Before we got to see it, though, we sat down with the abbot of the temple to enjoy sweets and tea and to try (and not necessarily enjoy) the foodstuff called Daitokuji nattō, which tastes pungent and looks like rabbit droppings. The abbot lectured to us on the importance of good posture and deep breathing, especially at Zuihōin, where, he said, the air is particularly healthful and free for the breathing. He observed that if getting to the point of life is pictured as climbing a mountain, modern distractions have us making a slow tack back and forth on the slope rather than a straight and efficient ascent. He encouraged us to value silence and posture and breathing and focus on what’s important. Nice guy. After our visit we split into two groups; the first went straight into the replica tea room while my group sat on a porch and contemplated a dramatic rock garden of angular boulders and course gravel raked into steep waves. Then the groups traded places.

Cleverly, I think, the builders of the reconstruction decided not to slavishly copy the existing Taian but rather to work from Rikyū’s plans for the original. Thus the replica has a walled-in front garden; an antechamber window higher and smaller than one in the original; a wider tokonoma. We entered the room not from the garden but through the mizuya. Remarkably, five of us plus Hamana-sensei squeezed onto the two mats while a monk sat in the antechamber and explained the room to us.

Besides its dollhouse proportions, the thing I found most notable about Taian and its copy was how dark they are. After bright and breezy Jakuan in Hawaii, many of the tea rooms I’ve visited here seem dim places; tiny Taian in particular is a box of shadows. The walls in the replica are darker even than those in the original: plaster rubbed with (if I recall correctly) oil and soot to quickly given them an appearance of great age. The overall effect of the room is remarkable. Intimate, weathered, humble, quieting.

We hurried back to school to prepare for the afternoon; because of the field trip, we hadn’t done any of the things we usually do in the morning before class. I sifted tea in an uncomfortable hurry, realized that I’d left the towels I’d washed the night before in my room, sent Sean back to the dorm with my key to retrieve them–bless his heart for being willing. Bolted lunch and set up for another round of kinin kiyotsugu on the 3rd floor, where the pleasant breeze made a mess of the natsume I was attempting to fill neatly; we had to close the window and suffer. Later, as the breeze became a rather violent wind, we had to slide windows in the main room shut, too. By the end of practice, it seemed that everyone was happy for the afternoon and the week to be over. We 1-As in particular were all having worse-than-usual knee issues, and it was a great relief to clean up and stagger home.

Szymon had promised to buy us a Friday night pizza if Poland’s soccer team won its match against Germany. The game ended in a 1-1 draw after a penalty shot in the last minute. Szymon decided to buy the pizza anyhow, so the usual four (two months ago, Sean and I together was the norm; a month ago Szymon had made it a usual three; now Tanawat is party to most of our adventures; Almerindo is…a long story) took a late walk down the street to Domino’s.

Now, stateside I don’t generally consider Domino’s a viable pizza option–too many better pies are so readily available. But none of us has the Japanese skills to confidently order over the phone, which limited us to shops within walking distance, which radically narrowed the field. We decided on an American-style pizza; Japan’s corn-and-mayo concoctions aren’t without charm, but neither are they really pizzas by my standards. So pepperoni and sausage it was. We stood around while the pie was made for us, walked it home and elevatored it to the roof, and broke crust together. And verily I say unto you, after over two pizza-free months and under these odd circumstances, it was one of the best pizzas of my life. Sean and I agreed that it was, in fact, objectively better than American Domino’s–it had better have been, for the price–but really it was having a convincingly American flavor on a Japanese rooftop on a (chilly) summer night that made it so memorable.

Today we met Hamana-sensei at the subway station and rode just out of town to Ōyamazaki, where there is a temple, where there is a tea house. The temple, Myōkian, is a relatively unremarkable thing just across the street from the train station. The tea house, Taian, hidden within its walls is a treasure. Literally: a government-recognized National Treasure, one of only three wabi-style tea rooms to be so designated. Rikyū built it originally near Yamazaki castle in 1582 at Hideyoshi’s command; later it was moved to its present home.

I’m not yet up to attempting–if I ever will be–a discourse of the wabi aesthetic, but you do need to understand that before Rikyū and his teacher and his teacher’s teacher, tea was something done by rich people in elegant rooms with expensive utensils. By the time Rikyū offed himself at Hideyoshi’s command, a new aesthetic had been refined that valued simplicity and the appearance, at least, of poverty. One manifestation of the shift was a shrinking of the tea room itself as it came to resemble a rustic grass hut rather than the older formal shoin rooms in which tea had previously been enjoyed. Taian is the oldest surviving specimen of the grass-hut style, and it is about as small as a space can be while permitting adult human beings (even the smallish sort who lived in Japan 400 years ago) to function at all within.

Tea rooms are measured in tatami mats. The smallest rooms used regularly are four and a half mats in size. If you’re not familiar with tatami, this probably doesn’t mean much to you. How about this: I’m just a few centimeters longer than a tatami mat, and a little over half as wide. A 4.5-mat room isn’t a cramped space, but it’s definitely cozy.

