Hamana-sensei in the morning, getting slightly ahead of himself to talk about the month of July–or more precisely, the ancient-calendar “month” of fuzuki, roughly corresponding to the modern July. The name is a contraction of fumitsuki, “month of letters,” because the Japanese tradition since way back when is to mail summer well-wishes to friends and family. This originally had something to do with the high occurrence of summer plagues and the corresponding likelihood that someone you knew really needed to be wished well. Or farewell.

The rainy season will end and we’ll enter the peak of the summer. July 22nd will officially start the 1/24th of the year called taisho, “big heat.” Of course, the profound unpleasantness will begin much earlier and end much later than that. But I’ll bitch about all of that when we get there.

Kinindate koicha again with Ro-sensei in the afternoon. More or less not-awful.

Tatami cleaning. This week and next, the five of us who started here in April are preparing for the departure of our senpai by taking responsibility for all the chores. The extra four bodies are still around to be pressed into service this way and that, but they haven’t been scheduled to do anything. They’ll be finishing here just about a month from now, and then we’ll be the senpai. I feel like we’re months, if not years, away from being ready for the responsibility. Something vaguely like parenthood, I imagine–ready or not, you’ve got to step into the shoes.

Evening in Szymon’s room, practicing another brand-new temae for the following day.

I switched on the air conditioner at bedtime, with the one-hour timer set to shut it off after I’d fallen asleep. The distinctive smell of an air conditioner running at full capacity makes me nostalgic (then again, what doesn’t these days?); it smells to me like summer vacation hotel rooms, which on general principal I always chill enough to keep meat from spoiling. I like to wake up uncomfortably cold, just because the technology exists that allows me to do so. And because it makes the first step out the door into the Southern California (or Florida, or wherever, as long as it’s hot) sun that much more of a sensation.

I assume there’s a lesson here.

Anyhow, it was a troubled sleep followed by an early start: Oiemoto’s schedule required that he distribute our monthly scholarship money a few days early, so we lined up in Konnichian’s old kitchen at 8:15 in the morning, shifting this way and that to accommodate the dozens of other people going in and out and through on their way to and from formal morning greetings with the Head Dude. The 28th is the day each month on which all Urasenke employees are paid. In cash. From the hands of Oiemoto himself, so nobody forgets where it’s coming from.

I aced the morning quiz on koicha but struggled to keep my eyes open during Hamana-sensei’s lecture on the month of June in Japan and in the tea world. In the old Japanese calendar, the season during which June now falls ended in what is now dry, hot July; thus the oddity of one of its traditional names: “the green month of no water.” Odd because the modern calendar’s June sees the main thrust (here in the Kansai region, anyhow) of tsuyu, the rainy season. (Tsuyu means “plum rain”; the name comes from the fact that Japanese plums ripen around the time the rains begin.) Temperatures will vary dramatically for the next month; then July and August will arrive to oppress us.

Tea sweets for the summer use transparent kanten (seaweed gelatin) and translucent kuzu to evoke water and ice, hopefully giving guests a cool feeling in the midst of sultry weather. Plain wood and black lacquer dōgu are used in the tea room for the same reason; they are thought to feel cooler than many of the ceramics used in other seasons for flower containers and the like.

In the afternoon we staged the first half of a chaji in two downstairs tea rooms so that we could practice the eating of a kaiseki meal. Yesterday we had the food itself; today we had all the dishes, empty. As involved as kaiseki cooking is, actually serving and eating the meal rival the preparation in complexity. All the various dishes come out in predetermined order, are set down in specific places, are received with scripted words and movements. We pantomimed eating the foods and drinking sake from shallow red hikihai saucers. We learned how to use chopsticks properly in the kaiseki context: first pick up the bowl you’ll eat from, and hold in in your left hand; then pick up the chopsticks from the tray in front of you with your right, holding them from above; transfer them to the hooked little finger of your left hand so that the right can orbit the back ends of the chopsticks and grasp them again from beneath in order to use them.

Don’t ask me to explain the part of the meal when the host brings out the hassun tray and serves each guest in turn while also pouring sake for each and drinking a serving of sake poured by each. I participated in it and the procedure still has my head spinning. All I know is that this can be very dangerous for the host at a chaji with many guests. Hamana-sensei told the story of a chaji he’d helped to host, at which the host himself actually passed out after this portion of the meal, and had to be revived with strong tea and a walk around the garden.

