A long, broad flight of stone steps climbs the hillside to the tomb, hidden in deep foliage. At its foot sits a spacious wooden pavilion. Today folded white strips of paper hung from a rope strung around the structure just below the roof line to signify ritual purity within its perimeter. On either side of the pavilion, tarps sheltered the spectators’ seats: on one side, wealthy and influential individuals, mostly older men in dark suits (Hamana-sensei pointed out a kama-maker to me); on the other, 3rd-year Japanese Urasenke students and the Midorikai group, five of us still in western clothes, the rest in a restrained kaleidoscope of kimono. The crowd numbered just over a hundred in all.

Beneath the pavilion, an elevated stretch of tatami led to a setup for temae: an stand of unfinished wood called a daisu, bearing on its top shelf two tenmoku chawan–tea bowls, one gold, the other silver, on individual stands–and two natsume enclosed in white cloth covers closed with braided cords, one purple, the other crimson, in elegant knots. On the daisu’s bottom shelf were the fresh water container (mizusashi), a bamboo dipper (hishaku) held vertically in its own rack, and the steaming kama.

To the right of the tatami platform sat several small wooden tables bearing platters of food offerings: fish, fruit and vegetables, mochi, water, sake, rice.

The crowd took their seats and quieted down as Oiemoto, his wife, and a small entourage approached the pavilion and were greeted by a group of Shinto priests in colorful outfits topped by hats resembling oven mitts made of giant avocados. Three musicians in similar attire took their places before ancient, ornate instruments at the back of the pavilion (the side furthest from the steps to Hideyoshi’s tomb, that is) and began to play the ancient music called gakaku on percussion and small wind instruments. (One, a silver-bound cluster of bamboo set vertically, allows the player to maintain a drone of subtly shifting unearthly chords that underpins the arrangements.)

One priest read an invocation, another purified each participant in the ceremony (including us, the witnesses) in turn with a shaggy pom-pom of folded paper strips on a stick. Then Oiemoto, in black kimono, stepped out of his zori and onto the tatami. He approached the daisu, facing Hideyoshi’s tomb, sat, and prepared koicha, thick tea. I could see few of his movements from behind the Japanese students and priests, but I did see him don a white surgical mask just before opening the natsume, not to take it off again until the tea was whisked and he’d re-covered the bowl with a thin sheet of what I assumed was wood; Hamana-sensei explained that human breath would be thought to befoul the tea and make it unfit to offer the kami-sama. I saw enough, too, to begin to understand a bit of tea philosophy that came my way recently.

There is a collection of a hundred short verses attributed to Sen Rikyū that outlines many of the ideals of our discipline. One of them is translated, “Practice constitutes learning from one, becoming cognizant of ten, then returning from ten to one, the beginning.” Which reminds me of a certain Christian philosopher’s (Francis Schaeffer, maybe?) pursuit of “the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” At any rate, I’ve seen clumsy and hesitant temae (heck, I do clumsy and hesitant temae), and I’ve seen confident and elegant temae. But Oiemoto’s movements were so controlled, so understated and precise, that his preparation looked quite effortless–not mannered in the slightest. Someone who didn’t know what he was watching might well think that there wasn’t much to making tea in this fashion. Which, of course, is the whole idea. All the practice, all the discipline, all the kata are ultimately not for performance but for hospitality: one person making tea for another.

Oiemoto went on to make thin tea, usucha, with the variations in technique required, and, of course, with the mask, and both bowls of tea were delivered to the priests, who set them on a table at Hideyoshi’s side of the pavilion and uncovered each briefly to allow his spirit to imbibe. The priests also moved the food offerings from the side of the pavilion to its front, and everything was officially handed over to the kami-sama for his enjoyment.

After another invocation and more eerie music, the ceremony concluded, and as the crowd filed out and the dōgu were cleaned and boxed up, Oiemoto gathered the Urasenke students around him and spoke briefly on the history of the kencha tea offering and the utensils traditionally used. (When performed at Buddhist temples, the preparation calls for fine lacquered dōgu; at Shinto shrines, unvarnished wood ones.) He invited us, too, to examine the dōgu. I admired the bare wood natsume, one’s lid marked with Oiemoto’s crest, the ichō leaf, the other with Okusama’s, a simple spiral.

We repaired to a giant cloth tent erected on a nearby lawn too late to keep the ground from getting soggy, and sat on benches while we were served sweets and tea by girls with muddy tabi. Then Hamana-sensei led us to a tea house neighboring the shrine, where we waited in a little machiai and admired a small collection of dōgu: everyone liked very much the dark red chawan by the ninth-generation head of the Raku ceramics tradition and the broken-and-repaired kettle. Its kantsuki, the small molded rings through which larger rings (kan) are threaded to lift the kettle were shaped like little monkeys with arms outstretched; we heard that this may have been a reference to Hideyoshi, a homely little man whose nickname was “monkey.”

