From April of 2008 through March of 2009, I lived in Kyoto, Japan, studying the traditional Japanese discipline called chadō or chanoyu-–usually referred to in English as “tea ceremony”–-under the auspices of the Urasenke Tradition of Tea’s Midorikai scholarship for non-Japanese students. I documented the experience in over a thousand photographs, some fifty short movies, and entries in a daily online journal that totaled in the neighborhood of 280,000 words.
Having posted it originally as a fatally unwieldy iWeb blog, I archived the journal as a collection of PDF files upon my return to the States, hoping–as I still hope–to use it as a collection of notes from which to write, eventually, a book about my experience. In response to one particular request for access, though, as well as from a more general personal desire to make the document available and easily navigable until such time as I get around to doing something more with it, I’m re-posting it now, using the superior SquareSpace servers and blogging engine.
Every one of these entries is an unedited first draft. Every one of them is badly in need of editing. I wrote as time and inclination permitted. Sometimes this approach generated too many words; other times, too few. I knew at the beginning of the year far less than I knew at the end, and some of the ignorance I see displayed in the earliest entries (as I repost these, I’m reading them for the first time since writing them) makes me cringe; I trust readers who know better than I did to understand and forgive. I release this awkward fledgling back into the wild with a great gulp of self-consciousness. But enough with the disclaiming. Perhaps there’s something of value here. If so, it’s yours to find.
A NOTE ON FUNNY WORDS
Tea is a Japanese discipline, and as such involves the use of many Japanese words. So does living in Kyoto for a year under any circumstances, come to think of it. I expect that my journal entries are riddled with inconsistencies, but in general, I attempted to italicize common nouns while leaving alone proper nouns and bits of Japanese that I expect are well known to most English-speaking readers. Thus, the “-sensei” suffix (and “Kyoto”) won’t appear in italics while, say, katsu will. Japanese generally does without explicit plurals, and I find that adding an ’s’ to pluralize a Japanese word for English readers yields an inelegant result, so you’ll probably have to get used to things like “two fukusa.” (Depending, again, on how consistently I applied my own rules, which I developed over the course of the year’s writing; and on how many corrections to the text I decide to make as I repost it.)