Walk
The first thing you learn in the tea ceremony is to walk. Which is like saying, learning to carry the body. Walk with stealthy movements, with the gait of a light body, with discreet and short steps. When I see my teachers move it seems as if they were floating slightly in the air, but their presence is not ethereal, quite the opposite: they are very firmly on the earth and their wisdom accumulated by experience and the passage of years makes them his way of being in the world is very forceful.
I did not notice all the performative aspects and the fundamental presence that the body has in the ceremony until I had to do it every day for a year, while I was studying at the Urasenke school in Kyoto. Daily practice shapes the body and every time I slid the fusuma 1 with one hand to enter the room and prepare tea, I felt like the curtain of a theater was opening.
Many years ago, when I was studying journalism, a professor told me that I looked Japanese in face and body, but my gestures were Argentine. Some time later, when I read the book Japanese Gestures by Michitaro Tada, I understood that gestures are part of the body and the culture itself.
Rereading my notes today, I think that being Argentine, I have to emulate a certain Japanese gesture when making tea: the delicacy of the hands when taking and putting down each object, getting up from the tatami and sitting back down on it with my back and head straight, as if I were being pulled by a thread that comes out of the center of my head, aligning my entire body. When blending the tea, do so vigorously, but do not let this sudden change in strength be noticeable on the arm or the grimace of the face. Harmonious and delicate movements. Movements that seem natural. That is the gesture required by Chadō, the way of tea, which in the West is known as the tea ceremony.
Distance
I always thought my grandmother had known about the tea ceremony in Japan. They are those things that you take for granted until one day you realize that your grandmother only lived in Japan for the six years that World War II lasted. And you travel to Japan and visit the town where your great-grandmother came from, a point on the map lost in the Kagoshima prefecture where the train doesn't even reach. The family house is in the middle of the field with no precise address. The indication to the taxi driver to get there is simply “near the cemetery.”
In the middle of the war and living in a house in a rural area of Japan, no one practiced Chadō. Yes, there was some Ikebana, as my obachan 2 remembers. “It was something very high for the Japanese. Thinking about it, it shouldn't be like this. Chadō is an education, it teaches you about gyougi sahou , everyday life, good manners.
Paradoxically (or not), my grandmother first approached the tea ceremony in Buenos Aires. It was in 1979, when through the Ladies' Circle of the Japanese Association to which she belonged she came into contact with this practice. A few years later, Okuda Sensei 3 arrived from Japan to teach and in 1985 it was my grandmother who took charge of the group that had been formed. By then I was one year old. I like to think that my grandmother was discovering two worlds simultaneously: that of tea and that of grandparenting.
A few years later he traveled to Japan, to the Urasenke headquarters in Kyoto to perfect himself in the tea ceremony. After those intensive months of study he was awarded his cha mei , his tea name, which is “So-e.” Since then he has dedicated himself to teaching in Buenos Aires.
In those long conversations we have, in which I can only find elusive answers to my specific questions, he told me that he had always wanted to do something related to Japanese culture. “The closest thing I found was the tea ceremony,” he told me. “Close,” says my grandmother sensei. I think about the thousands of kilometers that separate us from Japan. Physical distance and the cultural abyss. At times it seems like a miracle to me that in Argentina there is a group that rigorously practices the Japanese tea ceremony.
Kyoto/Buenos Aires – Buenos Aires/Kyoto
In these comings and goings, in this Kyoto-Buenos Aires tea ceremony traffic and vice versa, there was a milestone that marked history (at least ours) forever. On October 22, 1954, a tea ceremony was held for the first time in Argentina. The host was a 31-year-old young man, future heir to the Urasenke tradition. Sen Genshitsu XV, such is his name, would become the fifteenth Grand Master of the Urasenke School years later. Like my grandmother, she had been able to overcome the hard years of the war and had fully devoted her life to tea. He was one of the teachers who cared most about spreading a message of peace that he carried like a badge to each country he visited. Those trips brought him to Latin America. And their presence here gave rise to the Urasenke School that continues to exist today.
66 years ago, this first tea ceremony was held in a mansion located on Luis María Campos Avenue. It was the residence of the Japanese immigrant Kenkichi Yokohama who had dedicated himself to the trade in antiques brought from the East. In the black and white photos, the Grand Master is seen wearing a dark kimono and on it a detail that identifies his lineage: the family crest that is shaped like a top. Many years later, after a significant career at the head of the Urasenke tradition, Sen Genshitsu XV decided to step aside and hand over the position to his son. In one of the texts he published during those years he referred to that symbol: “just like the spinning top, I hope to be able to continue in constant movement throughout my life.”
* * * * *
On March 31, 2017, I arrived in Kyoto, specifically to the “Urasenke Gakuen Professional College of Chadō” to study the tea ceremony for a year. As I related at the beginning of the text, among the things I learned during that year I can mention the performative, the fundamental importance of the body. My world of tea expanded beyond imagined limits, because not only did I learn new things but I immersed myself in a Japanese way of doing things in all possible aspects: discipline, order, cleanliness, ways of bonding and living together. with my foreign classmates and with the Japanese students who came from different parts of the archipelago to study.
There are two scenes that say a lot about Japanese culture and the relationship with our own culture, Western and Latin American. These two scenes open and close a cycle: one happened before I embarked on the trip and the other towards the end.
Maruoka sensei, a teacher at the Urasenke School based in Mexico City who visits us every year to help us deepen our practice, gave me a series of advice in the last class we had in Buenos Aires before my trip. And one of them was very punctual: “Don't forget to enjoy the tea,” he told me. I didn't quite understand what he meant, because enjoying tea is something natural for those of us who practice it.
I finally understood it when I was in Japan: the overdemand, the level of excellence, the perfection with which Japanese structures function sometimes generates hesitation in human ties. It is as if on one side there was the organizational level and on the other the level of coexistence. Obviously they go hand in hand, but it is in those frictions where some discomfort was generated. And a tea environment really requires being free of tension. That is, to enjoy tea you have to get along first with yourself, and then with everyone else. It is an enjoyment then that requires a certain effort, a certain understanding. It is not something given naturally. And we must never forget: the most important thing in a tea party is that correspondence between the hostess and her guests. From that shared moment, from that experience comes the enjoyment of tea.
It also has to do with something linked to the body. The procedures for preparing tea are rigorously studied: the order, the place where each element goes, the subtle and elegant movements. Each of us practices them over and over again and at first they seem to be a little mechanical because it is the mind that puts the order. Years later, one becomes part of what one practices and it is the body that articulates the movement. Tea is made without thinking, the mind is empty of thoughts. And despite a certain rigidity in the form, the expressive freedom of each one emerges right there. These procedures have been performed in the same way for 400 years, but each practitioner shapes their style and when performing the ceremony they will reveal their own sensitivity; We will be able to observe different teachers doing the same ceremony, which will be personal and universal at the same time. I think there is also an enjoyment there: that of the flow of the procedure, when our body becomes one with the movement.
Grades:
1. Sliding door.
2. Grandma.
3. Teacher.
* This essay was originally published in the Nikkei Culture Dossier of Revista Transas (Universidad de San Martín) in October 2020. @revistatransas
© 2021 Malena Higashi
