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.
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.)