The we were summoned into the tea room. As we began to eat our sweets (hanaikada, slender bars of translucent lavender mochi filled with red bean paste), a quiet gasp ran around the room: Oiemoto had just entered. He told us, apparently, to relax, warned us that the sweets were a bit chewy, and talked at us for a while. (I never did get a translation.) On his way out, he looked at me and asked if the sweets had been okay. I managed a frantic affirmative nod.

After tea, we moved further through the complex of tatami-floored buildings and sat in another room where a light meal, tenshin, was served. If I ever have to feed someone and want them not to linger, I decided, I’ll have them eat sitting seiza. The traditional Japanese food (rice; miso soup; little shrimp with crispy legs and feelers intact, to be eaten whole; assorted little mystery bites of egg and tofu and thins from the sea; tea) was quite tasty, of course, but I had no idea if I was eating it with any degree of decorum. Nor did I remember what Gary-sensei had told us a week before: that at the end of such a meal, the guests are to blot their dishes clean with kaishi paper moistened in the condensation from the lid of the soup bowl. I did this in a panic just before my tray was taken away, and staggered out of the room with knees screaming and suit pockets bulging with dirty wads of paper.

Since we had the afternoon free, Hamana-sensei decided to take us to Ginkakuji, the temple that was once the private villa of retired shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who took office at age 8 and quit at 29 to become a monk and full-time devotee and patron of the arts. The main temple building was in the third month or so of a projected 26-month renovation, and so was being disassembled under tarps, but the gardens remained stunning, as did the main reason for our visit: tours were being given of one of the complex’s usually-closed buildings, the Tōgudō, besides the tarped Kannon Hall the only structure on the property never destroyed by fire. In the Tōgudō is Yoshimasa’s personal study, a room named Dōjinsai, which is considered to be the prototype for the later development of tea room architecture. It is an old-style shōin room, not a tea room, and so has a built-in writing desk under a window and split-level shelves (chigaidana) instead of a tokonoma, but its four and a half tatami mats and ro, and the fact that Yoshimasa did apparently make tea in the room, make it part of our history.

We hiked up the hillside at the edge of the property to see chanoi, the spring from which Yoshimasa drew his water for tea, and enjoyed the elevated view of the city to the west. Then we exited via the gift shop and Hamana-sensei bought us all green tea-flavored soft-serve ice cream before we took taxis home.

I had stashed some unclaimed sandwiches and ate one for dinner instead of going to the shokudō. Then I met Sean, Szymon, and a few of the others to visit a local kimono shop, where we didn’t buy anything. We took the long way home, stopping by a cheap dōgu shop of Szymon’s recommendation that offers ludicrous discounts to Midorikai students; we picked up cheap chasen and chashaku to practice with, and chakin and little plastic pouches to keep damp chakin in for Monday’s practice chaji, at which we’ll have thick tea, which is served in a common bowl that should have its rim wiped by each guest after drinking and before passing it along. At a shoe store I picked up some zori sandals; thank goodness sizes big enough for my feet are available here.

Buying dōgu is what passes for Friday night excitement around here, so having done that, we were in for the evening.

Guests proceed from yoritsuke to machiai to koshikake to roji to tea room, taking their cues to move forward from doors left open the width of a flat hand or the beckoning of an assistant. The yoritsuke is for changing into hakama and new tabi socks. In the machiai, there will be a scroll or artwork or what-have-you to admire, and a tabakobon to pass around and examine. This “tobacco tray” holds decorative smoking implements as signs of hospitality; guests admire the camellia pattern drawn in the carefully shaped ash beneath the live coal in the hiire, which once upon a time would have been used to light the pipe. The host’s assistant then brings out osayu, “honorable white hot water” (for some reason, heated water is said to have the color white), to cleanse the guests’ palates and give them a taste of the water that will be used to prepare the tea; they will later ask the host where it was specially drawn from.

The koshikake is traditionally a covered bench with sitting cushions and another tabakobon. From here the guests can see the host emerge from the nearby tea house to fill the tsukubai, the large stone basin, with fresh water. After the host has retreated, the guests one by one walk down the garden (roji) path, wash their hands and mouths at the tsukubai in the same fashion one uses at shrines and temples for purification, and enter the tea room, admiring scroll and flower before taking their seats. Then the host performs the charcoal arrangement procedure. Then a sweet is served. Then there’s a break. And only then is there actually, finally, tea.

It’ll be astonishing if we pull this off halfway gracefully.

Lunch was “hamburger steak” and spaghetti. Temae practice with Imagawa-sensei was embarrassing for all of the hangover-fogged men. Things that seemed easy yesterday we fumbled through today, and my knees weren’t amused. The general warming trend continued in spite of persistent rain, and my suit pants threatened to rip open at the crotch when I sat down without peeling them away from my sweaty legs. I managed to enjoy the aoyanagi sweets, round slices of dark red sweet bean paste wrapped in something pale green and fluffy, but otherwise I’d rather forget the afternoon.

