Hlwatsch-sensei made an appearance to continue his survey of the history of Japan, addressing this time roughly the same era as last time, but from a different angle. Previously, we learned about the first importation, adoption, and rejection of Christianity; today we got the story of the consolidation of power in Japan under Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.

After lunch: flower-induced panic. If I haven’t mentioned it before: I’m terrified of arranging the flowers for the tea room. I feel like everyone else is able to look at the flowers and see things I can’t. By now the fear is just feeding itself, of course: I go into the task with an attitude that ensures I won’t be able to perform it. This time the attitude was compounded by my having somehow gotten behind schedule. Anita had to step in to do the arrangement in one of our two practice rooms, and Tanja had to help me finish the one I’d started, while reminding me to breathe deep and try to relax.

Then on to shozumi disaster. I’d only had time and energy enough the night before to practice either charcoal or tea, and I’d chosen tea. That might have been a mistake. Having watched Nadja do shozumi the previous day, I blithely volunteered to give it a go this time around. As I’ve written before, I can watch a process very closely and still be completely unable to replicate it; I have to physically do a thing to learn it. So Hamana-sensei, his patience sorely tried, had to talk me point by point through the charcoal-laying procedure.

You may be curious about exactly what’s involved. Or not; I’ll describe it anyhow.

Before a tea function gets underway, the host places three burning lengths of charcoal called shitabi (“under-fire”) in the furo (or ro, depending on season), and then sets the kama atop it. After the guests are seated, the host brings in a basket containing a particular selection of charcoal pieces, metal chopsticks for handling the charcoal, metal rings for lifting the kama, a cluster of three large feathers bound together for dusting the furo and kama, and the incense box. He sets the basket down and makes another trip out of the room for a basin containing a pile of white ash that supports an ash spoon. Then, as methodically as he’ll make the tea, he produces from the front of his kimono a thick folded pad of white paper and sets it on the tatami; he lifts the kama off of the furo and sets it on the paper; he dusts the rim of the furo with the feathers; he adds charcoal and uses the ash spoon to cut a tiny divot out of the front of the furo’s ash (I haven’t learned the significance of this yet); he dusts again; he adds incense and dusts yet again; he replaces the kama and dusts it; and he takes the basket and basin away, leaving the incense box for the guest’s inspection.

Done well, this is all very impressive–especially after you’ve tried manipulating charcoal with big metal chopsticks yourself. Of course, I didn’t do it well at all on my first try. Not to worry: I won’t lack opportunities to refine my technique.

With the fire going (or on its way to going, we hoped) properly, we moved on to tea. Everything we’ve done up until now has been foundational; now we begin tackling a set of sixteen procedures called the konarai: “small learning.” The first is kinindate: a method for serving tea to a person of noble rank. Needless to say, opportunities to use it practically rarely come up, but Rikyū wanted his students to learn it early so that they’d be able to treat all guests as if they were nobility. Kinindate uses a tana, a tea bowl on an unlacquered wooden stand, and a special pedestal for serving sweets; the guest sits on the “highest” tatami–usually reserved in our practices for teachers’ use; and a hantō (helper) shuttles the tea bowl and dōgu for haiken between the host and guest.

Since I’d started the afternoon by doing sumidemae, I didn’t get to try kinindate until everyone else had done it, by which point my legs were no longer playing nice. Happily, since the temae isn’t so different from the tana usucha we’d done previously, I didn’t make too abhorrent a mess of my first attempt.

The weather was cool and cloudy but without any threat of rain, so Noh was back on the schedule. I cleaned tatami in a hurry and bolted my supper, then changed clothes and hopped a train to Heian Shrine with Anita and Almerindo. We approached the enormous complex from the south, walking beneath the immense red torī straddling the street, and walked through the gate into a sizable crowd. The large gravel courtyard had been given over to the two days of performances: chairs on risers at the back, chairs on the ground to the sides, low platforms covered with blue felt in the middle–closer to the action, but less comfortable, so more available. At the north end, an open Noh stage, the top of its framework fluttering with folded strips of Shinto-paper. On the ground surrounding the stage, wood fires burned in iron baskets on stands, constantly tended by priests.

