The tea ceremony is an iconic part of Japanese culture. It's known for its discipline and attention to every tiny detail; where and how the guests sit, the order in which items are served, and even the angle at which you handle the equipment are all important aspects. As you might expect, experiencing a full tea ceremony performed by a professional in Japan would be a pricey event. I assumed that the odd cup of matcha (powdered green tea) in a temple or family home was as close as I was going to get to the real thing, but I was in luck one day!
We were walking down the Kamogawa river near my house when we spotted an old man making tea and chatting with a couple of internationals. It looked like they were having a lot of fun, so after hovering awkwardly nearby trying to build up the courage we finally went and asked what they were up to and if we could join. We were warmly welcomed by the host and spent a nice hour learning about what he was up to so far from the tea houses of Kyoto.
The man who made us tea is called Masahito Tame. He went through all the traditional training to become a tea master, practised with the main organisation (that feels like the wrong word but I'm not sure what else to call it??) but eventually left to find his own way. This is because he has some issues with how the tea ceremony is performed nowadays; he said it has lost some of the original spirit, which emerged around the Kamakura period but was largely established by the monk Zen no Rikkyu in the late Muromachi period. According to Masahito, the life of a tea master should roughly be as follows:
- train strictly under a master for the first 15 years or so
- begin to develop your own style whilst still learning for another 15 years or so
- finally branch off to fully establish your own style
(Some of this might have been lost in translation, he only spoke Japanese so I was relying on a friend to translate. I hope I've got the general pattern right at least!)
Instead, he thinks that tea-masters today keep following the strict rules and never move on to the later stages of experimentation/refining of ones own style. So now he moves around Kamogawa and sets up his own little portable tea house to drink with whoever passes by. He has no fixed schedule, going where he wants when he wants, and there are 'no rules for guests'. He seemed to have a lot of fun making and experimenting with the tea that he served, and we were lucky enough to try 3 rounds of it.
The last 2 rounds were very traditional matcha tea - warm, shared between guests from 1 clay bowl (which he'd sculpted himself) and prepared with a bamboo whisk. But the first round was a special one which he called 'Surprise Tea'. Cold matcha, shaken with ice in a cocktail shaker then poured into these very strange almost pilsner shaped glasses which he pulled out from what looked like a treasure chest. You can see all of the equipment in the photo above. Definitely not a typical part of the tea ceremony. Giving some sort of sweet is part of the ritual (to counteract the bitterness of the tea), so he also served us dried persimmon rolled in soy flour and sesame - I politely ate it even though I'm still kind of fussy about the texture of Japanese sweets. It was a really relaxed atmosphere, and interesting to see how he incorporated his own ideas whilst keeping to the essential structure of the ceremony.
On his Facebook page he calls himself a 'monk and a beggar' - he didn't ask us for any money but of course after such a lovely experience we were more than willing to contribute. Because he's setting up on public property he isn't technically allowed to be there, so he said he sometimes gets moved on by the Kyoto police; frustrating after hours of setting up but I suppose it makes the whole thing more exciting and spontaneous. Luck isn't on my side all the time in Japan, but in terms of stumbling across random events like this I do seem to have very very good fortune.
His Twitter, in case anyone in Kyoto wants to follow where he's planning to be: https://twitter.com/tamemasahito
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