And the evening, come to think of it. After supper, a kind of stewed vegetable mixture with a croquette on the side, Anita walked me through my first haigata. For bonryakudemae, the kettle sits on a small brazier called the binkake, supported by a three-pronged iron stand called, for some obscure reason, the “Five Virtues” (gotoku), the base of which is hidden beneath a layer of fine grey ash that must be coaxed into a specific shape before each use. (Hamana-sensei says that a proper ash formation helps draw air to keep the charcoal lit, but I suspect the procedure has more to do with attention to detail for its own sake; my chanoyu dictionary says that it “adds a nice visual ‘scene.’”) The ash-shape appropriate to the binkake consists of two parallel ridges with a gentle valley between them. Using the haisaji, you sculpt the front face of the first ridge, then cut its back face downward to make a sharp edge. Repeat to form the back ridge, then even out the center expanse, blending its edges into the slopes. The angles should be smooth and consistent, the ridges mirror images of each other, the surface of the ash as free from marks as possible. After a frustrating 45 minutes, I threw in the towel. My haigata was ugly, but it was my first attempt, and the previous night’s drinking had left me impatient and irritable.

I stomped home, wrote and did laundry, and fell asleep happily sober.

Classes today were held in the practice facility on the second floor of the women’s dorm, which contains one very large room (dozens of mats; the largest standard tea room has eight) and a 4.5-mat room in one elevated corner, open on two sides to the rest of the hall. Our morning lecture was on Noh theater: an elderly American expatriate who performs with a Noh school here in Kyoto walked us through some of the basic postures and movements, which of course are very stylized, awkward, and difficult, and nothing at all like the way we carry ourselves in the tea room.

After a fish lunch, we continued our bonryaku practice, today with Imagawa-sensei, who patiently attempted to get me to sit up straight while keeping my arms and shoulders relaxed. At least I was more confident with the basic order of the procedure than I was yesterday, and for some mysterious reason, my knees held up comparatively well all afternoon. We had beautiful sweets called sakuramochi: soft and sticky pebbled balls of translucent pink mochi wrapped in fragrant green leaves. The slender hanging bamboo flower vase held a little red tsubaki bud and an elegant twig of yukiyanagi studded with tiny white blossoms. All in all, it was a lovely afternoon–our most enjoyable and encouraging practice so far–and I bounced up to do my chores in a mood as merry as yesterday’s was morose.

Supper featured a breaded fried egg. Later, Sean and Szymon and I sat down together to have a beer and study a bit. Unfortunately, before we got to the studying part of our plan, Almerindo knocked on the door with beer of his own, the conversation ran wild, and Szymon ended up producing a dangerous succession of liquors from his personal stash. Innocent little tastes in sufficient quantity lost their innocence, and we all stumbled off to bed in conditions most unsuitable for a school night.

Hamana-sensei gave us the first in a series of lectures designed to instill in us an appreciation of Japanese seasonal awareness. Today we learned about the month of May. Traditionally, the 5th or 6th of the month is considered to be the first day of summer. Many festivals related to agriculture will take place across the country, and chatsumi, the harvesting of tea, will be done just as the leaves have matured enough to be picked but are still soft and have not developed any tannins. Within hours of hand-picking, the leaves must be steamed and dried to preserve color and flavor. Then they’ll be cut small and blended; they won’t be ground into powder for many more months.

Centuries ago, when tea production required even more manual labor (the leaves were steamed in bamboo baskets in small batches and dried one by one, held over heat with chopsticks), it was fabulously expensive, and the tea fields of Uji, the source of Japan’s finest tea, were under the direct control of the shogunate. Written records from 1633 mention the Chatsubo Dōchū, the Procession of the Tea Jar, in which the shogun would demonstrate his wealth and influence by dispatching several hundred people to carry packed tea with great pomp from Uji to Edo (now Tokyo), where he resided. Commoners along the road were required to respect the great ceramic containers as they would the shogun himself, prostrating themselves and averting their eyes.

I ate udon for lunch and then went to my humiliation. Despite having achieved some rough competence with the bonryaku procedure a year ago, I might as well not ever have even seen it done before. My fingers are clumsy, my fukusa folding sloppy. I don’t keep my back and neck straight; my shoulders and arms are tense and not round enough. I can’t even remember the simple order of operations. And my knees hurt.

If that weren’t enough, I embarrassed myself by spacing out and creating extra work for a classmate. In tea, if the guest doesn’t, at a specific moment after having returned his empty bowl to the host, ask her to clean up and finish, protocol dictates that she simply make him another bowl of tea. Of course, I was guest, and was watching Nadia’s temae absentmindedly when Hamana-sensei said, unimpressed, “Looks like you’re getting another bowl of tea,” and I realized that I’d missed that specific moment. I apologized immediately, wishing I could claw my way down into the fragrant tatami and disappear, and Sensei observed that, having made the mistake, I’m much less likely to make it again. Which is how many of the best lessons are learned, which doesn’t make me like it any better.

