30th Year Reflection: Dr. Genshitsu Sen, Daisosho About Raku

A reflection on this my 30th year as a practitioner / student of Chado Urasenke.


The recent exhibition of Raku chadogu at the Los Angeles Museum of Art attracted many dignitaries, particularly Dr. Genshitsu Sen XV, retired o-Iemoto of Chado Urasenke. At his generous presentation of kencha, koicha and a lecture, he reminisced about how Raku was important in his initiation in Chado and as the wakasosho of his lineage.

At age 6 years, 6 months and 6 days it is customary for him to begin his formal training under the tutelage of his father, Tantansai, Sen XIV. At that time he was given a chawan made for him by Seinyu, Raku XIII created for that initiatory experience toward becoming the grand master of Urasenke. Subsequently, he was given chawan of Hagi and Karatsu kilns, the other great historical sources of Japanese ceramics. He learned the names of all the Raku grand masters as a young man. 

He stated that the word "Raku" implies fun, a modern / progressive design. He learned how to make chawan in the workshop of Kakunyu, Raku XIV and was taught that a chawan is a living thing, like a prayer, when one puts palms together. "There is "amazing electricity" that comes from touching a Raku bowl.

In addition to his personal impressions about the gathering, he delivered a speech emphasizing "Tradition and Transmission" of Wisdom, being the heart of his remarks. He stated that kencha is rather more the "ceremony". Our purpose is for host and guest(s) to be "one in spirit", united through the chawan itself.

This being my 30th year as a student of Chado Urasenke, and having heard his maxim, "Peace through a bowl of tea" many times, I must congratulate Dr. Sen for having the integrity to sustain his vision. Not only was he generous in making this practice accessible to so many people around the world, it is clear that he has indeed committed his life to this "simple" promise. It has proven to me to be a very reasonable path in greatly human terms.

My own sensei, Sosei Matsumoto, is a long time friend of the Sen Family and a truly devoted practitioner. I also owe here great thanks for taking me on as a student in 1985, for encouraging my attending Midorikai in Kyoto as a guest student (1987, 1989 and 1991) and for her dear friendship and support in the tea community of Los Angeles and beyond. 

SASAKI SANMI: A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

Chado The Way of Tea: A Japanese Tea Master’s Almanac

By Sasaki Sanmi

Translated by Shaun McCabe and Isasaki Satoko

(Boston USA, Tuttle 2002)

REVIEW BY LAUREN W. DEUTSCH

KYOTO JOURNAL 54

Tuttle Publishing, the New England / Tokyo bookmaker who has been keeping the sumi smoking for Okakura Tenshin’s Book of Tea seemingly forever, has recently snapped out of an all too long pop culture daze to help circulate some of the Japanese culture classics in English translation. Their reissue (In larger format facsimile) of A. L. Sadler’s Cha-No-Yu The Japanese Tea Ceremony (first published in 1933) is welcome simply for the fact that the print is now about 10 point, almost a 30% increase. Tuttle issued in 2001 a translation by Kyoto garden experts Marc Peter Keane and Jiro Takei of the millennium-old Sakutei: Records of Garden Making  by a Japanese court noble, considered the oldest book on gardening in the world.

And now the piece d’ resistance … Sasaki Sanmi’s Chado, a humongous volume of translation of the 20^th century tea master / journalist / intellectual who spent a great deal of effort (must have) writing down what to the rest of us was mandated as “oral transmission”. How this man secured permission from his patrons, the Sen Family (the book has a Forward by Urasenke's Hounsai Oiemoto, Sen Soshitsu XV), to put down this material into writing and publish it may be the only stone left unturned.

Although he wishes us to read it like a novel, a story, it’s most easily penetrated with an indiscriminate finger looking to get away from the mundane by taking a little sojourn into an idyllic world, where everything is just perfect. Perfect in the way the Japanese tea folks can do perfect. That “casual” perfect which make it look like everything just simply happened. Finally the code is cracked into English.

Unlike The Farmers’ Almanac, the American classic booklet (in comparison) which is a handbook on working with  or around the forces of nature in the buff (nature, that is), this accounting of correspondences, reflections and references, is more a study in how nature must be. (There is no hope for someone who can’t resist buying a flocked pink pine Christmas tree in the desert.) One might say there’s no room for weeds, but in fact there are appropriate weeds as well. (I knew that.)

The confidant of the 14^th Generation oiemoto (grand master) Tantansai of the Urasenke tea school, Sanmi (1893 – 1969) informs one’s effort toward deep appropriateness by using the device of listing to build a case for ambiance, much like the authors of Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book.

There are 12 chapters, one per month, listing in nine sections of myriad features ( utensils, poetic references, events, memorial days, flowers and weeds for tea, cakes, cuisine and foodstuffs, words and meisu, just lists and more lists of related this and thats). It leaves nothing unaccounted for: consider holding a lovely July asachaji (early morning tea gathering) … For the haboki (a feather brush used to dust the hearth from wayward ash during the charcoal laying rituals), “Do not forget the idea of using the feathers of a light red heron, a snowy heron or silver pheasant.”  (You have been warned.)

Sanmi’s text is narrative as well, a boon for neophyte tea students wrestling with the haiken (inspection) of utensils, as much as it is for the masters who are looking for a new theme for a new moon viewing chaji. We have a sense that all is quite lovely indeed.

The translators profess to not be poets, and this reader cannot vouch for their accuracy or sensitivity in this account as she cannot read the original. It must at least be “accurate” as the Oiemoto would never agree to participate in a project if it were not. One bi-lingual tea teacher commented that the language is much too pretty. Another chajin took issue with the selection of an image of yet another geisha making tea on the cover.

Enough with this premise that tea is frozen in time and space.  But, now with this book, chado in the hands of the unJapanese, it is anything but that at all. We are grateful.