After two long, painful, hot hours of pretending to eat, I had a crippling headache. We finished the practice with bowls of not-imaginary tea, and packed up all the dishes for transport back to their home in storage at the girls’ dorm. I pulled the large wheeled cart piled with dōgu up the street, feeling a little like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. In a polyester kimono. On the way back to school with the cart, I was spotted by an elderly lady on a bicycle whose face lit up at what was apparently a sight that took her back to the old days. “Pulling a cart–oh, the nostalgia,” she exclaimed in Japanese. I grinned and bowed low, and she greeted me politely before crying out again, “natsukashii”–a word that doesn’t slide comfortably into English grammar but that means, basically, “inspiring feelings of nostalgia.”

Cloudy skies and bruised dusk light threatened rain; by dark it was pouring down. A couple of ibuprofen from Anita, some caffeine, and supper soon had me feeling functional again, but still exhausted. I passed the evening quietly and went to bed early, thinking about starting to write a will of some sort.

Sean and I took a late-morning trip to the post office to send a few things to a few people back in the States, and then we stopped into a famous local sweet shop from which many of Urasenke’s tea sweets come. I’d tell you its name if I could remember or read it. Anyhow, it’s basically the Rolls-Royce dealership of sweet shops: extremely polite and polished staff; lots of empty floor space; a brightly lit glass counter running around the room. Inside of and atop the counter: an immaculate array of things almost too beautiful to eat. Happily, I went in knowing what I’d come out with. The place is known particularly for the mochi it flavors with the Japanese citrus fruit called yuzu. I tried a sample–exquisite–and bought two boxes: one for my Kobe host parents, the other for Anita as a thank-you gift for navigating Sean and I around Osaka the Sunday before. The boxes were bright yellow cardboard pressed into yuzu shape, complete with green leaf, and precision-wrapped in the store’s custom-printed wrapping paper. The sticker holding the folds shut advertises the day on which the sweets were bought.

And the store only gives change in shinsatsu: crisp, clean, new bills.

Then Sean and I biked north and east to check out a department store we hadn’t yet visited, in a fruitless search for matcha Kit-Kats, which seem to have gone out of season. We decided to take the long way home, walking our bikes down the gravel path on the west side of the Shimogawa river. A mild breeze from the mountains to the north blew intermittent refreshment down the river, but mostly the air sat still and sleepy and sun-baked above the tall grass choking the riverbed. A young mother with her two children ate convenience store bentō on the bank. A pale, shirtless gaijin sunned himself on a bench across the river. Children with their pants rolled up waded in the shallow water and hopped across the backs of a family of giant concrete turtles that the city, for reasons unknown, has strung across the riverbed like stepping stones.

Our thoughts slowed with our steps, and finally an unoccupied park bench insisted that we sit down and listen to the birds and the insects and the hum of the ancient universe behind everything. We kept very still in the brightness and swigged green tea from 2-liter bottles. I wasn’t wearing a watch, but if I had been, I’m reasonably certain I could have looked to find it stopped, second-hand twitching like a heartbeat without advancing.

Eventually a cloud passing in front of the sun released us from the river’s spell, and we pushed our bikes up the embankment and back into the world of trade and traffic. Even it seemed to be moving in slow motion. We rode an unfamiliar street west; it took us through a thick stand of trees that concealed a stream winding through green shadow along the boundary of a shrine. Up the gravel entranceway, bright red torī shone through the leaves.

Back in the apartment, noble intentions to be productive proved powerless against the napping impulse. And thus the afternoon slipped away.

Dusk found Sean and I with a certain amount of vigor restored, which was good, because I still needed to buy a gift bag in which to deliver yuzu mochi to Kobe the next morning. We pedaled up to Vivre, stopping by the women’s dorm to give Anita her mochi, quickly accomplished the mission, and were riding back along Karasuma, discussing our dinner options, when some festive lights down a side street caught our eyes.

We parked our bikes in front of a convenience store and joined a stream of pedestrians pushing toward whatever it was. Which turned out to be a little local matsuri–festival–at the shrine for the Officially Designated Protective Deity for the chunk of city in which Konnichian is located. We learned later that we were still a day ahead of the main event–the parading of the deity around the city streets in its portable mikoshi shrine, borne on the shoulders of tipsy men in short shorts–but tonight there was plenty to see nevertheless.

The street approaching the shrine’s gate was lined on both sides with cozy little yellow pavilions glowing merrily in the night with the light of bare incandescent bulbs. There were food vendors and games of chance; shallow tanks teeming with goldfish for children to net and take home; trinkets of this kind and that. Giddy festival crowds jostled up a short flight of stairs to the gate, where knots of high school girls with bleached-blond hair smoked sullenly in the shadows, and down the other side to the shrine’s courtyard. Here the temporary marketplace widened to three or four aisles up and down which ambled young people and old, families, couples, snacking on okonomiyaki and yakisoba; long grilled sausages on sticks slathered with spicy Chinese mustard; skewered chunks of pork battered and deep-fried; fresh pastries; snow cones; french fries; cotton candy; yakitori hot off tiny charcoal grills; chunks of fried karaage chicken in paper cups; giant fish-shaped senbei crackers drizzled with mayonnaise and okonomi sauce and aonori and katsuobushi.