My bad mood dogged me for the rest of the day. Teachers are beginning to wonder aloud why we’re still wearing western clothes. The reason is that we have no idea how to buy kimono, so we really need senpai to accompany us, but they’re all busy, and the shops close before we’re done with our chores. This weekend looks to be free, so we’ll likely get outfitted then; on account of my big frame and general American fatness, I’ll probably not be able to fit an affordable ready-made kimono and will have to pay dearly for a custom-tailored one. (The kimono we were measured for last week, the one the school is giving us, is to be worn for special occasions; we’re expected to buy our own practice wardrobes.)

Sean and Tanawat and I did make one last effort to clothe ourselves without help: after a supper of fish, we biked down to a department store that had been recommended to us, only to find that it stocked only a useless token selection of men’s kimono anyhow. Later Sean and I rode down to Shijō in search of a few accessories shops he’d found in a Kyoto guidebook. All we found was that his guidebook is out of date. So we declared ourselves beaten, and returned home to get some sleep.

Our first weekly quiz consisted of thirty questions on the names of various tatami mats and dōgu, directions and steps in the tearoom, and the like. I got 29 of them correct; an encouraging start. During second period, an American teacher named Hlawatsch who teaches Japanese history to international students at a local university gave us a crash course on the 14th century Ashikaga shogunate. We’ll see Hlawatsch-sensei once a month, and we’ll be tested on the information he gives us in lecture as well as on the copious reading he assigns. Our senpai have warned us that these tests aren’t easy.

After a lunch of croquettes, we had our last afternoon of warigeiko, the initial practice in component skills like folding the fukusa that are common to every temae. I could probably stand to sit through another month of this. Hamana-sensei is increasing the pace at which he introduces new terminology. Today we used the lacquered trays that function centrally in the temae we’ll start tomorrow: the simplest preparation, in which most of the required implements are brought out on a tray and the host pours hot water from a little kettle rather than drawing it from a bigger vessel with a bamboo dipper. Hamana-sensei expects us to remember the name of the tray shape (yamamichibon, because the top edge of the tray’s (bon) rim undulates gently like a mountain (yama) path (michi)); the lacquer technique; the red accents on the black tray (tsumagure: like nails painted red); the kinds of tea bowls used; the flowers; the scroll; the pebbled texture of the kettle (arare: hailstones).

We finished our chores and had another dinner of unidentified breaded meat, then went to the girls’ dorm. One responsibility I’m being groomed to inherit is the writing of letters on behalf of the Midorikai group. We owed a thank-you to Oiemoto for the dinner on Friday and one to Daisōshō for the tickets to Miyako Odori, and a birthday card for Daisōshō as well. I wrote the note to Oiemoto in English, Tanawat helped out by writing the other thank-you in Japanese, and Anita, who is the current letter-writer, made the card.

That didn’t leave us with much free time before bed. But that’s seems to be the way life here works.

The building itself seems to be on Japan’s historic place register, whatever that’s called. (A dim memory suggests “Tangible Cultural Asset.”) Or so I interpreted the plaque on the corner, without actually bothering to find out if I could read any of it. Entirely church-y and lovely, if not particularly inspired, inside and out. I walked in behind a Korean couple toting a baby boy, and followed them up the aisle; the congregation for the service was small enough to fit in the choir. There were twenty or so in attendance: two or three Japanese, a Chinese woman, the Koreans, a vacationing Australian couple, a few Brits. The priest was American, as was the fellow who accompanied the hymns on recorder.

I was just getting over my social discomfort and beginning to feel happy I’d shown up when things went south. I should explain that, as a semi-closeted arch-conservative, I have little tolerance for liberalism in religion; I’d rather spend time with, say, a Muslim who disagreed fiercely but cordially with me than someone who maintains the forms of Christianity but won’t assert its content. This makes me nearly allergic to Western Episcopalians. I had hoped, though, that a small overseas congregation in a profoundly un-Christian country might be composed of more staunch believers; otherwise, I thought, what would be the point? You certainly don’t have to go to church to keep up appearances around here.

Of course I was disappointed. And in a hurry, too, right after the Scripture readings. The order of worship read, as expected, “sermon.” Which is precisely what the priest proceeded not to deliver. So help me, he stood up and said, “Now, what do you get out of those readings?” It wasn’t an ill-conceived game of guess-what’s-in-my-head serving as a segue into a lesson on something we should have gotten out of the readings. It was twenty minutes of three congregants batting around ideas that ranged from inane to heretical while the priest agreed with everything and the rest of us stared uncomfortably at our shoes.

The Old Testament reading from Nehemiah, which remembers God’s taking of land away from pagan peoples to give it to the Israelites, prompted the elderly British gentleman to my left to launch into a harangue on the importance of remembering the plight of those pagan peoples, whom, in his view, Israel was actually guilty of “repressing.” Also he worked in a jab at the United States’ treatment of Native Americans, which in his mind was related. The New Testament reading, the account from Acts of the stoning of St. Stephen, mentions that a young man named Saul was in attendance. “Who is this Saul?” someone asked. “Paul,” another answered. “Really?” “Well, that’s the legend, the myth,” said the priest. The accompanist was very excited by the same passage because, he explained, he reads the Bible “very metaphorically,” and enjoys finding in it the occasional “snapshot” of the early Church that rates as historical according to the extra-biblical sources by which he defines factuality.

