Blissful Tea With Sempo Sugihara and Zach Golden

\Zach’s View

This Sunday, I am due to fly to Tokyo for my week-long vacation to Japan. 

I am very excited about this for several reasons: 

1. It’s a vacation. I haven’t been on one of any significant length in literal years.

2. I could afford the ticket. I found a massively discounted airfare, and from what I understand, Japan is far more affordable than the US once you’re there.

3. It’s in such a different time zone, I would like to think that I will truly be able to escape.

4. I like Japanese culture. I often visit Little Tokyo to relax, not very far away from Der Nister. But moreover, when I visited our friend (and Japanese tea master) Laurie Deutsch to experience a part of a tea ceremony, she told me very pointedly: “Japan really is good to go to.” I didn’t need to hear that twice.

The tea ceremony itself taught me so much about the joy of timelessness. She emphasized that tea has a motto attached to it, that there is nothing before or after the tea ceremony, there is only the tea ceremony. There are the minute details, perfectly executed, washing the utensils, sipping the cup — and in these smallnesses, I felt a great depth.

I wonder what I will be able to learn in Japan about this. 

I remember that when I traveled across Europe and the Middle East, visiting Jewish communities, I saw how they lived, taking so much pleasure in the combination of their cultural and religious lives. I was so inspired by what I saw there, I wanted to bring it to America, which I thought needed and deserved this. 

Though I felt that as good as it was to learn, I was learning for work, not for my own life. I want to learn how to find peace and tranquility in my own life, and I saw glimpses of this with Laurie.

5. Japan is why I’m alive. Well, specifically, my grandmother Shulamis and her parents were saved by the diplomat Chiune Sugihara’s mass writing of visas to Imperial Japan, as the Nazis were closing in on the Lithuanian territories when she and her family lived.

“Sempo” Sugihara’s visa writing was against the wishes of his Axis-aligned government, though curiously, they only recalled him, and did not cancel any of the documents.

My grandmother traveled the Trans-Siberian Railroad and was interned in Japan for six months, before being able to sail on to Seattle. (The US was not yet at war) Many visa recipients ended up in the Shanghai Ghetto that Japan created, but not them.

There is still a family story that circulates about how my great-grandfather Meir, a rabbi, did not know what day to hold Yom Kippur, because Japan was not a settled question in Jewish Law regarding where Japan falls on the Halakhic dateline. The Halakhic dateline does not (under most opinions) follow under the international standard, which itself is arbitrary. 

It was understood in Talmudic times that the day began in China, but Japan was not known about — and whether it should be considered a contiguous part of China or part of the other side of the world where the day ended was not settled. The question lingered, unanswered by the rabbis in Europe, and Meir had to make a decision. He chose to say that it was part of the New World.

My bubbe (grandmother) claims that this was because he felt like he already was looking forward not backwards. Halachic authorities, when they did reach him, ruled in accordance with him — though since then, it is a minority opinion to consider Japan on the other side of the Halakhic date line.

The idea that at the time, against what I would consider proper Talmudic logic, they decided that Japan was not part of the world they left behind is powerful to me.

I found it strange that I had grown up never knowing, only hearing stories about a country that seemed to have nothing to do with Jews, yet was the center of our family story of survival. Yet stranger was that it was a country which at the time committed horrific atrocities, while never believing they should be directed at Jews, as their Nazi allies did. Even stranger was that this was orchestrated by one man given enormous power and even greater courage, to save thousands of Jews.

I grew up idolizing Sugihara. I enjoy spending time with his statue in Little Tokyo, where he sits on a bench handing out a passport. Some of my most emotional memories linger with that statue.

I wanted to become a diplomat because of him. I so believed that by becoming part of the levers of power, I could one day use my position to do good in the world. I set out to Macalester College in Minnesota to study international politics, guided by the idea the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had gone there, and that the school flew the UN flag.

Upon graduating, I wanted to go to the Peace Corps. (I passed the first round of the US Foreign Service test, but didn’t make it past the second.) I realized I needed to go do foreign service before I could join the diplomatic corps. But one thing led to another, and paperwork drowned my dream of the Peace Corps, and I had to find something else — some other system to join and subvert.

That ended up being the rabbinate, which did not come easy either. After ranting about Maimonides on the phone to a Ziegler dean for a half hour, he told me I needed to be “socialized” and told me to go to Israel to study before considering becoming a rabbi. I did, for a difficult half a year, and got in after that. But I didn’t get the sense I was more socialized.

Rabbinical school was hard for me, because my beliefs were too strong to allow myself to be molded by anyone. I also grew disillusioned by my new concept, that religion could make a better society than politics was capable of. (This is what I used to transition myself out of the Sugihara dream.)

When rabbinical school took me back to Israel, I got kicked out of Talmud class for being furious that I couldn’t keep up. So began my disengagement from it all; I chose a new direction.

