We got there by bus: a monstrous tour vehicle that pulled up in right in front of the dorm at 8:00 in the morning. Stepping onto it took me right back, for whatever reason, to my 9th-grade choir trip to Florida, though I’ve ridden many buses since then. On that one, I remember, we watched Rain Man on the video system. On that one, I remember, contemporary crush and seat-mate Carol Cruse fell asleep on my shoulder as we rolled southeast through the night, giving me a hope that she promptly dashed fewer than 48 hours later by agreeing to date a guy named Chad who shared a motel room with me and Andy Kukla and Matt Nystedt. I remember honoring someone’s late night request to sing Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” in the dark; I remember stopping on the way home at a gas station in Tennessee, where several students took the opportunity to buy illegal-in-Illinois fireworks, which choir director Jeff MacDonald confiscated and discarded, and which the students may have managed to retrieve from the trash afterwards.

I seem to have strayed from my point.

We crossed the mountains into Shiga-ken and disembarked at the shrine after perhaps a 40-minute ride. Climbed a tall stone staircase to the gate and took seats for the ceremony, which was very much like the one we attended in April, but drier. This time Oiemoto made the tea using a formal lacquered daisu with gold floral makie patterns on the corners, and a colorful Kyōyaki kaigu set decorated with pictures of willows and sakura; the futaoki had a sakura-shaped cut-out in one side. The ryūkyū-buro and kama may well have been the same ones last Thursday, and the unlacquered wood natsume, one for thick tea (with the Sen family males’ spinning top crest) and one for thin (with the Sen family females’ spiraling whirlpool) were almost certainly the ones used in April. I never got a close look at the tenmoku tea bowls, but from a distance I discerned that the one used for koicha was black, the one for usucha red. Or reddish, anyhow.

An inconvenient post stood between Oiemoto’s temae and my scrutiny, but we were assured that it was more important for us to be united with him in spirit for this solemn occasion than to study his technique. Who am I to argue? There was, of course, purifying pom-pom waving, and chanting, and much standing and sitting and bowing, and funny hats.

The day’s tea seatings took place in a modern building elsewhere on the grounds. In a great big second-floor tatami room, a staggering number of us packed ourselves onto the blue felt rugs around the perimeter to eat purple-and-white kinton flecked with tiny clear cubes of kanten and called ajisai (hydrangea), and drink tea brought in efficiently by a small army of women. No long wait in a machiai, no time wasted, minimal seiza. Big chakai can have their advantages.

On our way out, we got to take a look at the dōgu. In the tokonoma hung a scroll by Oiemoto: hōbō kore dōjō. “Every step is a training facility.” Or the other way around. More or less. I think. Flowers: yellow, purple, red. Hamana-sensei gave us their names, but they meant nothing to me and didn’t stick–except for the one with a drooping spray of leaves and one tiny bud on a long stalk. Yaburegasa, that one’s called. “Broken umbrella.” Such things I can remember. (For the same reason, I can tell you that the flowers sat in a basket called mimitsuki–”ears attached” because of the protuberances on its sides, woven by Kuroda Shōgen.)

Knowing, as you do, how I adore funny hats, imagine my delight at the incense box in the shape of a funny hat. Kanmuri, it was called. The Heian-era one with a close-to-the-head part and a long semi-flexible strip that sort of sproings off the back.

Over on the tea-making end of the room, too, there was much good stuff to appreciate. A low screen (furosakibyōbu; remind me to get into that another time) with whirlpool crest paper mounted by Okumura Kichibē. A plain wood tana called, if Szymon’s notes are to be believed, an araisōdana, a favored item of Tantansai (Urasenke 14). A ceramic furo with little demon-mask lugs for threading the lifting rings (kan) through, topped with a terrific kama of a variety favored by Sen Sōtan, called kuchishihō: four-sided mouth. As the name suggests, the mouth of the kettle projects square from the round body.

There was a Takato mizusashi just not-round enough to be interesting, with a mottled running blueish-whitish-greyish glaze: my favorite piece of the day. A very elegant natsume, lightly lacquered and decorated with a metallic design (Gold? Silver? Both? I didn’t quite get close enough.) of an old-fashioned salt-drying kiln. Chashaku by Oiemoto, named minenomatsukaze: “wind in the mountaintop pines,” or something close. A white Raku bowl with crackly glaze that I didn’t care for, and a thin-walled shallow brown one of a variety called Totoya that suited me much better.

The tabakobon sat by itself all throughout the seki, because nobody wanted to jump into the slightly-more-complicated first guest position. (Not an uncommon chakai problem.) But for the record: it was handled and kind of swoopy-curvy, and a favored item of Daisōshō, and it bore a Sometsuke copy hiire with a pattern called unryū. (“Cloud dragon.” Shows up not infrequently.)

And this is just the stuff I personally remember looking at, with additional information from the notes Szymon scribbled furiously while Hamana-sensei explained things. I could tell you much, much more if I devoted some energy to translating the complete official list we were given with identifications and makers and names of everything used. But already I imagine I’m taxing your interest.

Hang in with me a little longer; there was one more seating. Just a handful of guests for this one, all Urasenke students, seated Western-style at a long table running around a first-floor room big enough to sort of swallow us. In one corner, backed by a tall golden screen, sat a table for performing ryūrei-style tea, invented by Gengensai (Urasenke 11) for the benefit of foreign tourists at the 1872 exposition in Kyoto. As odd as it looks to me, I can’t deny that there’s a great deal to be said for sitting comfortably during tea. Though bowing properly is just impossible.

