I dragged myself out of bed early once again and rode into the mountains, this time straight up the promising road I’d identified the day before. Alas: it didn’t lead much farther than I’d already taken it, or reveal any more than I’d already found. Past a small remote cluster of houses, it narrowed to a gravel path forbidden to any but locals–and I’m the sort of guy who generally obeys signs, especially under circumstances like these. A small disappointment but a nice ride regardless. Now I have to decide on the next direction to explore.

The whole school dressed formally and assembled in the biggest of the second-floor classrooms to hear an address from the principal, who is of course Oiemoto. For me this was an exercise in patience, sitting up straight and looking alert for an hour and a half while not understanding a thing that was being said to me. Heck, I could barely hear any of it to begin with: Midorikai, typically, sat at the back of the room, and Oiemoto’s microphone didn’t compensate for my worsening hearing. Gary-sensei has promised to provide a rough translation when he’s deciphered his notes. Our senpai tell us that these lectures are usually pretty interesting. Oiemoto graduated from Dōshisha with a degree in psychology, and his interests extend far beyond tea.

A hot afternoon in the tea room despite the air conditioner running. Ro-sensei clearly felt the heat too, mopping himself frequently with a hand towel and opening every window he could find to open. Despite the air conditioner running. Another in the series of kazari temae today, this one showcasing the chaire.

Then I went to war with a bowl of ash, and lost. In 45 minutes, I started my haigata, got disgusted and destroyed what I’d done, started it again, gave up, started once more, and gave up for good. Threw around my haisaji a bit for good measure, and got worried looks from the Japanese students fighting with their own haigata. I might have calmed myself down and finished the job except that I knew it didn’t actually have to be done until Monday, so I’d have the opportunity to come back to it with a better attitude.

I walked out of school into the aforementioned downpour, ate quickly, still in a foul mood, and retreated to my Fortress of Solitude to pull myself together with the help of some strong air conditioning. Restored equilibrium and spent the evening quietly.

I set off to the west through the empty streets, aiming to find out whether or not there’s hiking access to the hill with the character for “big” cleared into it: one of the giant mountainside characters that will burn in the night at the end of the bon festival. When I reached the lower slopes of the first mountains to the west, I realized that I was too far to the south to find my answer on this trip, so I skirted the southern slope and realized that I’d found the neighborhood of Kinkakuji, the famous “Golden Pavilion,” and Ryoanji, home of one of Japan’s most famous dry gardens.

I visited both places in July of 2006 on a rainy overnight trip with my host parents, who sprung for a room in a rather nice ryokan near Heian shrine. We did a round of sightseeing, checked in to the inn and changed into yukata, casual lightweight summer robes, hit the bath, had an old-fashioned fancy Japanese dinner, and went to bed before nine o’ clock, because my host parents are elderly and don’t go in for nightlife–not that there’s much of that near Heian shrine anyhow.

The three of us shared a single room; an attendant had laid out futon while we ate dinner. Because of the strange surroundings and the early bedtime, I woke up again around midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep for a very long time. I remember that my very small pillow felt and sounded like it was packed with dried beans; every adjustment of position crunched and rattled in the close dark space while my host dad breathed loudly in his sleep.

Kinkakuji underwhelmed me. The big draw is a smallish pagoda covered in gold leaf. Slightly garish. Ryoanji was better, except for the giant noisy crowd of tourists both foreign and domestic on the porch overlooking the ancient rock garden. “Don’t look at it with your eyes; look at it with your heart,” my host dad told me. But my heart was busy disliking the tall, neo-hippie American in his Patagonia gear chatting up the local girls; he looked like the classic Not-Religious-But-Spiritual and Cherishes-Traditional-Cultures-the-World-Over type. We lunched at the restaurant on temple grounds that serves just one dish: an exquisite tofu in a delicate broth. You walk a wooded path to get to the place, across a little stream filling a bamboo cylinder that empties itself when its center of gravity shifts, and you eat in an air-conditioned tatami room with a large loud party of Americans at one end and an attractive Japanese girl at the next table whose underpants peek distractingly from the back of her jeans.

