I got up early for the second day in a row and went on an aimless walk over to the Kamo river.

We met Matsunami-sensei in the Urasenke Center conference room. “I had a terrible stomachache yesterday,” he said. “And diarrhea.” Much lip-biting and staring hard at the table. “Many people suffer from diarrhea,” he added, and I almost passed out from holding in laughter. I fought hard to stay awake while he slowly reviewed the history of Daitokuji. Then he led us upstairs to the private Sen family Zen temple and eroded the last of my patience with Buddhism. (Apologies to the many good and sincere people who go in for it, of course.)

It was a long session this time; I meditated on how wretched it was to be sitting seiza in a stuffy room for untold minutes, sweating, wanting to clear my throat. At one point Matsunami-sensei rose to provide a Special Meditation Service: anyone who asked could be beaten with a stick. I am, as Dave Barry used to write, not making this up. Sensei walked slowly around the room with an enormous flat stick; if a student bowed as Sensei passed, he’d stop and give them a terrifically loud but reportedly not-so-painful shoulder-flogging. I chose not to take advantage of the offer.

The pain in my legs was just approaching truly intolerable when Sensei clacked his wooden clackers together to signal the end of the session. I pried myself out of the seiza position and used my handkerchief to blot the sweat from my hands that had collected in little beads on the polyester lap of my kimono. Then I realized that we weren’t done yet. Matsunami-sensei was leading us around the perimeter of the fifth floor in some kind of walking meditation: everyone single file, matching deliberate steps with the student in front of him.

After two or three circuits, we returned to the temple room. And sat down again. I’m not certain that Matsunami-sensei didn’t fall asleep at some point during all of this. I sat, and sat, and sweated, and hurt, and did not achieve enlightenment.

And then the session was over.

Of course my legs were no good for the rest of the day. On the upside, I managed to complete two not-completely-hopeless flower arrangements by myself, in time, and–I realize that no 31 year-old male should be proud of this–without losing my temper or almost crying with frustration, both of which have been the norm until now.

More kinin kiyotsugu koicha, but I was last in the practice rotation and we ran out of time before I ever got to make tea. Given my feelings on this particular temae, I didn’t feel too cheated.

Another aimless walk after dinner that took me again to Funaoka Hill, where I discovered on the north face a park that I’d missed on previous visits, with a curious little concrete amphitheater that would have looked desolate except that several of the many people enjoying the evening in the park were sitting on the benches, conversing. I wondered if the stage is ever used for performances of any kind. I thought that if I ever bought a cheap guitar here I could just show up and start playing.

There was just enough time between the walk and bed to check the email, talk over the next day’s temae with the boys, and have a beer with Sean on the roof.

I set off to the west through the empty streets, aiming to find out whether or not there’s hiking access to the hill with the character for “big” cleared into it: one of the giant mountainside characters that will burn in the night at the end of the bon festival. When I reached the lower slopes of the first mountains to the west, I realized that I was too far to the south to find my answer on this trip, so I skirted the southern slope and realized that I’d found the neighborhood of Kinkakuji, the famous “Golden Pavilion,” and Ryoanji, home of one of Japan’s most famous dry gardens.

I visited both places in July of 2006 on a rainy overnight trip with my host parents, who sprung for a room in a rather nice ryokan near Heian shrine. We did a round of sightseeing, checked in to the inn and changed into yukata, casual lightweight summer robes, hit the bath, had an old-fashioned fancy Japanese dinner, and went to bed before nine o’ clock, because my host parents are elderly and don’t go in for nightlife–not that there’s much of that near Heian shrine anyhow.

The three of us shared a single room; an attendant had laid out futon while we ate dinner. Because of the strange surroundings and the early bedtime, I woke up again around midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep for a very long time. I remember that my very small pillow felt and sounded like it was packed with dried beans; every adjustment of position crunched and rattled in the close dark space while my host dad breathed loudly in his sleep.

Kinkakuji underwhelmed me. The big draw is a smallish pagoda covered in gold leaf. Slightly garish. Ryoanji was better, except for the giant noisy crowd of tourists both foreign and domestic on the porch overlooking the ancient rock garden. “Don’t look at it with your eyes; look at it with your heart,” my host dad told me. But my heart was busy disliking the tall, neo-hippie American in his Patagonia gear chatting up the local girls; he looked like the classic Not-Religious-But-Spiritual and Cherishes-Traditional-Cultures-the-World-Over type. We lunched at the restaurant on temple grounds that serves just one dish: an exquisite tofu in a delicate broth. You walk a wooded path to get to the place, across a little stream filling a bamboo cylinder that empties itself when its center of gravity shifts, and you eat in an air-conditioned tatami room with a large loud party of Americans at one end and an attractive Japanese girl at the next table whose underpants peek distractingly from the back of her jeans.