And so I’m back to square one.

I spent the rest of the daylight hours in my room, cleaning, writing, and editing video until Sean appeared in the early evening, wanting to go shopping. We’d pretty much exhausted the options available to us on foot–our corner of the city isn’t its liveliest–so we decided to use bicycles to expand our range. Bicycles are big here. Most major thoroughfares designate about a third of the width of their broad sidewalks as bicycle traffic lanes. (Pedestrians and cyclists alike mostly ignore the designations. And most people ride cheap Chinese bicycles that cost around a hundred bucks or less and so aren’t generally worth stealing and therefore don’t need to be locked up very carefully. (The most common variety of lock is simply a spring-loaded hoop bolted to the frame that can extend through the rear wheel to keep it from turning.)

In our dorm’s sheltered bicycle parking area are several old beaters that Szymon identified as common property; all we had to do if we wanted to use them was break their locks and fill their tires. (The keys had disappeared with the original owners.) By the time we’d liberated the bikes and gotten them more or less rideable, rain was falling with some conviction, so we set out like locals: one hand on the handlebars and the other holding up a 100-yen umbrella. Note: this is dangerous behavior on wet crowded sidewalks, especially if your brakes don’t quite stop your bike in a timely fashion, like ours didn’t.

We made it down to Shijō street without incident, locked our bikes, and joined the rushing stream of pedestrians on the bright and endless covered sidewalks of what is probably Kyoto’s premier shopping district. A turn away from the street led us into a dazzling two-story arcade of shops and eateries of every description, aimed mostly at youth with disposable income. When we came to the end of the arcade, passages opened on either side to parallel arcades just as long and crowded: a consumer labyrinth built into a city block.

Since coming back to Japan, I had been doubting my earlier memories of the women here, so many of whom had seemed so punishingly pretty two years ago. This time they had been appearing in a much less unfair hot-to-not ratio. I wondered if I had just been blinded before by the excitement of being in a new place.

Turns out I was just in the wrong part of Kyoto. Or the right part for studying a demanding traditional art with the minimum of distraction, anyhow. The girls down on Shijō are incandescent.

We didn’t have much time to blind ourselves staring at them, though, because already the shops were closing up. We found our way out of the maze and stopped into a local fast food chain restaurant called First Kitchen, which offers a choice of some 8 or so flavored salts on its french fries: I had a cheeseburger with pizza fries. The burger barely achieved mediocrity, but the fries made me want to come back to try the other flavors.

We got back to the dorm wet but uninjured, and spent the rest of the evening studying for the first of our Monday morning quizzes.

Daisōshō, the retired (though still very active) 15th generation Grand Master of the Urasenke line, had given all the students tickets to the annual Miyako Odori dance presentation (this year’s was the 136th), so in the afternoon, Midorikai got dressed up once again and hailed taxis to take us to Gion, Kyoto’s old geiko (the local term for geisha) district. Automobiles and pedestrians vied for passage through the narrow streets of two-story wooden buildings, made considerably less charming by the addition of temporary signposts in garish oranges and grays advertising the odori.

Our tickets admitted us to the Gionkobu Kaburenjo theater complex, a handsome old cluster of buildings through which attendants herd four performances’ worth of visitors a day every day in April. We tramped across the blue-carpeted floors and down halls bright with circus-like red and white-striped wall hangings. A hundred or so at a time, deluxe ticket holders like us were funneled up a flight of stairs into a large room full of low, long tables and stools. At the front of the room, a geiko in full makeup and kimono was preparing tea in a style called ryūrei, developed in the late 19th century for the benefit of foreigners who couldn’t or wouldn’t sit on the floor in traditional seiza style. In ryūrei, host and guests alike sit like Westerners; it’s a lot more comfortable, of course, but it looked silly to me, and somehow more self-consciously mannered than the older styles. It didn’t help that the huge crowd kept cameras firing throughout; that a mobile phone some rows over rang halfway through with the title music from Austin Powers; that an efficient fleet of assistants distributed sweets and tea perfunctorily without any of the expected formalities of phrase and gesture; that as soon as our empty tea bowls were taken away, wranglers instructed us loudly to leave as quickly as possible to make room for the next lot of guests; that a few sips of my tea revealed an unwhisked lump clinging malignantly to the bottom of the bowl. On the other hand, we got to keep the rather pretty little plates our sweets were served on.

Next we got a brief glimpse of the lovely garden in the complex’s open central courtyard before we reached the waiting lobby for the show itself, where a good dozen vendors sold souvenirs, tea, sweets, books, elegant stationery, gaudy fabrics, and any number of things stamped with the likeness of unofficial national deity Hello Kitty.

