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.