I started working with a Russian tutor in Tel Aviv to keep up my momentum I got from my eye-opening trip to Russia. I bar mitzvahed and taught kids and young adults in Siberia, also also learned that, perhaps, there is more to defining Judaism than religion alone. I joined a Yiddish group taught by Dr. Miriam Trinh to keep up my Yiddish from the summer I spent on the immersive Yiddish Farm (an experience, which I was told at school was a “waste of time.”) I strategized more with my Turkish friend Kerem on bringing Turkish products, and just as importantly, culture to America. 

And I just couldn’t stop until I left all of my old ideas about changing systems from within behind, and thought more about creating new ones.

Maybe that was not the lesson I should have been drawing from Sugihara in the first place. After all, his was a unique situation which I cannot imagine being replicated. It was a miracle from God and a triumph of the human will.

I want to go to Japan, because perhaps I’ll get the chance to know more about who he was, not just what he did. What really lies within a person is the cause of what makes them act, and it goes beyond the circumstances of what their act entailed. I know that my great-grandfather decided that Yom Kippur was a different day than what it would be held on today, maybe because inside, he was looking forward, beyond the Nazis and the world that he once called home, into a toward a place of new life— and it was only a moment of truth before God that this was revealed.

Kyoto Sweets and Tea Room Locations

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Genshitsu Sen, Daisosho - Rotary Magazine - August 2022

 

En Avant Garde: Furuta Oribe and Mavo!

En Avant Garde

Turning Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan  Mike Murase, Ed. (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003)

Mavo: Japanese Artists and The Avant-Garde 1905-1931 Gennifer Weisenfeld (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002)

 

Imagine … It's early 1924. Furuta Oribe XII's 20-something only son, Oribe xiii, is deep into an early midlife crisis. Life as an heir apparent is not cutting it. Endlessly attending and holding those stuffy tea gatherings every time a cherry blossom petal takes to wind or a maple leaf blushes. He's full-up-to-here with the pretentiousness of emptiness, with a capital "EMPTY". 

Besides, no one sits seiza anymore.

His family's legacy of quirky ceramics and interior design, so beloved by generations of aesthetes of yore, has not transitioned into the new social economy. The Western hungry ghosts have insatiable appetites for Japanese oldies-but-goodies Chinoiserie knock-offs. The nouveau riche industrialists are good to go 24/7 with assembly line versions of his great-great-great-etc. granddaddy's classics, but the output is so much vulgar stuttering, diluting the genius of spontaneity. They think a whack of a paddle, a swish of brown slip and a splat of green glaze and … a masterpiece. Ha!

Very soon he'll be installed with full rights as Mr. XIII. This will mean managing and supporting the dreary household staff. It's not his cup of tea.

Wriggling out of the nijiriguchi, he hangs up the "Sorry We Missed You!" sign on the roji gate and heads for the sento. In the genkan, the front page of the morning's shinbun blasts an editorial about the decline of morals of youth due to a dangerous and growing sense of individualism among the intelligentsia. Women are cutting their hair short, exposing their skin in public, and men are wearing unisex fashion. There's a notice about a group of artists who are staging an art show and poetry reading at a café in support of a petition for more affordable housing. Another about the round-up of students hanging out at that same joint.

Slipping into his new brown hounds-tooth Jodhpur, cream mohair jacket and forest green leather boots, he headsshitamachi to find that little café. His soul is dry. And he's very thirsty. Thirsty for a fresh look at the world.

Consider what might transpire if xiii had met the modernists of his own time, Picasso for sure … But this fantasy must serve this review, so he meets Murayama Tomoyoshi and his band of merry Taisho pranksters, the artists of the Mavo movement.

Turning Point is the long awaited book on about the impact of Momoyama generalissimo chajin Furuta Oribe on Japanese aesthetics. Hideaki Furukawa, the director of The Museum of Fine Arts in Gifu, offers in its early pages, "The impulse to challenge and defy convention could be called the defining theme of Japan's Momoyama period. 'Oribe' neatly captures this sprit of creative nonconformity…" The Oribe book made its debut in sync with the block-buster one-stop exhibition of the same name held at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art staged at the end of 2003 through early 2004.

Weisenfeld's dense opus, Mavo, is a chronicle of the activities, inspirations and impact of Mavo, the Japanese sociopolitical aesthetic movement dated 1905 - 1931. It primarily focuses on Murayama Tomoyoshi, the movement's mastermind, who seemed to have a whole lot of fun stirring up the already turbulent Taisho status quo, with a capital Quo. While a bit dense to casually, the narrative would serve very well if complementing an exhibition.

"Mavo was a self-proclaimed avant-garde constellation of artists and writers collaborating in a dynamic and rebellious movement that not only shook up the art establishment, but also made an indelible imprint on the art criticism of the period," she outlines.

Rigorous narratives supported by copious illustrations fill these two volumes. By re- and de-constructing reputations, myths and the physical remnants of the times, they address philosophy and production of art in a multitude of methods -- from clay and oil painting and sculpture, to architecture, theatre and the mass media. They also give us images of how Japan deals with errant aesthetes.