We arrived late, just as the evening’s second play was concluding. There was a shuffling of spectators and we were able to find ourselves some space on one of the blue platforms; we left our shoes on the ground and hunkered on down. A kyōgen comedy began. Like all the presentations on this year’s program (The 59th annual “Takigi Noh” function), it was a tribute to The Tale of Genji; some of the plays were traditional Noh-repertoire adaptations of episodes from the novel, but this was an original piece. Two Heian playboys competing for one woman, who turns out to be an ancient crone. Funny despite my not understanding the dialogue.

The sky darkened by and by, leaving the performers in the light of electric bulbs and the constantly-stoked fire baskets. We ate chocolate and senbei as the final play of the evening began. Genji’s lover (Wife? Do I care?) lies gravely ill; a shaman and a priest are called in to heal her. The source of her affliction turns out to be one of Genji’s former lovers, so jealous that her living spirit has possessed and sickened the New Woman. In the end, the spirit appears in frightening demonic guise and does battle with the old priest, whose only apparent weapon is a string of prayer beads that he rubs vigorously, desperately between his palms. Contrary to my expectations, this seems to do the trick in the end.

Since this was Noh, of course, all of the above took an incredibly long time while performers declaimed in funny voices and moved very slowly. I can’t claim to have enjoyed it, exactly, but I was glad to have gone. Pretty costumes, an ancient art form worth seeing at least once just to say you have, and a perfect setting: the cool night, the primal roaring fires, the buildings of the shrine otherworldly at the edge of the dancing light.

And then once again back to the century in progress, onto a train and up an elevator and into bed.

Hang on–that’s not how the day started. We actually began with a quiz on which I did respectably but not outstandingly. For that I’ll go ahead and blame Ro-sensei. Nice as he is–and, of course, knowledgeable–the language barrier keeps him from imparting to us much in the way of facts of the kind that I needed to know for the quiz. Ah, well–these don’t go on our permanent record or anything.

Hlawatsch-sensei covered the early history of Christianity in Japan, from the arrival of the Jesuits in the mid-16th century to the expulsions, exterminations, and forced re-conversions that virtually extinguished the faith here a century later.

My supervisory duties went smoothly in the afternoon before and after practice. In between, we practiced more with the sugidana, which I’ve quickly grown to dislike, and here’s why. Failing an experienced sense of touch with the sliding middle shelf, the only way to put it where you want it is to look at it, which is impossible for anyone in the class, regardless of size, to do without hunching over and craning his or her neck in a most unbecoming fashion. And I don’t see how mastering the thing blindfolded would be worth the effort. The real point of the practice was to play around with various futaoki, kettle lid rests, on which we also set the hishaku from time to time. For hakobi temae, the futaoki should be plain bamboo, but with a tana, it should be anything but. (Exception: if the bamboo lid rest has an iemoto’s ciper on it.) So they can be metal or glass or ceramic or what have you, and certain shapes have certain rules governing their use and display. Fun fun fun.

Being Dude to Whom the Buck Might Be Passed means you don’t have to do any cleaning or anything afterwards, so I relaxed, had supper, and spent another evening failing to get to the bottom of my to-do pile. I would have made more progress than I did, but a script arrived for my perusal: the predetermined dialogs in which I’d have to participate during the next day’s chaji. I studied until bedtime, and dropped off feeling apprehensive.

Sean and I had heard that besides soaking, walking may do knees some good, so we left the dorm early and headed east toward a large swath of trees I’d seen from the roof of the building. The rain had returned overnight; this round will probably finish stripping the sakura bare. Twenty wet minutes of walking brought us to the walls of the vast park surrounding the old imperial palace. One look at a map posted at one of the entrances told us that we would be able to so much as circumnavigate it in the time we had, so we cut through its shorter length on a broad tree-lined path before returning to the dorm resolved to revisit the park and palace at leisure during better weather.

Anita and I were responsible today for the journal and the flowers. The journal records student absences, morning lecture content, and information on the afternoon’s practice: what was done and with which natsume, flower container, scroll, etc. Even the maker of the day’s sweets and their name gets preserved in the journal. (Yesterday’s sweets were steamed balls of dough filled with bean paste and decorated with a smudge of green representing grass and two horizontal streaks representing mist; they were called harugasumi: “spring mist.”)

