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.

This one started promisingly enough, with a nice late-morning laid-back class on Noh from Teele-sensei up at the girls’ dorm. We learned about the musical notation system for Noh chanting and tried a few lines ourselves; butchered them, of course. (Insert snarky “how could you tell?” joke here. Noh is definitely an acquired taste. And I don’t expect to acquire it myself.) Then we walked around stiffly with giant fans for awhile, and concluded by buying tickets from Teele-sensei to next weekend’s big annual outdoor Noh festival at Heian shrine. That’s when I noticed that my wallet was missing.

I didn’t panic at first, as I assumed I’d just left it in my room. We went off to lunch, and then to class, where I couldn’t worry about my wallet because I was too busy having an awful time trying to learn something new and difficult from the one teacher we have who speaks absolutely no English. Why we were dropped into koicha with Ro-sensei supervising, and with no preparation at all, is beyond me.

It’s not that it’s altogether different from the usucha we’ve been doing for weeks and weeks. It’s that it’s just different enough to throw you off your game such that you start screwing up even the bits that are identical. Details to follow probably in my next post.

Traditionally, in the study of tea, if you have watched someone else being taught something, you are considered to have been taught that something yourself. I’m here to report that, at least in my case, this is a load of rubbish. I have no gift for movement, and even after paying excruciatingly close attention to three classmates’ temae, I found myself unable to replicate the procedures. (Happily, we’re not actually held to the traditional expectations; apparently these days it only really applies to the high-level apprentices who observe Oiemoto giving lessons.)

The good news is that although I got frustrated, I didn’t come as close to losing my cool as I did at the chaji the day before. I saved that for after class, when I made a thorough mess of a haigata. I’m the only person in the program, I’m sure, who’s getting worse with practice. I resisted the temptation to drive my pointy ash spoon into my thigh, but only just. Sulked off to dinner, didn’t talk to anyone else at the table, ate quickly and retreated to my room.

Where I couldn’t find my wallet. By now I had no cool left to keep. Tore the room apart, patted down every pair of pants to make sure it wasn’t in a pocket. Called Anita and asked her to check the room in which we’d had Noh class in the morning. It was being used; I’d have to stop by in a couple of hours.

I really could have used a drink, but the last of my money was missing, along with my alien registration card, American bank card, Hawaii driver license, and school ID. I distracted myself by blogging for a while, then biked up to the girls’ dorm.

Where Anita, Tanawat, and Sean had just failed to find my wallet in a thorough sweep of the room.

I went numb. Could barely think straight enough to decide on a time to check the local police station with Anita in the morning. Felt awful that she was kind enough to offer to go with me. Stumbled out the door and rode home, de-sprocketing (?) my bike’s ever-loosening chain twice on the way. Tore the room apart again and then lay down on the floor amidst the mess, staring at the wall.

I knew even at the time that my reaction was out of proportion to the incident. I’ve had to replace the contents of lost and stolen wallets more than once. (Though the language barrier would make doing it this time a particular bitch.) But something in me is out of balance, and I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t chemical, because it only comes up from time to time, and it seems to be getting worse, almost totally crippling me when I hit a really bad spell.

Eventually I pulled myself together and decided on one more careful investigation of the apartment, though I had what I thought was a fairly accurate memory of putting the wallet into my bag in the morning. I started with the pair of pants I’d worn the night before and that I’d already squeezed quite thoroughly in search of bulges. This time I actually slid my fingers into the pockets.

Where, of course, I found the damned wallet.

Made apologies to some people for my mood and went down to Lawson for a beer. Stopped by the 2nd-floor practice room on a hunch, and found Szymon helping Tanawat and Sean with their koicha practice, so I joined in and did a temae with imaginary tea and water.

Went to bed very very tired but with balance restored to the Force.

Have you ever been lectured to for an hour and a half on charcoal and ash? Because I have. Hamana-sensei gave us a thorough rundown on the various sizes of charcoal (there are two sets of around eight each, one for the furo and one slightly bigger for the ro; we cut about three when we did sumikiri a couple of weeks back) and the eleven kinds of haigata. (Seven main shapes with a few variations.) They’re categorized into three levels of formality and deployed according to what brazier you’re using and when. Not a single one of them is simple. One of the most wretchedly time consuming (but shockingly attractive) one is an “informal” rustic arrangement only usable in October, in which the basic shape I’ve been working on is covered completely with carbonized rice straws, each cut to size and set in place with tweezers. It takes hours. And nobody had better sneeze.

Afternoon practice with quiet, elegant Imagawa-sensei. He’s still trying to get me to hold my elbow properly when I lift the chasen from the bowl to examine its tines before making tea. Of course, getting me to do anything coordinated with my body is a bit Sisyphean. I haven’t even gotten the hang of folding that blasted fukusa yet. Happily, Imagawa-sensei is as patient as he is quiet and elegant.

After supper I followed Sean to a few stores but didn’t buy anything for myself beyond some inexpensive elasticized booties to wear over my tabi to keep them from getting too dirty too fast, and a new stash of iced coffee. (One of the great pleasures of this country, and a personal vice. It generally comes in cartons, lightly pre-sweetened; add your own milk.)

Then, tired beyond functioning, I poked feebly at my computer for a while before giving in to the desire for bath and bed.

Gary-sensei lectured for two periods, nominally on tea sweets. On the way to listing and describing omogashi (“main sweets” for thick tea) and higashi (“dry sweets” for thin tea) he managed to work in discourses on the differences between ritual tea offerings and footwear at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples; the fraudulent tea document called the Namporoku; and the Chinese zodiac and ancient Japanese timekeeping, among other things. The sweets themselves he explained with references to a stack of books he’d brought, flipping through the illustrated pages gluttonously and getting sidetracked, over and over exhorting himself vocally to “stop it, stop it, stop looking.”

