The summer preview weather of the last few days washed away with the rain that began last night and continued throughout the cold, grey day. We had morning class not in the school building but at the Urasenke Center, in a wood-paneled fourth-floor meeting room with very large, very comfortable, very reclining and hard-to-get-out-of chairs around a glossy table. Our teacher was Matsunami-sensei, the abbot of (should be “an abbot from”–EDB,2011.04.27) nearby Daitokuji temple, where Sen no Rikyū and his teacher and his teacher’s teacher all studied Zen Buddhism. Matsunami-sensei, an unassuming little man with a shaved head in denim samue trousers and a navy cardigan, gave us a brief history of Buddhism, its teachings, and its connection with tea, stopping frequently to write redundant information on a dry-erase board in a careful, rusty, English cursive. He’d worry over difficult words for half a minute or more before he’d commit to a spelling; I suspected he was enjoying the chance to practice.

Then he led us up to the fifth floor, the top of the building, which is given over entirely to a private Buddhist temple/meditation space for Daisōshō and/or Oiemoto). The floor is bright, ringed with large windows that today offered a dreary view of the wet city, the mountains veiled entirely by cloud, but the central room is a gloomy place. Some twenty orange zabuton sit on tatami mats, and an altar (or whatever they call it) of dark wood seems to brood in the shadows at the innermost end of the room. We sat down cross-legged–those of us lucky enough to be in pants, that is; skirts and kimono leave no choice but seiza–and followed Matsunami-sensei’s instructions to straighten our backs; relax our head, shoulders, and arms; leave our eyes open just enough to let some light in, so as not to fall asleep; and slow our breathing, focusing our attention on ourselves.

Well, I tried to follow his instructions, anyhow. Something about the location of my body’s center of gravity makes sitting up straight in that position nearly impossible while simultaneously relaxing. Plus, if I can say this without undue offense to the world’s Zen practitioners, who I’m sure are a very nice and sincere bunch, I found the whole thing to be rather silly. Most of the time my attention is focused on myself to begin with; concentrating that attention further seldom yields much benefit. And I have considered and rejected the notion that we need to get beyond our dualistic conceptions of the universe.

Mostly what I ended up thinking about was swallowing. My body wanted to do little else (besides get the hell out of that uncomfortable posture), and every swallow seemed loud enough in that space to register on a seismograph. Across from me, Sean’s stomach kept demanding lunch: the growls I could deal with, but the little deflating-balloon whines had me biting my tongue to keep from laughing. Apparently he had not gotten beyond conceiving of existence in terms of hungry/not hungry. We sat still in (relative) silence for 25 of the longest minutes of my life before Matsunami-sensei struck two sticks together twice to signal the end of the session. Then we went to lunch and I ate gyūdon.

Ro-sensei oversaw our last afternoon of bonryaku practice. Mine was predictably dismal, but I dare say my knees are beginning to accept the treatment they’re getting here. Just beginning. Today’s sweets weren’t so impressive. I don’t recall their name, but their uniformly pasty texture sort of bored me and made them difficult to pick up. Their outsides were dyed bright green, studded with bright red paste extrusions presumably meant to resemble flowers; not bad, but I’ve seen Play-Doh creations about as appetizing. I never did get the name of the flower, but its blossoms were small and round and white and charming.

After class I changed and hurried to finish haigata before the shokudō closed. The results were better than last week’s but far from satisfactory, and I may have caused some friction by picking up some ratty old towels not designated for Midorikai use before hurriedly and apologetically handing them over to the Japanese student who was collecting and counting them. Apparently we are routinely suspected of making off with things that aren’t ours. It’s hardly fair, but them’s the breaks, and I hope I haven’t fueled any fires.

I got to the shokudō just past closing, but some comrades had secured a plate of shrimp tempura and salad for me before the kitchen ladies packed it in, so I didn’t go hungry. Sean and a few of the others disappeared to their weekly calligraphy lesson, which I think I’ve decided not to get involved with at all, and I wrote some letters. On paper.

And uploaded this mess-in-progress for public consideration.

Gary-sensei finished his lecture by showing us color slides of various dishes. His encyclopedic knowledge extends to food, a subject on which he is more than usually enthusiastic. He lovingly described the contents of each dish as far as he could discern from the photographs, told us everything he could remember related to every ingredient that he could identify, and gave us interesting trivia on the pictured dōgu as well.

During second period Tanihata-sensei, who we’d seen around but never been taught by, blew in for the first part of a series on the history of tea in Japan. A little man with longish floppy hair and a permanent pack of cigarettes in his front shirt pocket, he did some top-of-the-head chronologically untethered lecturing translated with liberal elaborations by Gary-sensei. Most of it I’d heard last spring in Dr. Farris’s class at UH, but certain bits of trivia were new. Basically, tea came to Japan from China twice, once in around the 7th century and again, after the first fad for the beverage had waned, in the early 14th century. It was brought into the country this second time under the auspices of Zen Buddhism by a monk named Eisai, which goes a long way toward explaining the still-strong link between tea and Zen (though tea is quite nonsectarian). At its first importation, the beverage took a form called “brick tea;” at its second, it had assumed the powdered matcha form we use today. Soon afterwards, the Chinese developed steeped green tea, sencha, but this preparation wouldn’t travel to Japan until the early 17th century. (It is by far the most popular way to drink tea here now.)

I don’t remember what lunch was called, but it was a pile of flavored rice with a poached egg on top, and it was wonderful. We continued with bonryakudemae today, practicing a variation that has the host turned slightly toward the guest, rather than facing in a perpendicular direction. Hamana-sensei seems pleased with our progress, I felt reasonably comfortable with my own level of proficiency, and my knees held up comparatively well. The sweets were lime green mochi balls with sweet white bean paste filling, branded sakura designs, and a snow-like sprinkling of crispy flakes made from rice flour. They were called hanafubuki, “flower blizzard,” and Hamana-sensei said that it was a little late in the season for them. Still, they were delicious. I made tea for Tanawat twice, once in a beige Ito bowl (steep sides, tall foot) that I’m not particularly fond of, and once in an Annan bowl (white porcelain, blurry blue patterns in the glaze, originally from Vietnam) that’s growing on me. The flower was a lively orange thing with pointed petals called himeyuri: “princess lily.” The scroll (actually shikishi, but who’s counting? (Tea people, that’s who.)) read dō, as in chadō–”way,” perhaps.

Changed into samue and cleaned bathrooms, then helped with the tatami because I’m a nice guy. Had tempura for supper, wrote a bit, rode through the rain with Sean to Vivre. With this paragraph, am 100% caught up on journaling this adventure. For the moment.

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.