DINNER: Mystery meat katsu.

WEATHER: Clear, crisp spring, bright and ideal.

There is a tree whose name I must learn in a corner of the temple property through which I pass ever day on my way to school. Just two or so weeks ago it was impossible to see past the sakura. Now their blossoms are just memories; their leaves have opened thick and green; they have become simple unremarkable trees once again. But the tree in the corner, and the one like it by the door to Omotesenke headquarters, that called no attention to itself two or so weeks ago is having its moment now. The day before last, I think it was, I realized that I’d been looking at it but not seeing it; that without my registering the change it had broken out in elegant pink flowers. Time passes as a succession of surprises and delights both big and small.

This morning we dressed down and reported to a workshop in the (Urasenke-owned) Tankosha Publishing building for a lesson in haigata. Nine furo braziers full of ash awaited us. Hamana-sensei demonstrated each step in the creation of the nimonji-oshikiri formation before dispatching us to execute it ourselves. Mine got off to such a disastrous start that Murata-sensei, assisting, started it over for me while I was watching Hamana-sensei demonstrate the second step, which got me a scolding from Hamana-sensei when he came to check my progress and saw that I was still back at the beginning. Shikata ga nai. I was glad to make it until lunchtime without throwing tools or handfuls of ash across the room. So far, this task is the one I’m least skilled at and most frustrated by. Doing it well requires a degree of perfectionism, but perfectionism can lead to madness, especially when working with fine ash as a medium. It holds shapes surprisingly well, but cracks can form in the slopes if you’re not careful, and to use tools on it such that it shows no traces of tools having been used on it takes a very light and agile touch I have yet to develop. For better or for worse, I’ll have lots of practice before I’m through.

We changed into our suits before lunch, and met Imagawa-sensei in practice room 2 for our first lesson in preparing tea with the chitosebon, or “1000 year tray.” This seems to be a procedure that we’ll learn quickly and never use again: the expert kitchen staff couldn’t remember where the one available tray was stored, and it took Imagawa-sensei a while to retrieve the correct order of operations from his own memory. The tray itself is like a short black lacquered hatbox with lid, in which everything but the kettle and waste-water container is brought in for making tea. I don’t care much for the box or the procedure, and not just because it frustrated me mightily right when I had started to get a grip on bonryakudemae.

Peonies (possibly; I’ll try to get a picture so that someone can correct me) are blooming by the gate  to school; on our way out Anita thought aloud that they looked like Alice in Wonderland flowers, oversized and picture-perfect, the pink blooms lightening gradually in color toward the ends of the petals. I killed time while Sean did haigata, then the two of us ate supper shortly before the shokudō closed up for the weekend.

Just after dark, with the temperature dropping rapidly, we biked up to the 100-yen shop that’s best for housewares and so forth to stock up on cleaning products and haigata brushes. The store constitutes the top floor of a three-story building over by Dōshisha University. The second floor is a miniature department store; the first floor and basement are a grocery store, where I bought some tea and some iced coffee. Then we headed over to the 99-yen shop (savings!), which is better for food, and bought various wacky snacks. I got a corn puff, like an unflavored Cheeto the size of a giant egg roll, dipped in some sort of brown sugar glaze. Unfamiliar but tasty.

Sean appropriated an unused television from the second-floor hallway a few nights ago, so we spent the rest of the evening not comprehending Japanese programming.

All the new students assembled in a second-floor classroom to wait. Seating was assigned; name tags were set out on the tables. These are long narrow clips of white plastic read vertically. We Midorikai students in our Western clothes hung ours on suit pockets, but the rest of the room were in kimono and so wore their name tags on their obi. For about fifty minutes we sat quietly, anxiously. Every so often a wrangler would appear to issue further instructions in Japanese. Tanawat is good enough with the language that he was able to assure us that none of the information was mission-critical.

We lined up in the hall outside shortly before the ceremony was to begin, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and entered the assembly room there to a long round of unbroken applause from administrators, teachers, parents, and second and third-year students. When all the new students had filed down the center of the room to find their seats, the Opening Ceremony began with the first of many bows in unison. Backs straight, fingertips reaching for knees, we slowly folded ourselves over to a slow mental count of three, held the position for three more, and rose to a final three. The room turned then in the direction of “Tea Mecca” (Hamana-sensei’s term)–a statue of Sen no Rikyū, who first codified our art and to whom the three major schools of tea practicing today trace their lineage–and recited a pledge to aspire to the highest standards and noblest ideas while doing tea in the Urasenke tradition.

Oiemoto, soft-spoken but imposing in his black kimono, gave a speech in which (Hamana-sensei paraphrased later) he compared us all to the flowers of the sakura. Now we are mere buds, but with diligence we may blossom. Presumably he went on to say something about the falling of the petals and transience–he is a Buddhist priest as well as a man of tea–but that’s just my guess.