Tea sweets come in many forms, but are alike in that they normally have no strong flavors. They should be sweet to balance the astringent taste of the tea, but should not interfere with its flavor otherwise. There are the formal manjū: steamed flour buns with sweet bean paste (an) filling. There are the soft potato-based kinton that look like Koosh balls. There are the crunchy senbei cookie-crackers; the sugar candies; the transparent kanten gelatins. There are many, many others, and wonderful, subtle variations within each kind. I understand Gary-sensei’s enthusiasm.

After lunch we filed through the side gate of Konnichian to receive our May stipend from the hands of Oiemoto. We stepped into a dim foyer we hadn’t visited before: old dark wood, high ceilings, sunlight from some past century filtering through the windows below the eaves to settle on the mysterious artifacts displayed in the room. Two doors within opened onto fluorescent modernity. One room bustled with young women in standard-issue office-lady attire; the other was Oiemoto’s office, where he received us quickly, one after the other, at the door, smiling and handing us envelopes of very welcome cash. Also he warned me not to bump my head on any low doorways.

Then we began our study of the procedure considered to be foundational to the rest of tea practice. It’s called hakobi usucha: carried-in thin tea. (The host carries everything (except brazier) required to make the tea into the room, rather than having items waiting beforehand on a little table.) Hakobi usucha takes longer than the abbreviated procedures we’ve been practicing, and is measurably more complicated, chiefly by virtue of requiring the use of the bamboo water dipper, the hishaku. What makes this tricky, besides just being elegant with the thing, is that once you’ve got it resting on the kettle, there are two different ways to pick it up and three different ways to put it down, depending on what you’re about to do or have just done with it.

My first temae was predictably ugly and much-corrected by Hamana-sensei, who also took a look at my haigata and told me to “keep at it.” Our sweets were simple but very good manjū from Oimatsu called Tokusa, for the design brushed on their surfaces: a reed once used in Japan for polishing things, if I heard correctly. We new students practiced in room 2, which has no tokonoma for scroll or flowers, but our senpais‘ toko was graced with a delicate little himeyuri flower and a two-character scroll that could be read as “peace” or “quietness” or as “nothing.” Very Zen.

I spent the first part of the evening attempting to refine my fukusa folding technique, and the second part in Szymon’s room with him, Sean, and Tanawat, talking tea.

We took a quiz this morning. The questions would have panicked me four weeks ago; now most of them seemed almost like common sense. I’ll find out tomorrow how I did on the trickier ones. (Out of what material is the hook in the tokonoma on which the scroll hangs made? a.)Metal b.)Wood c.)Bamboo d.)Rattan.)

After the quiz, we met Furiya-sensei, a young academic-looking type (that is, without the knack for shaving cleanly or wearing a necktie gracefully) who happens to actually be an academic. He’s a specialist in ceramics, and he came to tell us about the parts of a tea bowl and give us a very quick overview of the classification system for tea bowls. (Some are named according to their shape; others according to the glazing technique.) Furiya-sensei also brought show-and-tell: four impossibly valuable tea bowls (in excess of some $200,000 all told), the oldest a rough yellowish Korean chawan almost 400 years old. He insisted that we pick each up, run our fingers over every surface, appreciate the weight and thickness and glaze of each. One of the things I truly, deeply love about tea is its tactility. (Imagine my surprise at finding that “tactility” actually appears in the dictionary.) Everything is meant to be touched; in general, things aren’t appreciated from behind glass. Granted, none of the bowls we saw today will likely be used for making tea very often–not by us, certainly–but I’ll stand by my generalization. I’m amazed still that we were permitted to handle the bowls we saw today. (My favorite was the Raku chawan by the 6th-generation master, surprisingly light and warm in the hands.)

After lunch we changed into samue for an afternoon of spring cleaning. May 1st in the tea world is the day on which we change from the ro, the square hearth sunk into the tatami floor, to the furo, the portable brazier that sits slightly farther away from the guests to keep them more comfortable during the hot months. While the Japanese upperclassmen pulled the ro out of the floors and removed the ash from them, squads of other students gave the school a top-to-bottom cleaning. Midorikai worked on the second floor, wiping down tables, chairs, and floor, removing dust from ventilation grates, and cleaning windows. Because the building is cleaned so well and so often, none of this was particularly taxing, and some combination of fine spring weather and whatever was in the foamy aerosol glass cleaning spray had us all in fine, giddy moods.

Mine turned just as soon as we finished cleaning and I went to work on my haigata. I could almost swear that every time I attempt the task I get worse at it. There’s either too much ash in the furo or not enough. My angles are off, and I can’t smooth my slopes. The best advice I’ve gotten is Hamana-sensei’s recommendation to set a strict time limit for each step of the process, and to move on to each next step without obsessing over the condition of the previous. Dragging the operation out over longer than an hour doesn’t produce better results–just madness. As it was, my fifty-minute haigata almost overwhelmed me, by the end, with an impulse to drive my pointed ash scoop into my thighs. Also to break every nearby window. And scream.

I was more or less recovered by the end of supper. Knowing that I’d receive my monthly stipend the next day, I felt liberated to spend 300 of my last 2000 yen on some straw blinds and hooks at the 100-yen shop; my sheer curtains don’t keep out any light, and the sun coming through my east-facing window often wakes me up earlier than I want or need to be up some days.

I finished the day with a lesson from Szymon on how to put on and then properly fold a kimono. Once I had it on, he encouraged me to sit down on a tatami mat in his room and try some tea-preparation movements. The change in clothes may turn out to be more significant than I have been imagining; it’ll take an afternoon of practice before I’m confident to write more on the subject. We’ll make the change on Friday.

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.

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.

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.