I returned home and changed, and gave thanks for clothes that fit properly. On Friday after school I’d picked up my brand-new made-to-measure kimono, and now I got to wear it. True, it’s not as nice as a piece of work as the more expensive garment that the school gave me, but it’s a much better thing than the oversized ready-to-wear kimono I’ve been struggling with for the last month and a half.

Hamana-sensei lectured on tea in the month of July, and Tanihata-sensei breezed in to resume his history of tea in Japan, getting us right up to Sen Rikyū.

For a treat, we got to practice in the afternoon on the third floor, which meant that we didn’t have to carry the two heavy furo and their iron kama downstairs and then up again after class like we do most days. We worked on the koicha variation of kinin kiyotsugu, which I like even less than the standard usucha. First of all, I just don’t care for this kinin stuff at all. Second, koicha means sitting longer, which means more pain. Finally, making koicha for one person at a time is difficult: the volume of tea and water required is so small that it’s hard to whisk properly. Hard to drink, for that matter–most of it sticks to the bowl.

A confused little bird, the kind called Japanese White-Eye in English, flew across the room and into a pillar. It lay dazed for a moment, then took off straight into another pillar. Verena picked it up gently and held it out of a window, but it wouldn’t or couldn’t fly away, so she set it down on the top landing of the fire escape stairs. I forgot to check whether it ever recovered and got away.

After supper I resumed my search for access to the character on the hillside. Doesn’t seem that the public can get to it after all, but my time wasn’t wasted. Skirting this time the north side of the little mountain that is apparently called Shōzan, I came to a place where the houses end and a narrow winding road disappears into forest gloom. Occasional incongruous fluorescent street lamps arched over the road; it looked like the path to a modern Japanese Narnia. Beyond the guardrail, the ground sloped sharply down to a shallow, brisk stream cutting through green shadow.

When I stepped back into late sunlight, I was in a Kyoto I’d never seen before–if it was still Kyoto. Pockets of rural-looking houses and other buildings nestled between forested slopes; I saw cords of firewood stacked in yards. Whatever businesses might have operated in this satellite community were closed for the day, and few people or vehicles appeared on the streets.

Where the road disappeared into the woods again, I turned around, resolving to press further into the mountains sometime on bicycle, when I can cover ground faster.

After two lengthy adventures on foot in one day, I didn’t have to make a special effort to go to bed early. I futzed around online for awhile, tried to help Szymon get the sense of some difficult words in an English translation of some opaque ancient Japanese for the thesis he’s revising, and called it a night.

Gary-sensei gave an unenthusiastic and more-than-ordinarily unfocused lecture on kaiseki, charcoal, and the way to wash ash. (Of course we wash our ash. Our charcoal, too. Did you expect any less?)

In the afternoon we practiced making koicha using a tana. (The marujoku version, in my case.) Iit differs from making tea on the tatami almost exactly as tana usucha differs from hakobi usucha, so having gotten my head around tana complications and koicha complications separately, I was able to combine them without too much difficulty. And Hamana-sensei had a rather genial air–not that he’s ever unpleasant, mind you.

After supper, Sean and I paid a visit to our favorite local dōgu shop to see if we couldn’t relieve ourselves of some of the scholarship money Oiemoto had handed us on Wednesday. I finally picked up one of the tea person’s basic behind-the-scenes mizuya necessities: a sifter. Matcha is so fine that it packs itself tightly when you leave it alone for a while, so just before making tea it’s best to sift it. You can get an nicer, clump-free suspension in water much easier that way. Sure, you can get the desired results with a standard kitchen model, but I felt like shelling out a little extra for the kind common in the tea world: a tidy stainless steel lidded canister with a bamboo paddle for pushing the tea through the removable screen. More significantly, I acquired what I think of as my first real piece of temae gear; that is, not just the cheapest practice implement available–not something I’ll be looking to replace anytime soon with a better version. I bought a lacquered tray for doing bonryaku and chabako temae. Very basic, very useful. Very pretty. Standard black kakiawase with the bright red tsumagure rim. Not expensive. Just exactly what’s needed. Yes. I’m a little giddy over my new tray.

Late in the evening, Sean and Szymon and I put ourselves into a certain condition with a bottle of Polish vodka, and went for a long ramble around the neighborhood in the quiet small hours. Our stated aim was to locate Funaoka Hill, which is tricky even in broad daylight and sober; it’s a low enough rise that you can’t see it until you’re nearly on it, and no street runs directly to it. We circled until it rose black immediately ahead of us, by which time we didn’t feel like climbing it anymore, so we weaved our way home and to bed.

I charged up with a cellophane-wrapped bacon-egg-mayo-cheese-bread thing from 99 and headed out for a walk in the bright, cool morning. I chose one of the several paths that run the length (north-south) of the Imperial Palace park. Not much to see, truth be told: wide expanses of white gravel, trees, old-fashioned walls. Walkers, joggers, idlers. Pleasant enough, but nothing more. Supposedly the palace itself is well worth a visit, but you’ve got to make a reservation to do that.