Hamana-sensei lectured during first period on the role of fire in tea. He gave us a brief history of the fires that have ravaged Kyoto through the centuries, including the one in the late 18th century that destroyed much of Konnichian, the old Sen family compound. Two main buildings survived that fire; the legend has it that an ichō (ginkgo) tree planted by Sen Sōtan dropped its leaves to smother the fire threatening those buildings. Ever since, the ichō leaf has been the emblem of Urasenke.

Taoist cosmology, which came to Japan some 1500 years ago, considers fire one of the five elements of the universe. The influence of that model is memorialized in many of the implements and procedures of tea that were developed to subtly balance wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. These things are no longer thought to be particularly important as such, but we do still revere and respect fire for its simple, crucial role in heating the water for tea and for its intimate, comforting psychological effect on those who gather around a glowing hearth.

Hamana-sensei’s second-period lecture concerned mizuya design and philosophy. As the place of preparation for the making of tea, the mizuya must be clean, orderly, and well-organized; we say that to see a tea person’s mizuya is to see the reality of his spirit. Hamana-sensei insists, in fact, that the preparation area is just as important, if not more so, than the tea room itself. He followed his theoretical discourse with photographs and names of a great number of implements I’ll be expected to recall in the near future. I am hoping it won’t be the very near future. Finally Sensei demonstrated his favorite way to fill a natsume, subtly different and clearly better than what Szymon showed us on Saturday, and shaped fine ash in a bowl with his haisaji to show us what we’ll be learning next week.

After cleaning the classroom (another student task; Urasenke employs no custodial service, in fact), I had soba noodles with seaweed for lunch before dashing back to the practice rooms to help Anita arrange flowers. Following traditional Japanese home design, every tea room contains an alcove for displaying precious things: the tokonoma. A tea room’s alcove will always have two things on display: a wall hanging, often a scroll with a poetic phrase executed in flowing calligraphy; and a simple (but extremely deliberate) arrangement of flowers. One Anita had selected a small bud, a leafy twig, and a vase, and arranged them more or less to her satisfaction, we misted the arrangement with water to create a fresh spring feeling before practice started.

We new students met a new teacher today: Imagawa-sensei, a soft-spoken, gentle, and infinitely kind and patient young man who revisited everything we’d been learning from Hamana-sensei to further refine our postures and movements. We sat down, stood up, turned, walked in circles around the room. (The feet lightly scuff the tatami and each other to create a pleasant sound; the back and neck are held straight, ears above shoulders and nose aligned with chest; a full length of tatami should take four steps to cross.) We folded and refolded our fukusa, purified and re-purified our natsume and chashaku.

The best I can report concerning my knees is that I am quite obviously not alone in my distress. Although I do have a twinge in my right knee that feels like some residual injury, probably from the marathon training I did in the fall, it doesn’t seem to be getting any worse; the general blinding pain I’ve been feeling in both knees after sitting in the seiza posture for some minutes is afflicting us all. Assuming things continue in this wise, then, if I wash out of the program, we all wash out. Which probably means that all of us will get to stay, just learning to endure pain.

Anita and I completed our journal, put away our flower paraphernalia, ran home to change, and met again to clean the third-floor bathrooms. Then we met the others for dinner: fried fish and tonkatsu. (And the inevitable miso soup and rice and tea and various little pickles and salads and sides.)

There lives nearby an elderly retired Urasenke teacher whose joy in life now, it seems, is to give a free calligraphy lesson each week to Midorikai students. Virtually the whole group has been visiting him every Thursday for months now; they say he lights up to have the company. As much as I like to make people happy, and as much as I’d like to learn calligraphy, and as much as I hate to be the odd man out, though, I had to pass on the activity this time, at least. I was two and a half days behind in writing this account, and I have on my hard drive a fearsome amount of raw video that isn’t editing itself. And though I truly do hate being the odd man out, I also thought a break from this group of nine in which I spend virtually all of my waking moments might not be an altogether bad thing. So I stayed home and wrote, and did laundry, and even got a bit of that video cut. And then there was the bath, and after that, bed.