Tea Ceremony

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On Friday, I experienced a Japanese tea ceremony for the first time in my life. It was quite different than I expected it to be, before studying the subject. On Thursday, during our culture class, we studied tea ceremony (sado) as a class, to prepare for the ceremony. We also had a mini-lesson on a story known as Urashimatarou, which reminded me of Rip Van Winkle, in some ways.

The story starts out with a fisherman, who comes across some kids being cruel to a small turtle. The man saves the turtle, takes it home and nurses it back to health, then sets it free back into the ocean the next day. Soon after, he is approached by a large turtle, with summons to the emperial palace under the ocean, Ryuuguujyou, because the turtle he saved was actually the princess Otohime, and the king wanted to thank Urashimatarou, the fisherman, personally. So Urashimatarou is taken into the sea and visits the palace under the sea, where he is treated very well, and enjoys himself for an undefined amount of time. Eventually, however, he wants to go back home. Otohime doesn't want him to leave, but she gives him a box and instructs him that he can return to the palace as long as he has that box, but he must never open it outside of the kingdom under the sea. Then Urashimatarou goes back home, and everything has changed. What felt to him like a few weeks was, in his land, a hundred years or more. Forgetting his instructions, he opens the box, and a puff of smoke comes out, hitting him with all the time that he missed, and he instantly becomes incredibly old, and then vanishes.

We learned that tea ceremonies have themes, and the theme for ours turned out to be a mix of Tanabata, the story of Orihime and Hikoboshi, the celestial couple who are only allowed to meet once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month, and the story of Urashimatarou. The sweets served before the tea were from those stories, first tanabata, which was considered a "wet" sweet, then before the second cup, Urashimatarou, a dry sweet. My tanabata sweet was designed with a firefly and bamboo pictures. The bamboo symbolized the tanabata story in that today, the way to celebrate tanabata is for everyone to write their wish on a piece of paper, and attach it to bamboo, in the hopes that their wish will come true. I think the firefly comes from the story, where the light of the fireflies or stars allows Orihime and Hikoboshi to find one another. My dry sweet depicted the Urashimatarou story in three pieces. The part of the story my sweets depicted was when Urashimatarou first went into the ocean to meet Otohime. The candies were in the shape of a castle, water ripples, and coral, to depict the change of scenery into the ocean. The person before me had Urashimatarou, to introduce his character, and the person after me had Otohime, introducing her into the story in chronological order.

One thing that I have to mention is that our tea master is a descendant of the Tokugawa shogun, which totally blew my mind. How we managed to have a tea party with her, I don't know, but I'm glad to have had the opportunity. It was also interesting that we all had to climb into the tea house on our hands and knees through a tiny door, which came from way back when there were samurai. The tiny door required samurai and soldiers to remove their armor and weapons before coming in, making everyone equal for the duration of the tea party. We all received a unique souvenir from the tea party, as well: the tiny forks that we used to eat our sweets. I didn't bring my camera to that particular event, but I don't think I'll forget it anytime soon.

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