Chanoyu

Chanoyu is the Japanese tea ceremony. It began in very different form way back when tea first made its way from China to Japan. At first tea was limited to the temples and the courts, but soon made its way to the warrior class, who made it a lot more fun. (Insert gambling, excessive amounts of alcohol, contests to try and identify different types of tea after excessive amounts of alcohol). (For a side note about another possible samurai drinking game, see the end of the post).

Over time the tea ceremony mellowed out, however, and over hundreds of years was developed into an art called Cha-do that has several different schools with varying techniques and rules of etiquette. Each school has a grandmaster as well. I found it really interesting that the way of tea’s hierarchy is almost exactly the same as the way of open hand (meaning karate-do for all those non-dojo folk out there).

At HIF we were able to get a crash course in the basics of one of these tea ceremonies.

Sensei explains the tools of the trade before we get started

Our first challenge—properly taking two sweet beans from the serving dish and putting them on our individual paper.


One of Sensei’s helpers demonstrates the making of the tea. Here she’s cleaning the tea making tools, even though they’re already clean. (It’s part of the show of the tea ceremony).

We each get our own bowl of tea to try. There are three set phrases you have to say before you drink it—one to the host making the tea, one to the person on your left who got tea before you, and one to the person on your right who go tea after you. Also, you’re sitting in seza the entire time (that’s the formal sitting position where you sit with your feet tucked under you.) Then, once you pick your bowl of tea up, you have to rotate it twice, finish it in three sips (making the last one slightly louder so the host knows you have finished), rotate twice the opposite direction, and put it back down. (I totally forgot the rotating thing when I did it…)

Tea!

We also got some yummy nerikiri. (Same thing as what we made in the wagashi class, only by people with considerably more skill.) I had one of the green ones. As expected, it was pretty much pure sugar and a little bit of bean paste.
At the end we got to try to make our own tea. It’s pretty simple—you put two little scoops of the tea powder in the bowl, add hot water, whisk it with your chasen (tea whisk), and then enjoy. :)

A small bowl, a wooden scoop for the tea powder, a round black box with the tea, and the chasen (tea whisk).

My classmate, Mitchell, experiences some difficulties.

Hopefully I’ll be able to bring some of Japan’s green tea back with me to the U.S. It’s much better than the bag stuff!

Side note - Samurai Drinking Game?

I was walking back from the beach this last Saturday and I saw a small outdoor celebration going on outside one of the houses I walked past. There was a party game going on involving a watermelon and a small child armed with a shinai (practice sword made of bamboo). The girl had the obligatory blindfold on to give the watermelon a fighting chance against her surely ferocious strikes. It looked like the Japanese version of a pinata.

Having just written up this post about tea ceremonies actually being rowdy warrior class drinking parties, I wondered if this too would have been a drinking game. Take the melon intended for dessert, find a particularly drunk comrade, blindfold him, hand him his katana (real, of course) and then set him loose. There's possible limb loss in this scenario, but also the possibility for good, wholesome fun. :)