned to you as credit on future shopping trips.

After pricing out Yodobashi, we stopped for a standing lunch of noodles and tempura in the warren of restaurants in the belly of Osaka station. Then we hit Bic Camera and Yamada Denki: nearly indistinguishable from each other or the first store, and different from Kyoto’s retailers only in that they’re bigger and louder and have more stuff. On the way to and from Yamada we passed through a covered shopping arcade decorated with day-glo articial flower arrangements where every store was a supplier of commercial foodservice supplies: shelves of ceramics disappearing over the horizon, takoyaki griddles, ice shavers, uniforms, ovens, paper lanterns advertising udon and soba and karaoke.

The camera Sean wants is sold out. As in, everywhere in the country. All the stores are waiting on Canon to ship more units. So he paid a deposit and left his phone number, and we rolled home slowly, having accidentally not gotten onto the express train.

After all the excitement of the big city and its bright lights, I had just enough energy for a stiff drink before calling it an early night.

Walk in the rain; matinee; Curry House

The riot of commerce around Shijō is so information-dense that as many times as I’ve walked through it, I never quite feel like I’ve walked the same stretch twice. New patterns emerge constantly from the noise. Today it was the realization that you can get Loco Moco on Teramachi. And not just in one restaurant. Once we spotted it on one menu, it seemed to be on all of them. (For readers not from Hawaii: Loco Moco is a comfort food consisting of a heap of rice topped with a hamburger patty topped with a runny fried egg topped with brown gravy–highly recommended anytime day or night.) Now Sean and I have a solemn responsibility to sample these, to find out what the Japanese have done with/to them. One place offered the dish both Hawaiian-style and Japanese-style. My curiosity will be satisfied!

But that will have to wait. Today we continued our recent okonomiyaki streak at a hole-in-the-wall even better than Mr. Young Men but without the most excellent name or mirrored signage. Sean, Szymon, and I had woken to a cold rain that would persist, western Washington-style, without change or interruption until the following morning; and we had descended to the first floor to find that my umbrella had been taken. I endured the drizzle while we explored the neighborhood to the north on foot in search of used dōgu shops reputed to exist there. We didn’t find them.

There were, however, appliance stores and convenience stores and clothing stores and tea stores and liquor stores and drug stores and hardware stores and vegetable stalls and fish markets and butcher shops; only the fishmongers and butchers were doing much trade on a gloomy Saturday morning. One dark shop with no employees in sight displayed a scant few 10-dollar bags on 40 year-old shelves; it looked looted, abandoned, Dawn of the Dead-style. Would have thought it long out of business if the door hadn’t been open. Official luggage suppliers of the Apocalypse. I also peered through a cracked display window belonging to no obvious establishment: inside were lined up at least half a dozen ancient, dust-blanketed sewing machines in various stages of disrepair. None of us could account for the sight.

I was dripping wet by the time we made the Kitaoji subway station. We rode to the Karasuma-Oike stop and walked the last few blocks to the shopping labyrinth. There, sheltered from the elements, I finally bought a new umbrella. 260 yen buys a whole lot more umbrella than 100 yen does, it turns out. Now I’m spoiled. But then, I’ve always had rich tastes. That Boydston, with his 3 dollar umbrella–who does he think he is?

We warmed up at the previously-mentioned okonomiyaki restaurant, where poor Szymon concluded a gargantuan, delicious, affordable meal by spilling a pot of okonomi sauce all over himself. He ran–literally–back to the dorm to change while Sean and I got some important window-shopping and girl-watching done, then raced downtown again on his bicycle to meet all of Midorikai except Nadia at the movie theater.

We watched Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, which I’d seen over a year before in Honolulu; movie release schedules over here cannot be predicted. (Tanja and Verena, also having seeing it and not in the mood to see it again, split to watch The Golden Compass.) I was glad, indeed, to have seen it before: this time it was presented in Mandarin with Japanese subtitles. I would likely have been thoroughly lost if I were seeing it for the first time. Then again, there’s a lot of eye candy in the movie, so I wouldn’t have been bored, at least.

We reunited in the lobby with Tanja and Verena afterwards and Almerindo disappeared to wherever that guy disappears to when he disappears, which is not infrequently. The rest of us popped open our umbrellas and walked home, ambling through the Imperial Palace park in wet, chilly twilight en route.

Then Sean and I took care of some business we’d been meaning to attend to since long before coming to Japan. We are lucky to have in Honolulu a few outlets of the Japanese curry chain Coco Ichiban, and we’d long wanted to compare them with the original. So we hiked down Horikawa and negotiated the purchase of some curry. Turns out it’s pretty much exactly like what you get at the stateside establishments, except with better rice and the option to get it much, much spicier. Also it’s a bit more expensive. So we enjoyed our supper but feel that we can cross that restaurant off our list.

We closed out the day by resuming work on our case of chu-hi and watching Tigerland on Sean’s laptop. Not a dreadful film but definitely not an enthusiastic recommendation.