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.

Anita and I were on mizuya-cha detail today: cha being the Japanese word for tea, as in chadō, the Way of Tea. We sifted the fine, vibrant green powders for making thin and thick tea before lecture began, and then listened to Gary-sensei describe the basic outline of a full chaji. It takes something like four hours and involves a good deal of cooking as well as the preparation of the tea itself. Gary-sensei managed to work into this account innumerable tangents on subjects like the defining characteristics of Shino ceramics, the story of the severed head of the statue of Rikyū, and the tendency of tea people to present relatively recent innovations in the art as ancient practices.

Lunch: tendon. (As in tempura over rice, not as in tendon.) Then Anita and I learned that we’d made a mistake: we were supposed to be taking care of fire today, not tea. We hurried to the school kitchen and stacked three little cylinders of charcoal (carefully chosen and cut to uniform size) in a perforated iron pan called the hiokoshi and set them on the stove to ignite while we preheated water for the kettle. When the charcoal was ready, we set the hiokoshi into its slightly larger companion pan, the (non-perforated) daijūnō, and carried it to the room in which it was needed, calling out the warning “Hi ga tōrimasu”–fire coming through. Anita arranged the charcoal in the ro hearth sunk into the floor of the room; I won’t be allowed to handle fire myself until I’ve been here for a month.

The new students were taught today by Ro-sensei, a teacher from China who speaks Japanese but no English. Like Imagawa-sensei yesterday, he asked us to demonstrate what we’ve learned so far, and made small corrections as we went. He paid special attention to the procedures for entering and leaving the tea room. To enter, you sit just outside the door with your sensū on the floor in front of you. After apologizing to the guest behind you for being ahead of him, you move your fan across the threshold before dragging yourself into the room. You pick up your fan and rise to cross to the tokonoma, where you sit again and bow in respect to the scroll’s calligrapher, observe the scroll and flower, and bow again.

When moving through a tea room, you have to remember that it has “high” and “low” ends, reckoned by two overlapping planes of respect. The side of the room on which the guests sit is higher than the host’s side, and the end of the room on which the host makes tea is higher than the end from which he enters. When rising to move “down” the room, you lift your left knee from the tatami before your right knee, and when walking, you cross onto every successive mat with the left foot first. So when leaving the tokonoma you walk “down” the room before turning 45 degrees on your way to observing the kettle. Because the kettle is “up,” you have to make the turn in three steps rather than the usual two so that your right foot will lead into the next tatami. After observing the kettle, you make your way to your seat. (To leave the room, you reverse the procedure.) At every point in this little routine, too, you and the guests before and behind you need to be aware of each other’s positions and movements, so that more than one of you can be in the room at the same time without colliding.

Bear in mind that these are some of the easier things about doing tea.

Ro-sensei showed us only one new thing: the proper handling of the chasen, the bamboo whisk used to mix the powdered tea and hot water. Before making tea, the host lifts it twice from the bowl, giving it a half turn each time, inspecting it before the guest(s) to ensure that it’s clean and in good repair. It would not do to have happen what actually did happen to me during our break for tea later: one of the chasen’s tines broke off when I was whisking, and I didn’t know it until I was washing the empty bowl later and saw the sliver of bamboo stuck to the bottom. (In my defense, the chasen in question was a battered old one reserved for practice, already missing tines and no doubt weakened by years of abuse.) Our sweets for the day looked like small green and pink Koosh balls.

We finished practice a little early and finished our chores as quickly as we could. (Happily, the tatami in the third-floor practice hall doesn’t have to be cleaned on Fridays.) Then we freshened up briefly at the dorm and hopped a cab for the Rubino Horikawa Hotel, where we had yet another in the sequence of beginning-of-semester events. This one was a “welcome dinner” for students and office workers. After indulging in the generously stocked buffet (sashimi, sushi, fried rice, spicy pasta with bacon and spinach, coffee and cake, et a whole lot of cetera), each of the 70-odd students in attendance stepped up to the microphone on the stage at the end of the room and gave a brief self-introduction. Hamana-sensei asked Midorikai to please attempt ours in Japanese; everyone managed at least his or her name and a polite “Dōzo yoroshiku onegai shimasu” except for poor shy Verena, who mumbled her name and “I don’t speak Japanese, so…” before retreating. I tried to get a little fancy and no doubt sounded ridiculous, but I at least got a gratifying murmur of female interest when I told the crowd I’d worked at Disneyland. (Tanja tells Sean and I that we new foreign boys have, in fact, been quite the topic of conversation for the girls at Urasenke this past week.) It was fun to see the rest of the students outside the quiet, sober bounds of the school; the second and third-year kids in particular were much transformed, all loud energy and inside jokes. Hopefully our self-introductions will get some of the Japanese students to start to talk to us. Even after just a week, the Midorikai world is starting to feel a little small.

With no need to get up early the next morning, Sean and I saw no reason why a certain amount of beer shouldn’t be consumed, so we devoted the rest of the evening to that noble pursuit.

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.

All the new students assembled in a second-floor classroom to wait. Seating was assigned; name tags were set out on the tables. These are long narrow clips of white plastic read vertically. We Midorikai students in our Western clothes hung ours on suit pockets, but the rest of the room were in kimono and so wore their name tags on their obi. For about fifty minutes we sat quietly, anxiously. Every so often a wrangler would appear to issue further instructions in Japanese. Tanawat is good enough with the language that he was able to assure us that none of the information was mission-critical.