I returned home and changed, and gave thanks for clothes that fit properly. On Friday after school I’d picked up my brand-new made-to-measure kimono, and now I got to wear it. True, it’s not as nice as a piece of work as the more expensive garment that the school gave me, but it’s a much better thing than the oversized ready-to-wear kimono I’ve been struggling with for the last month and a half.

Hamana-sensei lectured on tea in the month of July, and Tanihata-sensei breezed in to resume his history of tea in Japan, getting us right up to Sen Rikyū.

For a treat, we got to practice in the afternoon on the third floor, which meant that we didn’t have to carry the two heavy furo and their iron kama downstairs and then up again after class like we do most days. We worked on the koicha variation of kinin kiyotsugu, which I like even less than the standard usucha. First of all, I just don’t care for this kinin stuff at all. Second, koicha means sitting longer, which means more pain. Finally, making koicha for one person at a time is difficult: the volume of tea and water required is so small that it’s hard to whisk properly. Hard to drink, for that matter–most of it sticks to the bowl.

A confused little bird, the kind called Japanese White-Eye in English, flew across the room and into a pillar. It lay dazed for a moment, then took off straight into another pillar. Verena picked it up gently and held it out of a window, but it wouldn’t or couldn’t fly away, so she set it down on the top landing of the fire escape stairs. I forgot to check whether it ever recovered and got away.

After supper I resumed my search for access to the character on the hillside. Doesn’t seem that the public can get to it after all, but my time wasn’t wasted. Skirting this time the north side of the little mountain that is apparently called Shōzan, I came to a place where the houses end and a narrow winding road disappears into forest gloom. Occasional incongruous fluorescent street lamps arched over the road; it looked like the path to a modern Japanese Narnia. Beyond the guardrail, the ground sloped sharply down to a shallow, brisk stream cutting through green shadow.

When I stepped back into late sunlight, I was in a Kyoto I’d never seen before–if it was still Kyoto. Pockets of rural-looking houses and other buildings nestled between forested slopes; I saw cords of firewood stacked in yards. Whatever businesses might have operated in this satellite community were closed for the day, and few people or vehicles appeared on the streets.

Where the road disappeared into the woods again, I turned around, resolving to press further into the mountains sometime on bicycle, when I can cover ground faster.

After two lengthy adventures on foot in one day, I didn’t have to make a special effort to go to bed early. I futzed around online for awhile, tried to help Szymon get the sense of some difficult words in an English translation of some opaque ancient Japanese for the thesis he’s revising, and called it a night.

Over-optimism modest chocolate?

Today I prepared for tsuyu by sharpening my holding-an-umbrella-while-riding-a-bicycle skills. Szymon and I pedaled out into a fine rain in search of June kimono. Not an easy mission, it turned out. June traditionally calls for a thickness of fabric between the lined fall-winter-spring kimono and the see-through summer kimono. Seems that the tradition is falling by the wayside–perhaps because the unlined kimono is only supposed to be worn two out of twelve months in the year. What the stores had in stock suggested that most of the people who still bother to put on kimono go straight for the summer material as soon as the season warms up.

We struck out at Daiyasu. No–not quite; we both found cheap used obi, and I bought replacement tabi. Then we ventured, against our better judgement, back into Mimuro, which was just as overpriced and high-pressure as we remembered. We ended up finally at friendly local standby Kimura, where the owner (who I’ve only ever seen wearing Western-style string ties, incidentally) had nothing ready-made to suit us but offered us a reasonable price on custom-made kimono. We both jumped at it, even though the kimono won’t be done until the 13th of June, when we’ll only have two weeks to wear them before switching material again. But they should fit beautifully, and we got to choose colors. And I’ll be able to use it again come September. It’ll be polyester still, but less of it.

I walked out of Kimura having spent a disheartening chunk of my June money before June had even begun. And I have yet to get a proper summer juban. Need to ask Hamana-sensei a few questions about that garment (color, length, material) before I buy anything else. In the meantime, I’ll be using the standard cheat: a strip of summer material fabric that you sew onto the collar of a juban so that it at least looks correct.