At noon, Sean and I met Anita at her dorm, and the three of us hit the town. We rode the subway down to Teramachi, making a stop or two so that Sean could price out mobile phone service–Anita is a skilled translator and very generous with her time and effort–before buying movie tickets. This we did not at the theater itself, but at some discount-ticket storefront that claimed to be offering a bargain at around $13 a ticket. Then we walked up and down the arcades, trying to decide on a place at which to eat lunch. Finally we settled on a dingy-looking okonomiyaki place called “Mr. Young Men.” On one of its interior walls hung an illuminated sign, a large mirror printed with the restaurant’s name and a scattering of simple colored shapes, that looked like a refugee from a Showbiz Pizza restaurant circa 1984. I got the “Young Men Lunch:” okonomiyaki, yakisoba, and onigiri (rice balls). Quite a lot of food, and tasty enough, and less than 8 dollars.

Then we made our way up the arcade to the theater, where we exchanged our non-time-specific tickets for assigned seats at the 1640 hrs. showing of Cloverfield. Assigned seats at a movie is a new one on me, but apparently that’s how it’s done everywhere here, and it does eliminate the pre-show scramble to find blocks of seats where you want them. Sean and I had to visit the snack bar to make sure we got the full experience. Prices there were probably roughly comparable to prices at American theaters–it’s a little hard to say, because portions are much smaller. The large popcorn we bought was perhaps the size of the normal American small, and it turned out to be plenty. Better yet, we exercised the option to get half of it buttered popcorn, and the other half caramel corn. I got a Coke, too. Second soda I’d had since I got to Japan, and the first “American” soda; the first was a Japanese lemon soda (Suntory “C.C. Lemon”) that I fell in love with two years ago. Crazy-sweet after the long break–and I hadn’t even been drinking the stuff very regularly for a long time anyhow.

The theater itself was surprisingly (or not; this is Japan, after all) small, but clean and comfortable. The movie, which we chose because it was the only one playing in English that I hadn’t already seen and had some desire to see (and nobody else expressed an opinion), met expectations. I liked the handheld camcorder gimmick, though it made me a feel a little ill. Uninspired creature design. Dialogue sounded too much like it was written to sound like it hadn’t been written. I tried to keep up with the Japanese subtitles while processing the English audio and the visuals. The ones I could read definitely took liberties with my mother tongue. Then again, there’s really no getting around that.

We rode the subway back home after dark, stopping at Anita’s dorm to try (semi-successfully) to sort out some computer problems for her. Then Sean and I settled in for some Japanese television and a pot of powdered soup from Poland that Szymon had given us. We made it in Sean’s rice cooker. It turned out pretty well.

I pointed myself in approximately the right direction and began winding my way through the tiny residential streets, making what I hoped were appropriate adjustments when I hit dead ends and when angles of streets changed. Then I turned a corner, and there at the end of the street was my destination.

Turns out it’s called Funaoka Hill, and the roof I’d seen belongs to part of a complex of buildings known as Takeisao shrine or Kenkun jinja. The shrine was established in 1869 by the Meiji Emperor but the hill’s significance dates back to 1582, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi chose it as the site of his predecessor Oda Nobunaga’s grave.

Bright red torī straddle a stone staircase climbing the wooded hillside; a parallel path leads past an obelisk (Nobunaga’s?) and up to the main temple buildings, quiet today in their immaculately landscaped clearing. A monk swept leaves from around a little shrine to Inari, the fox god. (Should be “god whose messengers are foxes,” or some such. –edb, 02 May 2011) Only a few other visitors crunched along the gravel paths, snapping pictures. The noon sun pressed with a flat light that made the day look hotter than it was; great big bumblebees buzzed idly around my head. Past the temple, paths crossed the bright top of the hill, where I passed a man napping on a bench with his hat covering his face, and wound through the shady trees on its sides, where unseen birds chirped and whistled in the foliage overhead.

I was on the west side of the hill when I heard a recorded announcement blare from tinny P.A. speakers somewhere in the streets below; it was backed by some romantic, antiseptic orchestral score that sounded old and faded: the Longines Symphonette or some such. I wondered if an event of some sort was beginning at an outdoor venue. I followed the sound to a view through the trees of a dirty, partly filled institutional swimming pool, but the music was already fading: obviously the recording was being played from a vehicle on the move.

When I returned to the east side of the hill, the monk had traded his broom for a gasoline-powered leaf blower. I headed back to my apartment to eat a sandwich and then out again to wander around Vivre and the 100-yen shop; retail wasn’t observing whatever today’s holiday was. My legs had had enough then, so I came home for a shallow nap and the usual round of writing, photo-sorting, and puttering.