I turned toward a tug at my arm to see, unexpectedly, Hamana-sensei and his wife; we chatted briefly, then went our separate ways. Just beyond the hubbub sat the shrine itself, filled with fresh offerings of food and drink that glowed pale and white from the shadows. People walked past quietly, respectfully; some stopped briefly to pray.

Then it was back to the light and noise. Sean and I decided that dinner had found us; we filled up on sausage and okonomiyaki and karaage on the way back to our bicycles. “Oishisō desu yo,” I exclaimed to the karaage-seller: “Looks delicious!” “Meccha oishii,” he replied in very casual slang: “Damn good” is close. He added that it would go great with some beer, and he piled my paper cup unusually high with fresh hot chicken, perhaps as a reward for my being a gaijin attempting his language and complimenting his product.

Different language, different food, and a thoroughly foreign religious pretext–but the same energy as any warm summer-night county fair midway I’ve ever walked. We passed through the gate and left the color and light and smells and sound behind, and I went to bed full of good food and pleasant thoughts about cultural universals and the special charm of summer, when the echoes of forever reach us ahead of the sound itself.

A man’s kimono isn’t a terribly involved thing to put on, but it takes a while if you’ve only tried it once before, like I had. (Womens’ kimono, on the other hand, can take even experienced wearers a good half hour to don.) First you slip on the long nagajūban robe and tie it shut with a strip of fabric wrapped around the waist. Then you put on the kimono itself, tying it shut with a second strip. Over that utilitarian fabric belt you tie the obi, which wraps around the waist several times. You knot it in front of you so you can see what you’re doing, then pull the knot around your body to the back. (This is cheating. Before the end of the year I had learned to tie my obi behind me, like a grownup. –edb, 06 May 2010)

Moving in a kimono is nothing like moving in western clothes. Those who have worn pencil skirts will know the feeling of having one’s steps constricted; hurrying anywhere is pretty much out of the question. Sitting, bending over, and kneeling are likewise regulated by the wraparound fabric, and the wide obi does much to encourage a good straight posture. The desks and chairs at school were made for small people, and I can’t any longer perform the leg contortions I’d devised to squeeze myself into them nicely. Sinking into and rising out of the seiza position in the tea room suddenly requires another level of strength and muscle control, as the legs must stay close together. But it looks so much more graceful than the way we were all doing it before, splaying our legs for balance.

Likewise, the kimono makes good posture while sitting seiza easier and more natural, and suddenly the physical language of tea preparation makes sense. The temae were created by tea people in kimono, and performing them in kimono feels very natural. It was strange to hold my knees while turning in trousers; now if I don’t, my kimono will open scandalously. The angles and movements of my arms, awkward in a shirt, now work with the cut and length of my sleeves. I felt all these difference in my own temae and saw them in the other students’.

The limitation on step length imposed by the kimono makes crossing the tatami in the appropriate number of steps a breeze. The split-toed tabi socks are odd but comfortable, and much better suited to the tatami than my white cotton socks were. Stepping into and out of zori sandals is quicker and easier than wrestling with shoes. And though I no longer have pockets, I have an enormous amount of storage space in the front of my kimono and in the sleeves, where various tea necessities fit comfortably.

We got many pleased looks from the Japanese students, our teachers, and the office workers at school. Except for our glaring non-Japanese-ness, we’re no longer the five odd ones out.

Hamana-sensei lectured more on tea in the month of May, covering seasonal flowers, the evolution of Children’s Day (formerly Boys’ Day), and some of the sweets that Gary-sensei mentioned yesterday. After lunch we resumed our hakobi usucha practice with Ro-sensei, who generally refrains from making corrections as long as host and guest both take every possible opportunity to say something polite. Yesterday his silence was comforting as I moved more or less confidently through the temae, getting the feel of doing it in kimono.

And I appreciated anything comforting after the panicked pre-practice rush to get flowers in the tokonoma. I’d only tagged along once before as Anita did the job; today I begged Szymon to walk me through it. Flowers intimidate me because I have no experience with them at all, and because there are right and wrong ways to arrange them for tea, but nobody’s explained it all clearly. Finally we got a big purple tessen blossom into a big, knobbly, hanging bamboo vase in the one room, and another large flower of some sort into a truly gargantuan and fairly hideous Shigaraki vase in the other.

Sean and I rode up to Vivre after dinner and bought tension rod shelves to maximize the potential storage space in our apartments. Then we repaired to the roof with Szymon for an end-of-the-week round of beer and sake. Naturally.

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.