Hamana-sensei gave us the first in a series of lectures designed to instill in us an appreciation of Japanese seasonal awareness. Today we learned about the month of May. Traditionally, the 5th or 6th of the month is considered to be the first day of summer. Many festivals related to agriculture will take place across the country, and chatsumi, the harvesting of tea, will be done just as the leaves have matured enough to be picked but are still soft and have not developed any tannins. Within hours of hand-picking, the leaves must be steamed and dried to preserve color and flavor. Then they’ll be cut small and blended; they won’t be ground into powder for many more months.

Centuries ago, when tea production required even more manual labor (the leaves were steamed in bamboo baskets in small batches and dried one by one, held over heat with chopsticks), it was fabulously expensive, and the tea fields of Uji, the source of Japan’s finest tea, were under the direct control of the shogunate. Written records from 1633 mention the Chatsubo Dōchū, the Procession of the Tea Jar, in which the shogun would demonstrate his wealth and influence by dispatching several hundred people to carry packed tea with great pomp from Uji to Edo (now Tokyo), where he resided. Commoners along the road were required to respect the great ceramic containers as they would the shogun himself, prostrating themselves and averting their eyes.

I ate udon for lunch and then went to my humiliation. Despite having achieved some rough competence with the bonryaku procedure a year ago, I might as well not ever have even seen it done before. My fingers are clumsy, my fukusa folding sloppy. I don’t keep my back and neck straight; my shoulders and arms are tense and not round enough. I can’t even remember the simple order of operations. And my knees hurt.

If that weren’t enough, I embarrassed myself by spacing out and creating extra work for a classmate. In tea, if the guest doesn’t, at a specific moment after having returned his empty bowl to the host, ask her to clean up and finish, protocol dictates that she simply make him another bowl of tea. Of course, I was guest, and was watching Nadia’s temae absentmindedly when Hamana-sensei said, unimpressed, “Looks like you’re getting another bowl of tea,” and I realized that I’d missed that specific moment. I apologized immediately, wishing I could claw my way down into the fragrant tatami and disappear, and Sensei observed that, having made the mistake, I’m much less likely to make it again. Which is how many of the best lessons are learned, which doesn’t make me like it any better.

My bad mood dogged me for the rest of the day. Teachers are beginning to wonder aloud why we’re still wearing western clothes. The reason is that we have no idea how to buy kimono, so we really need senpai to accompany us, but they’re all busy, and the shops close before we’re done with our chores. This weekend looks to be free, so we’ll likely get outfitted then; on account of my big frame and general American fatness, I’ll probably not be able to fit an affordable ready-made kimono and will have to pay dearly for a custom-tailored one. (The kimono we were measured for last week, the one the school is giving us, is to be worn for special occasions; we’re expected to buy our own practice wardrobes.)

Sean and Tanawat and I did make one last effort to clothe ourselves without help: after a supper of fish, we biked down to a department store that had been recommended to us, only to find that it stocked only a useless token selection of men’s kimono anyhow. Later Sean and I rode down to Shijō in search of a few accessories shops he’d found in a Kyoto guidebook. All we found was that his guidebook is out of date. So we declared ourselves beaten, and returned home to get some sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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