Sean, Szymon, and Tanawat returned after dark from the tea house cleaning project they’ve been volunteering for in their spare time recently, and after they got cleaned up, the four of us put our heads together in Szymon’s room to study for the next day’s quiz. Then Sean and I had time enough before bed to watch a television drama set at an old-fashioned Japanese restaurant: an hour of romantic tensions and much fretting over the conversion of soybeans into miso. (Apparently the traditional way to do it involves mashing them with your feet in big wooden buckets, like grapes for wine.)

Daisōshō, the retired (though still very active) 15th generation Grand Master of the Urasenke line, had given all the students tickets to the annual Miyako Odori dance presentation (this year’s was the 136th), so in the afternoon, Midorikai got dressed up once again and hailed taxis to take us to Gion, Kyoto’s old geiko (the local term for geisha) district. Automobiles and pedestrians vied for passage through the narrow streets of two-story wooden buildings, made considerably less charming by the addition of temporary signposts in garish oranges and grays advertising the odori.

Our tickets admitted us to the Gionkobu Kaburenjo theater complex, a handsome old cluster of buildings through which attendants herd four performances’ worth of visitors a day every day in April. We tramped across the blue-carpeted floors and down halls bright with circus-like red and white-striped wall hangings. A hundred or so at a time, deluxe ticket holders like us were funneled up a flight of stairs into a large room full of low, long tables and stools. At the front of the room, a geiko in full makeup and kimono was preparing tea in a style called ryūrei, developed in the late 19th century for the benefit of foreigners who couldn’t or wouldn’t sit on the floor in traditional seiza style. In ryūrei, host and guests alike sit like Westerners; it’s a lot more comfortable, of course, but it looked silly to me, and somehow more self-consciously mannered than the older styles. It didn’t help that the huge crowd kept cameras firing throughout; that a mobile phone some rows over rang halfway through with the title music from Austin Powers; that an efficient fleet of assistants distributed sweets and tea perfunctorily without any of the expected formalities of phrase and gesture; that as soon as our empty tea bowls were taken away, wranglers instructed us loudly to leave as quickly as possible to make room for the next lot of guests; that a few sips of my tea revealed an unwhisked lump clinging malignantly to the bottom of the bowl. On the other hand, we got to keep the rather pretty little plates our sweets were served on.

Next we got a brief glimpse of the lovely garden in the complex’s open central courtyard before we reached the waiting lobby for the show itself, where a good dozen vendors sold souvenirs, tea, sweets, books, elegant stationery, gaudy fabrics, and any number of things stamped with the likeness of unofficial national deity Hello Kitty.

The theater itself was large and richly appointed with comfortable seats in dark red velvet on the main floor and balcony, and tatami mats in the galleries for holders of less expensive tickets. The hour-long performance featured a dozen or so live musicians on either side of the front of the hall–shamisen to stage left, drums and shrill flutes (I can’t be expected to know the Japanese name of absolutely everything, can I?) to the right–maintaining a near-constant backdrop of the traditional-sounding noise that I don’t expect to ever acquire an appreciation of. (It wasn’t always obvious to my ears, to begin with, that both sides of the orchestra were in fact attempting to execute the same piece of music.) One, and sometimes all, of the shamisen players sang a text that doubtless shed great light for Japanese speakers on what was happening onstage; the percussionists would periodically do some call-and-response rhythmic shouting.

I don’t get Japanese dance any more than I get Japanese music. I appreciate the elegant movement and precise body control, but after five or so minutes of it, I feel like the point has been made. A working knowledge of Japanese and consequent ability to follow what plot was being suggested onstage (the program said it had been adapted from The Tale of Genji, the world’s oldest surviving novel and a product of proud Japan, which is celebrating the thousandth anniversary of the book’s publication this year) would probably have helped. As it was, I had to settle for enjoying the dazzling kimono and clever scene changes; happily, there was quite a lot there to enjoy. Also from time to time I would amuse myself by trying to imagine what various of the dancers looked like with her hair down and makeup off.

Szymon, Verena and I saved money and got exercise by walking back to the dorms. It took us about an hour at a brisk pace that I really shouldn’t have attempted in dress shoes; we followed the Kamo river most of the way uptown. The early evening had brought grey skies and a biting wind, but young couples, amateur photographers, and one inexplicable trombonist crowded the river’s steep brick banks, while a few late hanami parties soldiered on beneath much-thinned sakura.

Sean and I took a bus down Horikawa to a long shopping arcade called Sanjō that had been recommended to us, only to find that almost all its merchants had closed up before 7 on a Saturday night. We bought takoyaki for supper from one of the few open businesses and hit up a 100-yen shop for snacks and the sorts of housewares that we’re still discovering we need after a week and a half in our new home. And then we drank beer and listened to the Beach Boys in Sean’s room until bedtime.

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.

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.