We lined up in the hall outside shortly before the ceremony was to begin, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and entered the assembly room there to a long round of unbroken applause from administrators, teachers, parents, and second and third-year students. When all the new students had filed down the center of the room to find their seats, the Opening Ceremony began with the first of many bows in unison. Backs straight, fingertips reaching for knees, we slowly folded ourselves over to a slow mental count of three, held the position for three more, and rose to a final three. The room turned then in the direction of “Tea Mecca” (Hamana-sensei’s term)–a statue of Sen no Rikyū, who first codified our art and to whom the three major schools of tea practicing today trace their lineage–and recited a pledge to aspire to the highest standards and noblest ideas while doing tea in the Urasenke tradition.

Oiemoto, soft-spoken but imposing in his black kimono, gave a speech in which (Hamana-sensei paraphrased later) he compared us all to the flowers of the sakura. Now we are mere buds, but with diligence we may blossom. Presumably he went on to say something about the falling of the petals and transience–he is a Buddhist priest as well as a man of tea–but that’s just my guess.

There were more speeches and more bows, I executed my role in the proceedings without embarrassing myself impossibly, and suddenly we Midorikai students were lined up in the second-floor hallway again, waiting to receive our monthly stipend from the hand of Oiemoto himself. We were beckoned into his office as a group, and one by one were handed each an envelope containing a generous amount of cash in uncirculated bills–the Japanese don’t give each other dirty used money on formal occasions. I had been feeling relieved that bowing is the customary greeting in Japan, because my nervous hands were bloodless and cold; naturally, Oiemoto had to shake mine while welcoming me to Japan in English. I managed a bit of Japanese and tried very hard to exude genuine high-octane gratitude. And that was it. Until next month, and the next envelope.

It had begun to rain sometime during the ceremony; loaner umbrellas were located and we were herded over to a tea room somewhere to drink a bowl with a large-ish group of new students’ parents. The okashi–sweets that always precede tea to balance the drink’s bitterness–were the most remarkable I’ve ever seen: spongy cakes shaped like sakura leaves, delicately colored pink and white and touched with gold leaf at what would be the tree end. As I drank my tea, I listened to the rain on the roof and remembered that my first visit to a teahouse, my dear Jakuan at the University of Hawaii, where all this began, was on a rainy day. Ever since then, rain has been my favorite weather for tea, and I took it as a good sign that my first day of school at Urasenke should echo my first glimpse of this refined world.

Next we were allowed a brief, precious glimpse of Konnichian. Many times already I’ve bowed toward the “helmet gate.” Today we walked through it into a green garden glistening wet. We followed the curving path to the house, over three centuries old, and stepped out of our shoes and into history. Attendants pointed the way through the labyrinth of low, dim hallways, and we ducked our heads as we followed a carpet of green felt rolled out along the tatami to a tiny room containing only a shrine, perceived vaguely in the shadows, to the memory of Rikyū. We sat down and pulled ourselves respectfully across the threshold on our knees, had our moment with the dead, and then returned to the modern world–or as close to it as we get in around here.

It was good that our bowing muscles were warmed up, because more formal introductions awaited us at various points throughout the rest of the day: the staffs of two different offices, Sekine-san, who apparently has much to do with appropriating the budget for our little Midorikai program, and the cook in charge of the shokudō, who invited anyone in possession of a recipe from his or her own country that could serve 80 to send it along.

Lunch was provided in the second-floor classroom where our day began. We were treated to terribly elegant obentō (boxed lunches) from some not cheap place. Each large lacquered box was divided into four compartments, each of those containing an assortment of very traditional Japanese delicacies, very precisely arranged. (The garnish on one dish included a wisp of fern almost too small to be picked up with ohashi (chopsticks). Miso soup and tea were served separately.

Then, at last, we had a class. We began by observing our senpai as they prepared for the afternoon’s practice. I followed Anita around as she heated water for the kama (kettle), lit charcoal, and placed it in the tearoom’s sunken hearth. Then Hamana-sensei began our education officially by guiding us through the practice tea rooms. There are six, each executed in a subtly different style from the next, ranging in formality from elegant room 1 to rustic room 6. Sensei encouraged us to be attentive to the details in the architecture but simultaneously to cultivate a sensitivity to the more important feeling of each room.

Then he explained the arrangement of the mizuya (“water room”), the preparatory area outside the tea room itself. “A place for everything, and everything in its place” is the basic philosophy of mizuya organization. Three full-length shelves and a bottom shelf about one third as long hang over a bamboo drain grate set into the floor. On the grate itself and on the lowest shelf rest the dōgu that have to do with water, arranged carefully according to value. Above that are dōgu that have to do with tea, then the fire-related implements, and finally things that just aren’t used very frequently at all; the closer to you something is when you kneel in the mizuya, the more likely you are to be handling it often.

Szymon performed temae (the formal term for the ceremonial preparation of tea) for us then, his practiced fluid movements unlike anything I’ve seen done at Jakuan. Every step of the process seemed to uncoil like spring steel, controlled, a study in motion and rest under great control.

We finished with a tour of the large kitchen, where various dōgu are stored, okashi distributed, water heated, and charcoal lit. About thirty years ago, Sensei revealed to us, some drunk Midorikai students accidentally burned down the building that had then stood on this site, jeopardizing the future of the program. Ever since, we’ve had to be the most vigilant students of all where fire is concerned.

Sensei dismissed us with handouts full of procedures and endless lists of new words to be committed to memory. Then we hurried to the post office. Though our tuition is paid for, we are expected to give a small portion of our monthly stipend back to cover various material costs, and that means getting hold of shinsatsu (new bills). We had change made and submitted the fee to the teacher responsible for collecting it, and hurried over to the shokudō to eat tonkatsu. The rain still fell, but it hadn’t managed to absolutely strip the sakura trees of their blossoms, though lawns, shrines, and puddles were blanketed in soft pink and white petals.

After dinner, Sean, Tanawat and I went shopping at the 99-yen shop down the street: think of a classy dollar store with a much greater variety of merchandise. Then we returned to putter around the dorm and think over our full day before retiring.