The theater itself was large and richly appointed with comfortable seats in dark red velvet on the main floor and balcony, and tatami mats in the galleries for holders of less expensive tickets. The hour-long performance featured a dozen or so live musicians on either side of the front of the hall–shamisen to stage left, drums and shrill flutes (I can’t be expected to know the Japanese name of absolutely everything, can I?) to the right–maintaining a near-constant backdrop of the traditional-sounding noise that I don’t expect to ever acquire an appreciation of. (It wasn’t always obvious to my ears, to begin with, that both sides of the orchestra were in fact attempting to execute the same piece of music.) One, and sometimes all, of the shamisen players sang a text that doubtless shed great light for Japanese speakers on what was happening onstage; the percussionists would periodically do some call-and-response rhythmic shouting.

I don’t get Japanese dance any more than I get Japanese music. I appreciate the elegant movement and precise body control, but after five or so minutes of it, I feel like the point has been made. A working knowledge of Japanese and consequent ability to follow what plot was being suggested onstage (the program said it had been adapted from The Tale of Genji, the world’s oldest surviving novel and a product of proud Japan, which is celebrating the thousandth anniversary of the book’s publication this year) would probably have helped. As it was, I had to settle for enjoying the dazzling kimono and clever scene changes; happily, there was quite a lot there to enjoy. Also from time to time I would amuse myself by trying to imagine what various of the dancers looked like with her hair down and makeup off.

Szymon, Verena and I saved money and got exercise by walking back to the dorms. It took us about an hour at a brisk pace that I really shouldn’t have attempted in dress shoes; we followed the Kamo river most of the way uptown. The early evening had brought grey skies and a biting wind, but young couples, amateur photographers, and one inexplicable trombonist crowded the river’s steep brick banks, while a few late hanami parties soldiered on beneath much-thinned sakura.

Sean and I took a bus down Horikawa to a long shopping arcade called Sanjō that had been recommended to us, only to find that almost all its merchants had closed up before 7 on a Saturday night. We bought takoyaki for supper from one of the few open businesses and hit up a 100-yen shop for snacks and the sorts of housewares that we’re still discovering we need after a week and a half in our new home. And then we drank beer and listened to the Beach Boys in Sean’s room until bedtime.

Anita and I were on mizuya-cha detail today: cha being the Japanese word for tea, as in chadō, the Way of Tea. We sifted the fine, vibrant green powders for making thin and thick tea before lecture began, and then listened to Gary-sensei describe the basic outline of a full chaji. It takes something like four hours and involves a good deal of cooking as well as the preparation of the tea itself. Gary-sensei managed to work into this account innumerable tangents on subjects like the defining characteristics of Shino ceramics, the story of the severed head of the statue of Rikyū, and the tendency of tea people to present relatively recent innovations in the art as ancient practices.

Lunch: tendon. (As in tempura over rice, not as in tendon.) Then Anita and I learned that we’d made a mistake: we were supposed to be taking care of fire today, not tea. We hurried to the school kitchen and stacked three little cylinders of charcoal (carefully chosen and cut to uniform size) in a perforated iron pan called the hiokoshi and set them on the stove to ignite while we preheated water for the kettle. When the charcoal was ready, we set the hiokoshi into its slightly larger companion pan, the (non-perforated) daijūnō, and carried it to the room in which it was needed, calling out the warning “Hi ga tōrimasu”–fire coming through. Anita arranged the charcoal in the ro hearth sunk into the floor of the room; I won’t be allowed to handle fire myself until I’ve been here for a month.

The new students were taught today by Ro-sensei, a teacher from China who speaks Japanese but no English. Like Imagawa-sensei yesterday, he asked us to demonstrate what we’ve learned so far, and made small corrections as we went. He paid special attention to the procedures for entering and leaving the tea room. To enter, you sit just outside the door with your sensū on the floor in front of you. After apologizing to the guest behind you for being ahead of him, you move your fan across the threshold before dragging yourself into the room. You pick up your fan and rise to cross to the tokonoma, where you sit again and bow in respect to the scroll’s calligrapher, observe the scroll and flower, and bow again.

When moving through a tea room, you have to remember that it has “high” and “low” ends, reckoned by two overlapping planes of respect. The side of the room on which the guests sit is higher than the host’s side, and the end of the room on which the host makes tea is higher than the end from which he enters. When rising to move “down” the room, you lift your left knee from the tatami before your right knee, and when walking, you cross onto every successive mat with the left foot first. So when leaving the tokonoma you walk “down” the room before turning 45 degrees on your way to observing the kettle. Because the kettle is “up,” you have to make the turn in three steps rather than the usual two so that your right foot will lead into the next tatami. After observing the kettle, you make your way to your seat. (To leave the room, you reverse the procedure.) At every point in this little routine, too, you and the guests before and behind you need to be aware of each other’s positions and movements, so that more than one of you can be in the room at the same time without colliding.

Bear in mind that these are some of the easier things about doing tea.

Ro-sensei showed us only one new thing: the proper handling of the chasen, the bamboo whisk used to mix the powdered tea and hot water. Before making tea, the host lifts it twice from the bowl, giving it a half turn each time, inspecting it before the guest(s) to ensure that it’s clean and in good repair. It would not do to have happen what actually did happen to me during our break for tea later: one of the chasen’s tines broke off when I was whisking, and I didn’t know it until I was washing the empty bowl later and saw the sliver of bamboo stuck to the bottom. (In my defense, the chasen in question was a battered old one reserved for practice, already missing tines and no doubt weakened by years of abuse.) Our sweets for the day looked like small green and pink Koosh balls.

