Classes today were held in the practice facility on the second floor of the women’s dorm, which contains one very large room (dozens of mats; the largest standard tea room has eight) and a 4.5-mat room in one elevated corner, open on two sides to the rest of the hall. Our morning lecture was on Noh theater: an elderly American expatriate who performs with a Noh school here in Kyoto walked us through some of the basic postures and movements, which of course are very stylized, awkward, and difficult, and nothing at all like the way we carry ourselves in the tea room.

After a fish lunch, we continued our bonryaku practice, today with Imagawa-sensei, who patiently attempted to get me to sit up straight while keeping my arms and shoulders relaxed. At least I was more confident with the basic order of the procedure than I was yesterday, and for some mysterious reason, my knees held up comparatively well all afternoon. We had beautiful sweets called sakuramochi: soft and sticky pebbled balls of translucent pink mochi wrapped in fragrant green leaves. The slender hanging bamboo flower vase held a little red tsubaki bud and an elegant twig of yukiyanagi studded with tiny white blossoms. All in all, it was a lovely afternoon–our most enjoyable and encouraging practice so far–and I bounced up to do my chores in a mood as merry as yesterday’s was morose.

Supper featured a breaded fried egg. Later, Sean and Szymon and I sat down together to have a beer and study a bit. Unfortunately, before we got to the studying part of our plan, Almerindo knocked on the door with beer of his own, the conversation ran wild, and Szymon ended up producing a dangerous succession of liquors from his personal stash. Innocent little tastes in sufficient quantity lost their innocence, and we all stumbled off to bed in conditions most unsuitable for a school night.

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.

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.