Taian has just two mats. It almost looks like a scale model of a tea room. The ro, cut into the corner of the room in the sumiro configuration, is 3.3 centimeters smaller than a standard ro. I couldn’t stand upright under the lowest sections of the ceiling. But I wouldn’t know that for sure until the next day, when we visited a replica of Taian; we weren’t allowed to enter the real thing. At Myōkian we had to appreciate the tea room from the outside.

Besides the two mats in the room proper, Taian has a one-mat mizuya on its north end and a one-mat antechamber on its west side, connecting to the two-mat room. (The antechamber’s floor is made a hand-span wider by a wooden floor panel along the far (west) side of the mat.) Thus, the whole entire structure could theoretically be nested within a 4.5-mat room. Unreal.

Taian’s walls are warairi, plaster with visible embedded straw. The tokonoma is low, narrow, and shallow, its interior corners plastered over in the murodoko style. Its size won’t even admit the hanging of a standard ichigyō scroll. The ceiling has three separate sections: level above the host’s entrance and in front of the toko, a sharp angle meeting a vertical rise in a peak above the middle of the room, making it a less potentially claustrophobia-inducing space.

The north end of the hut abuts one of Myōkian’s other structures, allowing us a glimpse into the mizuya, which seems a fancy name for a one-mat space with a few suspended shelves in one corner, and no water (mizu) or even drain. Outside, I wedged my gaijin monster-feet halfway into a pair of plastic slippers and minced along a stone path around the outside. Small windows on the west side admit light into the mizuya and antechamber. (A word, by the way, which invariably sends my mind many, many years back to the place I learned it: a book in my parents’ collection on the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen. As a child I’d flip through it in fascination, always with the horrified knowledge that I’d land finally on the photo in the back of the boy king’s desiccated, unswaddled head. I didn’t want to see it; I couldn’t not look. That ancient lipless grimace had me terrified that mummies lurked beneath my bed and in my closet. Raiders of the Lost Ark didn’t help with that, either. Ahem.)

Taian is (well, was, I guess) entered from the south side. Its roof of thick cedar shingles overhangs the front for protection; apparently Rikyū’s original drawings (and possibly original structure near Yamazaki castle) specified a walled garden enclosure around the front, but at Myōkian there’s just a short open stretch to the nearby temple wall, overgrown with greenery. A large, low window allows more light into the antechamber, and here’s an opportunity for interesting construction-related trivia: one of the kinds of tea room windows possible is this kind, the shitajimado, or “understructure window.” The walls of the building are woven out of slender lengths of bamboo and/or I don’t know what else, and then plastered over. A window can be created in any shape, size, and location simply by not plastering there; no structural complications, and a neat aesthetic effect with the exposed latticework.

To the right (east) of the big shitajimado is the nijiriguchi, the crawl-in entrance, beneath another large window, a renjimado of vertical bamboo bars. The nijiriguchi is larger than the standard size; its sliding wood door seems to have been cut from a larger shutter-like amado in an early experiment by Rikyū. We crouched to peer (and take forbidden photographs!) through the nijiriguchi, careful not to bump our knees on the fumiishi, the large stone on which to step up out of your sandals before sliding into the room. What we saw inside, I’ve basically already described. Small, dark, somber. And did I mention small?

On the east side of the room are two more windows, set in curious relation to each other in demonstration of Rikyū’s aesthetic sense, which prized asymmetry. A non-structural post on the hut’s exterior cuts vertically across the end third of one of the windows without apparent reason. In the garden outside grows a pine tree descended from one apparently planted by Rikyū himself. Hamana-sensei had a funny name for it that referred to how expensive it is to keep properly pruned; I’m sure he’ll remind me of what it was when he reads over this account. The current tree’s parent, dead since I’m not sure when, has been carved into tea scoops: for about $350, you can take home a piece of tea history. Wood from the descendant of a tree planted by this one guy next to a hut! I mock gently, but if I’d had 35000 spare yen, you’d better believe I would have taken one of those chashaku home with me.

For 500 yen you can buy agonizingly detailed architectural drawings of Taian with precise measurements listed, I guess so that you can build your own reproduction, though you have to be an old and wise and experienced master of tea before you can use a two-mat room without being presumptuous, and anyhow, if you were going to build a tea room, wouldn’t you want to make it your own? And bigger just for practicality’s sake?

Back to Kyoto and into kimono. Lunch and then practice. Today: a variation on kinindate called kinin kiyotsugu. A temae for when a V.I.P. shows up with his posse. You serve the kinin his sweets on the fancy-pants stand and his tea in the fancy-pants bowl as usual, and serve sweets and tea for his honorable companion in separate, lower-ranked vessels. You even use a separate chasen of dark smoked bamboo and a separate chakin folded in a different manner for the companion, because kinin stuff is for the kinin alone. (A fun part to take in practice, by the way, since you don’t have to do so much as slide to get your own bowl of tea; other people do all the “work” for you.)

Also we started work on gozumi, the second laying of charcoal in a chaji. Very similar to shozumi. Maybe similar enough to be more confusing. The biggest difference is that the host adds water to the kettle as part of the procedure, to replenish what’s been used since the first charcoal-laying.

The evening’s entertainment consisted of nursing sore legs and washing towels and chakin (homework for whoever’s assigned to fire detail on a given day).

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.

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.