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.

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.

I am insured now for the first time in years. This morning we took care of one of our last procedural errands, walking down to the ward office again and walking out with National Health Insurance identification cards. Apparently it’ll cost me around $200 for a year of coverage. Somebody back home ought to look into this.

Class this morning was a lecture from Gary-sensei, who grew up in Texas and whose path to Tea began when his father bought him a Japanese sword, easily obtainable after the war when GIs had brought them home as souvenirs, and told him to learn everything he could about it. Gary-sensei knows so much about tea that he has trouble staying on topic; every subject suggests interesting tangents that he’s able and eager to pursue. He implored us to never again use the phrase “tea ceremony,” so from here on out it’s chadō, chanoyu, or just plain “tea.” He will be primarily teaching us about chaji, big tea functions, of which there are seven main types enabling hundreds of variations. Today, though, his main topic, so far as he had one, was the various stuff that one carries in the front of one’s kimono (“kaichū”) for tea purposes.

Kaishi is the white paper in a folded pad off of which one eats sweets before tea. It’s also used for wiping fingers, and tea bowls if necessary, and you can even put it to its earliest historical use by writing on it. The fukusa is a square of thick silk fabric (called shioze, after the student of Sen no Rikyū’s who first decided to make fukusas out of it) used by a host to symbolically purify the dōgu when making tea. In the Urasenke tradition, men’s fukusas are purple and women’s are red or orange, except on special occasions. Midorikai has special permission to use green fukusas when hosting tea functions, and Oiemoto uses a white fukusa when making ritual kencha tea offerings to Buddhas or gods or dead people. The fukusa is worn on the host’s obi during tea; the story goes that one of Rikyū’s predecessors started this custom after seeing the decorative girdle pendants that the Chinese would wear when hosting parties.

The kobukusa I’ve written about before and have little further insight into now. When bringing someone a bowl of tea without doing temae, it’s customary to cover your left palm with the kobukusa before setting the bowl on it. Gary-sensei recommends carrying at least two kobukusa of different levels of formality at all times, to be prepared for any eventuality.

Finally, the sensū is a small fan that isn’t used for fanning. Like the ropes and folded strips of white paper that designate purified areas at Shinto shrines, the fan is a kekkai, a thing that ties worlds together: in this case the worlds are people. We hold the sensū in our right hand when meeting people formally, set it on the tatami in front of us when greeting and thanking each other at the beginning and end of tea, and leave it behind us to mark our space on the mat when moving to receive a bowl of tea from the host.

We broke for a lunch of pork and vegetables, then spent the afternoon learning from Hamana-sensei how to sit, stand, walk, and open and close doors in the tea room. The postures required are all very tiring to muscles that haven’t had to maintain them before; even in Hawaii Sean and I were rarely corrected so exactly as we were today. For the second day in a row I ended the afternoon with my knees complaining loudly. For the last few months my biggest fear has been that my old joints will simply not hold up to the stresses here, and that I’ll be sent home early when I can no longer sit properly. My senpai’s assurances that I’ll get used to the pain have not helped much in light of various senseis’ grave admonitions to take the great care of our knees. It’s very difficult to stay focused while carrying around this fear, but I can do more than take things one day at a time and deal with circumstances when they present themselves. And if one of those circumstances turns out to be that my body betrays me and I can’t finish the program, at least it won’t come as a total surprise.

After class we were measured for the custom-made kimonos we’ll be given. The tailor covered a table with fabric samples and let us choose the color of our kimonos, their linings, and their obi. The women also chose a small symbol to be embroidered on the upper back (traditionally a Japanese family crest), and the men picked a color for their hakama, the trousers men wear with kimono on occasion.

Dinner was some tasty breaded mystery meat. Afterwards, we rested.