We finished practice a little early and finished our chores as quickly as we could. (Happily, the tatami in the third-floor practice hall doesn’t have to be cleaned on Fridays.) Then we freshened up briefly at the dorm and hopped a cab for the Rubino Horikawa Hotel, where we had yet another in the sequence of beginning-of-semester events. This one was a “welcome dinner” for students and office workers. After indulging in the generously stocked buffet (sashimi, sushi, fried rice, spicy pasta with bacon and spinach, coffee and cake, et a whole lot of cetera), each of the 70-odd students in attendance stepped up to the microphone on the stage at the end of the room and gave a brief self-introduction. Hamana-sensei asked Midorikai to please attempt ours in Japanese; everyone managed at least his or her name and a polite “Dōzo yoroshiku onegai shimasu” except for poor shy Verena, who mumbled her name and “I don’t speak Japanese, so…” before retreating. I tried to get a little fancy and no doubt sounded ridiculous, but I at least got a gratifying murmur of female interest when I told the crowd I’d worked at Disneyland. (Tanja tells Sean and I that we new foreign boys have, in fact, been quite the topic of conversation for the girls at Urasenke this past week.) It was fun to see the rest of the students outside the quiet, sober bounds of the school; the second and third-year kids in particular were much transformed, all loud energy and inside jokes. Hopefully our self-introductions will get some of the Japanese students to start to talk to us. Even after just a week, the Midorikai world is starting to feel a little small.

With no need to get up early the next morning, Sean and I saw no reason why a certain amount of beer shouldn’t be consumed, so we devoted the rest of the evening to that noble pursuit.

Sean and I had heard that besides soaking, walking may do knees some good, so we left the dorm early and headed east toward a large swath of trees I’d seen from the roof of the building. The rain had returned overnight; this round will probably finish stripping the sakura bare. Twenty wet minutes of walking brought us to the walls of the vast park surrounding the old imperial palace. One look at a map posted at one of the entrances told us that we would be able to so much as circumnavigate it in the time we had, so we cut through its shorter length on a broad tree-lined path before returning to the dorm resolved to revisit the park and palace at leisure during better weather.

Anita and I were responsible today for the journal and the flowers. The journal records student absences, morning lecture content, and information on the afternoon’s practice: what was done and with which natsume, flower container, scroll, etc. Even the maker of the day’s sweets and their name gets preserved in the journal. (Yesterday’s sweets were steamed balls of dough filled with bean paste and decorated with a smudge of green representing grass and two horizontal streaks representing mist; they were called harugasumi: “spring mist.”)

Hamana-sensei lectured during first period on the role of fire in tea. He gave us a brief history of the fires that have ravaged Kyoto through the centuries, including the one in the late 18th century that destroyed much of Konnichian, the old Sen family compound. Two main buildings survived that fire; the legend has it that an ichō (ginkgo) tree planted by Sen Sōtan dropped its leaves to smother the fire threatening those buildings. Ever since, the ichō leaf has been the emblem of Urasenke.

Taoist cosmology, which came to Japan some 1500 years ago, considers fire one of the five elements of the universe. The influence of that model is memorialized in many of the implements and procedures of tea that were developed to subtly balance wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. These things are no longer thought to be particularly important as such, but we do still revere and respect fire for its simple, crucial role in heating the water for tea and for its intimate, comforting psychological effect on those who gather around a glowing hearth.

Hamana-sensei’s second-period lecture concerned mizuya design and philosophy. As the place of preparation for the making of tea, the mizuya must be clean, orderly, and well-organized; we say that to see a tea person’s mizuya is to see the reality of his spirit. Hamana-sensei insists, in fact, that the preparation area is just as important, if not more so, than the tea room itself. He followed his theoretical discourse with photographs and names of a great number of implements I’ll be expected to recall in the near future. I am hoping it won’t be the very near future. Finally Sensei demonstrated his favorite way to fill a natsume, subtly different and clearly better than what Szymon showed us on Saturday, and shaped fine ash in a bowl with his haisaji to show us what we’ll be learning next week.

After cleaning the classroom (another student task; Urasenke employs no custodial service, in fact), I had soba noodles with seaweed for lunch before dashing back to the practice rooms to help Anita arrange flowers. Following traditional Japanese home design, every tea room contains an alcove for displaying precious things: the tokonoma. A tea room’s alcove will always have two things on display: a wall hanging, often a scroll with a poetic phrase executed in flowing calligraphy; and a simple (but extremely deliberate) arrangement of flowers. One Anita had selected a small bud, a leafy twig, and a vase, and arranged them more or less to her satisfaction, we misted the arrangement with water to create a fresh spring feeling before practice started.

