Dave Lowry
9th September 2001, 17:53
Speaking of chado…
I just finished a marathon session at the Japanese Festival here in St. Louis over the Labour Day weekend. Six tea ceremonies a day for three straight days. My job, for the past ten years or so, is to translate and narrate the action. By Monday afternoon, I’ve ingested enough caffeine to keep me humming like a high-voltage power line in a thunderstorm and enough chagashi to shingle the roof of the tea hut.
What’s fascinating is that, while the majority of the guests (almost none of whom have had exposure to chado), are open to the experience and enjoy the hell out of it, every year we get a few of exactly the same sorts that must be dealt with in the budo from time to time. The Japanophiles. The closet Nihonjin. The romantics who have read “Shogun” or seen “The Karate Kid” and who have expectations of an ethereal, mystical encounter with the profundities of the East. And they are, some of them, mightily peeved at me as the instrument of their disappointment.
Know that vignette about the master who shows the prospective student that the student can’t have his cup of tea filled by the master unless he empties it first? Well, if you want to see that acted out literally, come hang out with me next year.
One I shall never forget was a woman so angry with me she was literally shaking as she approached me after the ceremony was completed and I was standing out beside the tea hut. After informing me I had no business anywhere near tea (principally because I was not Japanese), she castigated me furiously for my cavalier narration of what was, she insisted, a “sacred ceremony.” I asked if she had any training at chado. “No,” she snapped. “But I’ve read A LOT of books about it!” Sound familiar?
For some reason this year, a common theme was a double whammy of racism and sexism. The impressively skilled and highly ranked woman who leads the demonstrations is an issei. About half her assistants are of Japanese ancestry, the rest are haole. Those of us not endowed with epicanthic folds are, I suspect, an irritant to guests wishing to have the unadulterated “Tea Ceremony Experience.” The tea hut is located within a spectacular roji on an island in a vast, 14-acre Japanese kare-sansui garden. It’s just a perfect venue for a Saturday afternoon satori—and then here comes a mabushi-head ketojin to lead them to the hut and do a play-by-play and ruins it all.
My favourite this year was a woman who, after the temae had ended, complained bitterly to one of the tea sensei’s assistants. She resented, she said, the “white male dominance” I represented.
Next day, we had another young woman who demanded to speak to the sensei after demonstrations were completed for the day. Sensei was busy, an assistant told her and offered to help. “Well,” the woman said, “I just wanted to know if there is any way I can do a tea ceremony here without having some white male talking through it.” To her considerable consternation, the assistant said “No,” and walked away.
This year, as always, we had the aikidoka who try to do shikko across the floor of the hut, looking like bulldozers in such a confined space and displaying suki out the whazoo. The karate guys who sit rigidly in seiza, fists on their thighs until it slowly, painfully dawns on them that sitting this way for 30 minutes or so is a whole different ball game than doing it for a few moments before and after class and who gradually succumb to shibireru and end up hunched miserably in o-agura not looking terribly martial at all.
It’s informative and instructive for me to see the baggage some of these people bring into the tea hut, not so different at all from what’s carried into the dojo. Some are so adamant about bringing it along they can’t possibly leave it behind and experience chado unencumbered. Makes me constantly re-evaluate my own baggage and lighten it as often as possible.
Cordially,
I just finished a marathon session at the Japanese Festival here in St. Louis over the Labour Day weekend. Six tea ceremonies a day for three straight days. My job, for the past ten years or so, is to translate and narrate the action. By Monday afternoon, I’ve ingested enough caffeine to keep me humming like a high-voltage power line in a thunderstorm and enough chagashi to shingle the roof of the tea hut.
What’s fascinating is that, while the majority of the guests (almost none of whom have had exposure to chado), are open to the experience and enjoy the hell out of it, every year we get a few of exactly the same sorts that must be dealt with in the budo from time to time. The Japanophiles. The closet Nihonjin. The romantics who have read “Shogun” or seen “The Karate Kid” and who have expectations of an ethereal, mystical encounter with the profundities of the East. And they are, some of them, mightily peeved at me as the instrument of their disappointment.
Know that vignette about the master who shows the prospective student that the student can’t have his cup of tea filled by the master unless he empties it first? Well, if you want to see that acted out literally, come hang out with me next year.
One I shall never forget was a woman so angry with me she was literally shaking as she approached me after the ceremony was completed and I was standing out beside the tea hut. After informing me I had no business anywhere near tea (principally because I was not Japanese), she castigated me furiously for my cavalier narration of what was, she insisted, a “sacred ceremony.” I asked if she had any training at chado. “No,” she snapped. “But I’ve read A LOT of books about it!” Sound familiar?
For some reason this year, a common theme was a double whammy of racism and sexism. The impressively skilled and highly ranked woman who leads the demonstrations is an issei. About half her assistants are of Japanese ancestry, the rest are haole. Those of us not endowed with epicanthic folds are, I suspect, an irritant to guests wishing to have the unadulterated “Tea Ceremony Experience.” The tea hut is located within a spectacular roji on an island in a vast, 14-acre Japanese kare-sansui garden. It’s just a perfect venue for a Saturday afternoon satori—and then here comes a mabushi-head ketojin to lead them to the hut and do a play-by-play and ruins it all.
My favourite this year was a woman who, after the temae had ended, complained bitterly to one of the tea sensei’s assistants. She resented, she said, the “white male dominance” I represented.
Next day, we had another young woman who demanded to speak to the sensei after demonstrations were completed for the day. Sensei was busy, an assistant told her and offered to help. “Well,” the woman said, “I just wanted to know if there is any way I can do a tea ceremony here without having some white male talking through it.” To her considerable consternation, the assistant said “No,” and walked away.
This year, as always, we had the aikidoka who try to do shikko across the floor of the hut, looking like bulldozers in such a confined space and displaying suki out the whazoo. The karate guys who sit rigidly in seiza, fists on their thighs until it slowly, painfully dawns on them that sitting this way for 30 minutes or so is a whole different ball game than doing it for a few moments before and after class and who gradually succumb to shibireru and end up hunched miserably in o-agura not looking terribly martial at all.
It’s informative and instructive for me to see the baggage some of these people bring into the tea hut, not so different at all from what’s carried into the dojo. Some are so adamant about bringing it along they can’t possibly leave it behind and experience chado unencumbered. Makes me constantly re-evaluate my own baggage and lighten it as often as possible.
Cordially,