At any rate, the table, or tana, was of a kind called shunjū, favored by Daisōshō. Black shin lacquer and thick red knotted ropes as accents. It looked to me rather like a prop from some Victorian magic show; I half expected the teishu to materialize some doves or ask for somebody to volunteer to be sawed in half. On one end of the table, in a recessed brazier, sat a shajikugama, a kama named for a wheel axle, for reasons that this particular specimen didn’t make entirely clear. On the other end sat a truly unique mizusashi: it was made of ceramic but looked almost like marble, and was a straight-sided but irregular pentagon. Or whatever you call a pentagon extended into three dimensions.

Really really tasty dry sweets were served on a set of gold and silver lacquered trays that commemorated the current Iemoto’s elevation to Iemoto. There were rolled-and-cut sugar sweets, green leaves that tasted somehow like baked senbei, and gemlike chunks of crisp-shelled, gel-centered translucent candy. The kaiki, the official list of dōgu and such, doesn’t do much to clarify the sweets’ names. Nor do Japanese poetic naming conventions. Something was called aobanotsuyu–”green leaf’s dew.” Then, in parentheses: aokaede hanakōri. “Young maple flower ice.” Two names for one sweet? Which sweet? Two different sweets? Then why parentheses? Anyhow, you get the idea, I imagine.

The teishu and the hantō did their things and we did ours, and then we went up to haiken the dōgu. Tea bowl 1: extremely wide and shallow, glazed with two shades of green in a technique called kakewake, wherein the two glazes meet in a sharp line somewhere midway along the bowl. Tea bowl 2: There was a second tea bowl. I looked at it. It didn’t stick. Tea bowl 3: Other people tell me that there was a third tea bowl. I can confirm that there was, in fact, a futaoki: a tripod of three colorful porcelain bells. Called sanrei. (“Three bells.” Not everything has to be called something like “green wind of the mountaintop pine dew.” Thankfully.) Whether or not they’d actually jingle if shaken, I’d like to know. They ought to, by rights.

The natsume was of a type favored by Nintokusai (Urasenke 10). Black lacquer with a willow design, this one executed by the 7th-generation Sōtetsu (1799-1846). The chashaku, named tamagaki, had been carved by the chief priest of Ōmi Jingū.

Being a modern Western-style room, the hall had no tokonoma, but on the screen behind the teishu hung a flower arrangement and a senmen–instead of a scroll, a fan bearing calligraphy. This one, too, had been written by Oiemoto, and read koshō chitose no iro: “the color of a thousand year-old pine,” I’ll venture. The flowers were…flowers. And very pretty and nicely arranged in what was apparently Shigaraki ceramic but looked to me like a gourd with a hole cut in it. Way cool.

So with non-exhausted legs we returned to the second floor for lunch, which was obentō from someplace famous, in styrofoam boxes made to imitate wood, grain and all. All very tasty, but the little ayu fish lying whole across the top, grimacing blindly, unnerved me just slightly. I tore his head off and ate most of the rest of him.

We got back onto the bus then and took advantage of already being far afield to visit the Monkey Temple. (Properly, Saikyōji–but my version’s funnier, and that’s almost the only way I measure things anymore.) An important but not often visited complex, Saikyōji sits weathered and solemn on the mountainside it’s occupied for something like 800 years. It may be the first outpost of Tendai Buddhism in Japan, or I may be mis-reporting. At any rate, we entered the central hall as the sky darkened and thunder echoed through the hills, and as we sat on red felt carpets while a priest talked history in Japanese, a proper storm broke outside.

It was eerie: the thunderstorm, the large shadowy room filled with heavy carved wood and glittering gold ornament and a giant statue of the Buddha, and the periodic sounding of a struck bell. They say that the bell has been rung continuously for 500 years, and that when the war drove the priests from the temple for safety, a monkey came down from the mountains, entered the hall, and assumed bell-ringing duties. A carved statue of said monkey wearing priestly vestments that sits in the hall is said to have healing powers; rub the afflicted part of your own body and the corresponding part of Monkey-sama’s anatomy, and good will come of it. Another statue, this one of a human (?) whose name I didn’t catch, is supposed to work similarly, but we were warned to do things in the right order: touch your own affliction and then leave it with the statue by rubbing. Rub the statue first, and you’ll bring afflictions upon yourself. Unless you rub its head and then your own, in which case you’ll acquire some of its wisdom or some such.

I personally rubbed no statues.

We took a quick tour of the rest of the complex: rainy views of an ancient jagged cemetery; exquisite little gardens of rock and moss and plants and ponds; old statues and various historical artifacts that I didn’t really pay any attention to. Mythical Japan realized in the physical universe. Doing stuff like this while playing dress-up in kimono heightens the effect.

But then of course there’s a bus to get back on and a city to get back to. And dinner and cleaning and literally hours of writing that still don’t get you entirely caught up, and a very late study session for the morning quiz on shozumi that you seriously don’t expect to do well on at all, and the room is a mess and you still haven’t folded kimono or hakama or written the thank-you letter to Oiemoto but you’ll just have to set the alarm for early in the morning and do it then, which is why you probably shouldn’t have a beer right now but MAN does it sound good, and you wonder why you ever thought that keeping a journal of this year was a good idea, and you hope that it turns out some day to have been worth the time and effort. Hamana-sensei keeps saying it will, anyhow.

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.