We new students met a new teacher today: Imagawa-sensei, a soft-spoken, gentle, and infinitely kind and patient young man who revisited everything we’d been learning from Hamana-sensei to further refine our postures and movements. We sat down, stood up, turned, walked in circles around the room. (The feet lightly scuff the tatami and each other to create a pleasant sound; the back and neck are held straight, ears above shoulders and nose aligned with chest; a full length of tatami should take four steps to cross.) We folded and refolded our fukusa, purified and re-purified our natsume and chashaku.

The best I can report concerning my knees is that I am quite obviously not alone in my distress. Although I do have a twinge in my right knee that feels like some residual injury, probably from the marathon training I did in the fall, it doesn’t seem to be getting any worse; the general blinding pain I’ve been feeling in both knees after sitting in the seiza posture for some minutes is afflicting us all. Assuming things continue in this wise, then, if I wash out of the program, we all wash out. Which probably means that all of us will get to stay, just learning to endure pain.

Anita and I completed our journal, put away our flower paraphernalia, ran home to change, and met again to clean the third-floor bathrooms. Then we met the others for dinner: fried fish and tonkatsu. (And the inevitable miso soup and rice and tea and various little pickles and salads and sides.)

There lives nearby an elderly retired Urasenke teacher whose joy in life now, it seems, is to give a free calligraphy lesson each week to Midorikai students. Virtually the whole group has been visiting him every Thursday for months now; they say he lights up to have the company. As much as I like to make people happy, and as much as I’d like to learn calligraphy, and as much as I hate to be the odd man out, though, I had to pass on the activity this time, at least. I was two and a half days behind in writing this account, and I have on my hard drive a fearsome amount of raw video that isn’t editing itself. And though I truly do hate being the odd man out, I also thought a break from this group of nine in which I spend virtually all of my waking moments might not be an altogether bad thing. So I stayed home and wrote, and did laundry, and even got a bit of that video cut. And then there was the bath, and after that, bed.

As I’ve mentioned, we begin and end our days with chores according to the tōban list. Today was the first day that we newbies didn’t have special activities in the morning or afternoon, so we got to follow our senpai around and learn. Anita and I were on mizuya-chō detail, in charge of the preparation area outside the tearoom. Before morning lecture we stopped into the school’s second-floor kitchen to bag up everything we’d need for practice later. Then we prepared sweets, tea, water, and a hot towel (oshibori) for our teacher. After class began with a bow, Anita brought in the sweets, retreated to whisk the tea, brought it in, disappeared once more, and returned carrying a tray with the towel, glass of water, and second kind of tea.

During the first lecture period Mittner-sensei explained Urasenke’s organizational structure to us. Most of her talk went not quite over, but definitely to one side of my head. Hamana-sensei dedicated the second lecture period to a round-table get-to-know-one-another session.

We lunched quickly on hayashi rice and hurried back to prepare for afternoon practice. The mizuya-chō retrieves the day’s special sweets from the kitchen along with the various trays and wooden picks needed to serve them, makes a mental note of the arrangement of the mizuya (everything must be cleaned and restored to its original position at the end of practice, and readies stacks of towels and chakin, the strips of linen used to clean tea bowls during temae.

Hamana-sensei taught us how to fold a fukusa and use it to symbolically purify the natsume and chashaku. Like everything in tea, this is harder than it looks–and done well, it looks beautiful. Dancers and some athletes know the kind of strength and control required to make a thing look effortless, but it was new to me. Posture and movement in tea, moreover, should communicate a feeling of peacefulness to the guest, and to let go of tension when one’s knees are screaming for mercy is no mean feat.

Before he dismissed us, Hamana-sensei helped us bend our copper haisaji (ash scoops) into their ideal shapes. Then we rejoined our senpai to help clean up. The mizuya-chō puts away everything he took out while making sure everyone else has done the same. Once all the dōgu have been cleaned and replaced, the head mizuya-chō for the whole practice facility is summoned; only after his review and approval can we leave.

We hurried back to our dorms to change into work clothes and then returned to school. The floor of the large room that hosted the opening ceremonies has been covered with dozens upon dozens of tatami to transform the space into a giant practice facility. Every day Midorikai is responsible for sweeping and wiping down all those tatami. We made short, fun work of it, though, and were soon over at the shokudō, eating nice broiled fish.

Sean and I needed more appropriate work clothes than jeans and t-shirts, so Szymon took us to a kimono shop to buy samue, the pajama-like working garments of Buddhist monks, and favored cleaning attire at Urasenke. (They would also make terrific pajamas, for that matter.) Then Sean and I stopped by the 100-yen shop to buy this and that. We realized on our way home that we hadn’t had a thing to drink since the airplane ride here a week before, so we popped into Lawson for some beer and holed up for the evening in Sean’s room.

Somebody had suggested soaking sore knees in hot water, so before I went to bed I used my big bathtub for the first time. Now I doubt I’ll go a night without a bath. It works magic on the joints and is just pleasantly relaxing in general. Warm, limber, and a happy distance from sobriety, I dropped off to sleep.