There were more speeches and more bows, I executed my role in the proceedings without embarrassing myself impossibly, and suddenly we Midorikai students were lined up in the second-floor hallway again, waiting to receive our monthly stipend from the hand of Oiemoto himself. We were beckoned into his office as a group, and one by one were handed each an envelope containing a generous amount of cash in uncirculated bills–the Japanese don’t give each other dirty used money on formal occasions. I had been feeling relieved that bowing is the customary greeting in Japan, because my nervous hands were bloodless and cold; naturally, Oiemoto had to shake mine while welcoming me to Japan in English. I managed a bit of Japanese and tried very hard to exude genuine high-octane gratitude. And that was it. Until next month, and the next envelope.

It had begun to rain sometime during the ceremony; loaner umbrellas were located and we were herded over to a tea room somewhere to drink a bowl with a large-ish group of new students’ parents. The okashi–sweets that always precede tea to balance the drink’s bitterness–were the most remarkable I’ve ever seen: spongy cakes shaped like sakura leaves, delicately colored pink and white and touched with gold leaf at what would be the tree end. As I drank my tea, I listened to the rain on the roof and remembered that my first visit to a teahouse, my dear Jakuan at the University of Hawaii, where all this began, was on a rainy day. Ever since then, rain has been my favorite weather for tea, and I took it as a good sign that my first day of school at Urasenke should echo my first glimpse of this refined world.

Next we were allowed a brief, precious glimpse of Konnichian. Many times already I’ve bowed toward the “helmet gate.” Today we walked through it into a green garden glistening wet. We followed the curving path to the house, over three centuries old, and stepped out of our shoes and into history. Attendants pointed the way through the labyrinth of low, dim hallways, and we ducked our heads as we followed a carpet of green felt rolled out along the tatami to a tiny room containing only a shrine, perceived vaguely in the shadows, to the memory of Rikyū. We sat down and pulled ourselves respectfully across the threshold on our knees, had our moment with the dead, and then returned to the modern world–or as close to it as we get in around here.

It was good that our bowing muscles were warmed up, because more formal introductions awaited us at various points throughout the rest of the day: the staffs of two different offices, Sekine-san, who apparently has much to do with appropriating the budget for our little Midorikai program, and the cook in charge of the shokudō, who invited anyone in possession of a recipe from his or her own country that could serve 80 to send it along.

Lunch was provided in the second-floor classroom where our day began. We were treated to terribly elegant obentō (boxed lunches) from some not cheap place. Each large lacquered box was divided into four compartments, each of those containing an assortment of very traditional Japanese delicacies, very precisely arranged. (The garnish on one dish included a wisp of fern almost too small to be picked up with ohashi (chopsticks). Miso soup and tea were served separately.

Then, at last, we had a class. We began by observing our senpai as they prepared for the afternoon’s practice. I followed Anita around as she heated water for the kama (kettle), lit charcoal, and placed it in the tearoom’s sunken hearth. Then Hamana-sensei began our education officially by guiding us through the practice tea rooms. There are six, each executed in a subtly different style from the next, ranging in formality from elegant room 1 to rustic room 6. Sensei encouraged us to be attentive to the details in the architecture but simultaneously to cultivate a sensitivity to the more important feeling of each room.

Then he explained the arrangement of the mizuya (“water room”), the preparatory area outside the tea room itself. “A place for everything, and everything in its place” is the basic philosophy of mizuya organization. Three full-length shelves and a bottom shelf about one third as long hang over a bamboo drain grate set into the floor. On the grate itself and on the lowest shelf rest the dōgu that have to do with water, arranged carefully according to value. Above that are dōgu that have to do with tea, then the fire-related implements, and finally things that just aren’t used very frequently at all; the closer to you something is when you kneel in the mizuya, the more likely you are to be handling it often.

Szymon performed temae (the formal term for the ceremonial preparation of tea) for us then, his practiced fluid movements unlike anything I’ve seen done at Jakuan. Every step of the process seemed to uncoil like spring steel, controlled, a study in motion and rest under great control.

We finished with a tour of the large kitchen, where various dōgu are stored, okashi distributed, water heated, and charcoal lit. About thirty years ago, Sensei revealed to us, some drunk Midorikai students accidentally burned down the building that had then stood on this site, jeopardizing the future of the program. Ever since, we’ve had to be the most vigilant students of all where fire is concerned.

Sensei dismissed us with handouts full of procedures and endless lists of new words to be committed to memory. Then we hurried to the post office. Though our tuition is paid for, we are expected to give a small portion of our monthly stipend back to cover various material costs, and that means getting hold of shinsatsu (new bills). We had change made and submitted the fee to the teacher responsible for collecting it, and hurried over to the shokudō to eat tonkatsu. The rain still fell, but it hadn’t managed to absolutely strip the sakura trees of their blossoms, though lawns, shrines, and puddles were blanketed in soft pink and white petals.

After dinner, Sean, Tanawat and I went shopping at the 99-yen shop down the street: think of a classy dollar store with a much greater variety of merchandise. Then we returned to putter around the dorm and think over our full day before retiring.