Tea Ceremony- A Way of Life

A Japanese cup of tea is more than is implied by the name for the ceremony - cha no yu (hot water for tea). It is, in fact, a quiet interlude during which host and guests strive for spiritual refreshment and harmony with the universe. The Japanese Tea Ceremony captures all the elements of Japanese philosophy and artistic beauty, and interweaves four principles - harmony (with people and nature), respect (for others), purity (of heart and mind), and tranquility. It grew from the custom of Zen Buddhist monks drinking tea from a single bronze bowl in front of a statue of their founder, Budhidharma, during their act of worship. Over the centuries, rituals gradually developed around the religious significance and the use and appreciation of the utensils needed for preparing and serving tea.



Today, the ceremony may be performed in a specially designed room in a private house, in a tea house within a private garden, in a designated complex of rooms in the workplace, or in a public tea house.
A full tea, or Chaji, involves a meal and the serving of two different types of tea and can last for four hours, but shorter, simpler teas can be served to suit individual occasions. Some alternative teas to use in these ceremonies include Genmaicha, Kukicha and Hojicha (all very popular Japanese teas). Ceremonies are held to honour special guests, to celebrate particular occasions such as the blossoming of the cherry trees in Spring, to admire the full moon, or simply to gather together a few friends.

For each occasion, the flowers, vase, wall hangings, and tea wares are chosen carefully to suit the event, the time of year, and the desired atmosphere...




When the guests arrive, they are not greeted at the door by their host or hostess, but are guided through a series of open doors to a waiting room. Here they are served a small porcelain cup of hot water taken from a kettle in the tearoom as a foretaste of the water to be used in the tea making. They then make their way quietly and calmly into the garden and are met halfway at a gate by the host or hostess, who opens the gate and silently greets them with a bow. This gentle passage through the garden represents a breaking of ties with the everyday world and allows a clarifying of the senses through the enjoyment of the sweet sound of trickling water and birdsong, and the visual pleasure of trees, plants, and blossoms. Nearby stands a stone lantern to light the path when evening falls. The guests pause to cleanse their hands and mouth with water from a stone basin of running water.

The entrance to the tea room is so low that everyone must stoop to go through - a symbolic gesture of humility - and once inside, guests spend a few minutes admiring the kettle, the scrolls decorating the walls, and the flowers. They then kneel on tatami (rice straw) mats, sit back on their heels, and watch while their host performs the ceremony of the lighting of the charcoal fire. A meal of fine foods and saki is then served but although this can last for more than an hour, it is not the main event but merely a preparation of the body for the tea that is to come. After eating, the guests step back outside into the garden while the tearoom is freshened ready for the tea brewing ceremony. They then return inside and spend the next forty five minutes sharing a bowl of green tea (usually upper-end teas, such as Gyokuro, Sencha, or Matcha). A sweet cake made with bean curd is served and is eaten with little wooden picks that each guest has brought to the ceremony.



By this time, the fire has burnt low and the host or hostess performs a different fire-lighting ceremony and waits, while conversation continues, for the kettle to boil for a second time. Individual bowls of thin watery tea are then prepared and served to each guest in turn, again accompanied by little dainty sweets. Once this is over, final greetings are exchanged and everyone leaves.

Because the Tea Ceremony involves an understanding and appreciation of a complex combination of sensual and spiritual elements, the training to become a Tea Master is long and demands complete commitment. A student can learn enough of the basic movements and rituals to create a tea after three years or so of dedicated study, but becoming a true Tea Master is a lifetime's work and the training process is never really completed.

Because there are so many ways of creating a tea, and because the ceremony involves almost every aspect of Japanese life - architecture, history, food, craft, art - a student must bring to his or her training all the knowledge and skills learned and developed in everyday life as well as human qualities such as sensitivity, awareness, skills of communication.

Although the study is long and demanding, it is also fun and very rewarding... And whatever style of tea a host or hostess creates, each tea occasion links the people taking part to a continuous chain of 885 years of tea history.

Ukiyo-e Paintings and Prints

Ukiyo-e, 'pictures of the floating world', depict the Kabuki actors, courtesans and female entertainers (geisha) of the pleasure-quarters of urban Japan, where men (strictly, commoners, but also numbers of samurai) went to escape the rigid social hierarchy of feudal society.

The Ukiyo-e school developed out of early seventeenth century fūzokuga ('genre paintings') of the entertainment districts of Kyoto and Osaka. However, by the late seventeenth century, the centre of demand for these works had moved east to the Shogun's capital city of Edo (modern Tokyo), with the rapid growth of the wealthy merchant class there.





Ukiyo-e artists worked in a number of formats. Printed books (guide-books, picture-books, illustrated narratives, and illustrated poetry anthologies) grew in popularity as literacy rates increased. Many Ukiyo-e artists were also commissioned by rich clients to produce hanging-scroll paintings (nikuhitsu), often showing single figures of celebrated courtesans. However, it was the single-sheet woodblock print that was most readily available as a cheap memento or pin-up, and many thousands of designs were produced by a succession of highly accomplished artists.