Because I could, I took a nap. Then I puttered. Then I went to a birthday party. Classmate Verena turned 21 this day, and we managed to coordinate a bit of a surprise for her on the 3rd floor of the girls’ dorm. Anita ordered a real monument of a cake, something that looked like a high-speed photograph taken a millisecond after a firecracker buried in a bowl of strawberries exploded. Tanja wrangled the birthday girl; the rest of us waited in a dark room to yell when the lights went on. We had the cake with ice cream, sat around and jawed and snacked for a while, and then let Verena get on to her original plan for the evening, which was to make pancakes. We got to try the results: the thin crepe-y kind, flecked with chocolate, served with red bean paste. Exquisite.

Finished the evening in front of Sean’s television, away from which I could not tear myself away, on account of a stunningly weird hour-long live-action drama produced with the visual style of anime. Had to do with some ancient board game, over which contestants grimaced and sweated between soft-focus flashbacks of ancient-board-game senseis in traditional rooms, and hallucinations of computer-generated anthropomorphic mushrooms. Also there was a girl who wore very professional business attire and no expression while watching the game in progress, but who wore a technicolor maid costume when visiting the protagonist at home. Apparently she became the property of the victorious challenger in this episode: a cruel and fey young man with long platinum hair and steely blue contact lenses. Breasts were central to the plot, but neither Sean nor I could figure out how, exactly.

I totally already know what I’ll be doing next Saturday night at 11:00.

Well, I was stopped at one today on the way to school next to an old man astride a bicycle, muttering to himself. A gaijin coming toward us on a bicycle slowed at the intersection, checked for oncoming traffic, and pedaled on through the red light. “Aka. Aka deshō. Aka,” muttered the old man. “It’s red, you know.” He said it to himself. I suspect he deals with most of his dissatisfaction with the world this way, sharpening up reprimands but never firing them at their targets.

Today’s tana was the kōkōdana, a favored item of Gengensai (Urasenke XI). It has one shelf more than the marujokudana, and is square instead of round. This adds up to a bit of extra stuff-shuffling and having to remember to set the hishaku on the tana with its mouth facing up at the end of the temae.

Glad you asked. Because tea developed to incorporate a lot of imported Chinese cosmological stuff about elements and yin and yang and so forth, and so the dōgu and temae strive for various balances. Like, we draw a glyph for water in the ash in the furo, because it’s thought to balance the fire that will sit atop it. That kind of thing. Likewise, the bottom of the hishaku’s cup is reckoned the circular part, and because the kōkōdana is square, you want to set the not-square side of the hishaku on it for balance.

Terrific sweets today: kashiwa mochi. Sweet, gooey mochi filled with bean paste and wrapped in an oak leaf. Kind of a hassle to eat, though. I didn’t start early enough when I was guest, so to avoid making my host pause in his preparations, I had to squirrel most of mine away in my sleeve after just a small first bite.

Imagawa-sensei tried to improve my hishaku handling today. When picking the thing up from its resting place atop the kama before drawing hot water, you reach across your body with your right hand (the furo sits ahead of you and to the left), palm flat, hand extended straight out from the forearm. The tip of the middle finger lifts the end of the hishaku’s handle from beneath. The handle’s tip should describe a straight line, not an arc, as you bring it up and to the right to get a better grip on it. When pouring water from the hishaku, the joint between cup and handle should remain stationary in space as it pivots.

These are the things that consume me these days. And I’m giving you the irresponsibly simplified version. The hell of it is that I really, truly care about these minutiae.

They say you can spot a tea person anywhere because his fingertips are always in a straight line.

Sean wanted to buy some stationery at Vivre, and I elected to have nothing better to do than go with him. At a red light on the way there, another old man on a bicycle muttered to himself as he nursed a tall can of chu-hi. At least, that’s what I assumed until I realized he was, in fact, addressing me. “Buchō. Buchō. (Boss. Boss.) You teach me English, okay?” he said, in English.

“I cannot speak English,” he continued. I protested that his English sounded fair enough to me, but he ignored me. “Where. From. You come?” he asked. “America. California,” I said. “Los Angeles?” he asked. “Sono tōri,” I said; “you got it.”

“United States is. Greatest country. In the world,” he concluded, and then the light changed and we were off.

What do you say to that? Even if it is just the booze talking?

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.