 



Many of the earlier Ukiyo-e prints by artists such as Hishikawa Moronobu, Sugimura Jihei (worked about 1680-1705), Torii Kiyomasu I (worked about 1700-20), Nishimura Shigenaga (died 1756) were hand-coloured. From the early 1740s, Okumura Masanobu (?1686-1764) and others started to use a limited number of colour blocks.

Olympics Medal 1964

Medals were designed by. Mr. Yusaku Kamekura. On the reverse side of the medals are the letters of  "XVIII OLYMPIAD TOKYO 1964" with the game designation in English of each of the 20 sports (e.g. ATHLETICS).

Medals were of 60 mm in diameter and 3 mm thick. The gold medal is a pure silver mould strongly gilded with 6 grams of fine gold, the silver medal is made of pure silver, and the bronze medal is of bronze. The medals were provided with a ring plated with gold, silver or copper respectively, and a coloured box coated with Japanese black lacquer.

The medals were cast at the Japanese Mint. Some of the surplus medals were presented to public museums and for exhibition purposes, while the remainder were melted down.

Tokyo will be the host country for the 2020 Olympics. Also, the Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori has accepted a request to become head of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic organizing committee.

Tokyo 2020 Candidate City Poster.

The walk of life in Japan

These mountain paths date back to the 10th century and link the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, Tanabe and Wakayama to the three grand shrines of Kumano. These three grand shrines - Kumano Hongu Taisha, Kumano Hayatama Taisha and Kumano Nachi Taisha - started out as popular pilgrimage destinations for the imperial family and aristocrats, before gaining popularity with commoners during the 15th century.


In 2004, Unesco declared the Kumano Kodo along with its sacred sites and shrines to be World Heritage sites - making this only one of two pilgrimage routes to achieve this status, the other being the more famous Camino de Santiago in Europe.

Many sections of the ancient mountain paths have been restored and with comfortable traditional guesthouses along the way (known as ryokan and minshuku) it is now possible to undertake your own pilgrimage and walk your way into a small part of Japan's history.

The beauty in undertaking this pilgrimage is threefold - you get to see amazing mountain scenery and actually have the time to appreciate it; you get to immerse yourself in the traditional Japanese way of life, including how they sleep, eat and bathe; and you get to take part in something much bigger than yourself, a sense of achievement that comes from successfully completing your pilgrimage, whatever your motives, as others did so many hundreds of years ago.

We started our adventure by taking the train from Kyoto to Tanabe. Near the train station there is an excellent tourist information office where they will answer any of your questions (in perfect English) and have many maps and brochures on the Kumano Kodo. We stopped here to have lunch before catching a local bus to our pilgrimage starting point, Takajiri.

Our four-and-a-half-day pilgrimage took us 70km along the Nakahechi route, through remote mountain paths and forests, past innumerable oji shrines and, most importantly, to two of the Kumano grand shrines - Hongu Taisha and Nachi Taisha.

The pilgrimage does test your fitness and endurance, with many long, lung-cleansing inclines followed by steep and slippery, joint-jolting declines. The scenery throughout the whole trail is breathtaking - from pristine mountain vistas, to misty wooded forests, to bamboo groves and lush river valleys.

We stayed in five quaint little villages along the Nakahechi route, where our hosts were always welcoming and very helpful, even if they didn't speak much English. Our dinner each evening was a gastronomical delight, each meal cooked freshly by our hosts and consisting of pickles, noodle soups, fried fish, tempura seafood and vegetables, sashimi and sticky rice. We washed down all this wonderful food with delicious local sake.

Each guesthouse had a lovely traditional communal Japanese onsen for bathing. An onsen is a hot spring bath, which the Japanese believe to have healing properties. Whether it does or not, soaking in a lovely hot bath is the perfect end to a tough day of hiking and a great remedy for aching muscles.

Each night we stayed in tatami mat rooms and pulled our futon mattresses out of the closet to convert our living room to a bedroom. We would leave the window open to enjoy the cool mountain breeze throughout the night, and slept the wonderful deep sleep of those who have earned it.

Our pilgrimage came to an end at the grand shine of Nachi Taisha, in a lovely little tourist town called Nachi-san and which is also home to the sacred Nachi-taki waterfall. Here we had a communal dinner with other pilgrims and shared stories of our experiences on the Kumano Kodo. We all agreed; it had been a tough but highly rewarding experience.

Japan's Dark Souls Cafe

You've played Dark Souls the game. And next January in Tokyo, you can patron Dark Souls the cafe!

From Software, the game's creator, says the goal is to recreate the game's mood in the form of an eatery. And on January 6, Australian themed bar OZ Cafe in Tokyo's Nishi-Azabu will be reborn as Dark Souls Cafe. Currently, there are no photos of the completed cafe.

This is part of a promotion for the upcoming Dark Souls II, which will be released this March. Starting January 6, the Dark Souls Cafe will be opened for a limited time only and serve Dark Souls themed food and drink.