During each period, evolutions of artistic styles were inseparable from developments in Japanese enterprise, hegemony and industrialization, mass consumer culture, and social order. Bookending three centuries of isolationism, it may be argued that the volumes under consideration reflect "modernist" trends within its own time period, providing an interesting spectrum from which to explore the premise of Vlastos' book Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. (See accompanying review "I Am Therefore …")

"Artists are too often omitted from sociopolitical studies [of the Japanese intelligentsia], here they gain their rightful place in the debates of the early twentieth century. Including those who dealt with art: educators, bureaucrats, dealers, collectors and publishers," notes Weisenfeld.

As an exhibition catalog, Turning Point is a font of illustrations of stunning dogu for chanoyu. It also contains generous helpings of mind -candy about the who / how / huh of Oribe. In addition, it offers literary works, screen painting and even Portuguese maps and diaries. Each points to Oribe's impact as a major "player" in volatile and changing political, social and cultural landscapes of his time … and now.

A major focus of the book and exhibition is the new archeological scholarship being undertaken at historic Seto kiln sites. Sifting through household waste and layers of potsherds, they are documenting the popularity and mass production of Oribe-ness. What is lacking in both book and exhibition is a sampling of today's Oribe-ish ephemera such as plastic sushi bar shoyu dishes. Do I ask too much?

The editor states, "During the era of Oribe, a common aesthetic language bound all the visual arts more strongly than any other time in Japan before or since, and intimate working relationships existed among artists in different media." Until the advent of Mavo, perhaps.

Like the French impressionists in the late 19th century, Murayama and his avant-garde cronies took on the gadan (art establishment) of their time, unabashedly challenging conventional taste and social norms. And like Oribe, Murayama was charismatic and drew tremendous inspiration from his collaborations with others.

Where Oribe's jazzy naturalistic designs were to be "seen" mostly dimly lit tea rooms set to promote harmony and tranquilly, purity and respect, Mavo was a brash, in-your-face under- and-above-ground collective tour de force affront to the bitter reality of life Meiji / Taisho.

The origin and significance of the "Mavo" name itself seems to be contested among the group members. The most widely disseminated story has it coming from a random selection within a collective process with representation of the membership itself. While a hotly disputed conclusion, it proved to be a useful "brand", replete with mystery. The actual composition of "membership" also waxes and wanes with opinions, however scholarly, but consensus contends it fluctuated.

What is quite clear, however, is that they played turned everything upside down and backwards. For example, The "V" in Mavo on their publication covers is mimicked in several of the members' (men and women) hairstyles … or is it vice versa? Like Andy Warhol's "Factory" in New York of the 1960s, the group of young, largely self-trained Mavo men and women spent as much energy promoting its manifesto as making the "art" itself.

"While drawn together because of a 'constructivist inclination,'" states the author, "the Mavo artists did not assert ideological solidarity. Rather, they maintained distinct convictions, respecting each other's personal goals."

On the serious art side, Mavo was deeply imprinted by German Abstract Expressionism and the "happenings" of Dada and other modernist movements in Europe and the USA. Illustrations include architectural designs catering to the lifestyle of the proletariat. Graphic designs for leftist literary works, periodicals and promotional materials for Mavo events incorporated typographic influences of Europe (including classic Germanic script and Hebrew!).

Weisenfeld writes, "They strived to revolutionize the form, function and intent of Japanese art. They aimed to reestablish a connection they felt had been broken in the Meiji period with the codification of autonomous "fine art' based on the Western model … reintegrating art into the social (and political) practice of everyday life."

As a friend living in Japan said, it would take an exhibition in New York or Paris for Furuta Oribe to be publicly claimed by the Japanese as a favorite son in "mixed" (gai and Nihon-jin) company. And then there's Mavo. Can't imagine the French keeping Picasso a secret for 400 years, much less declaring the uniqueness of analytical cubism.

Originally published in Kyoto Journal, May 2004

Tea Huts 'R' Us?

As a 34 year practitioner of the Japanese tea "ceremony" chanoyu, literally tea’s hot water, I naturally gravitate to opportunities to see how contemporary artists try to replicate the architectural features that foster a unique ambiance in which a host and guest sit together to share a bowl of matcha. 

Thus, I was thus intrigued by the recent installation of Mineo Mizuno’s HARMONY on the lawn outside on SWP next to Resnick Pavilion. It reminded me of the nursery rhyme finger game "here is the church, here is the steeple ..." It seems to project an ambience without literally being a useful space!

In fact, typically one doesn't see any of the occupants of a tea hut. I intimacy is the cornerstone of hospitality of a tea gathering. 

Like most “classic” tearooms, it’s about 9’ x 9’, accommodating a maximum of 5 guests and one host. His interpretation includes a nijiriguchi, wriggling in entrance, that requires the guest to stoop and slide inside on knees, and a tokohoma, raised alcove for a hanging scroll and/or flower arrangement. It has wabi and sabi sentimentality of simplicity and rusticity. Inasmuch as the entire structure is constructed in branches of local wood, having a special tokobashira, the usually unfinished wood pillar at one side of the alcove, is redundant. This important structure punctuates the otherwise sparse interior with a sense of nature. Can you imagine sitting on the floor, much like a spot in the virgin woods?

He brings in the harmony, purity, respect and tranquility that is at the core of the mindfulness practice by the use of kanji characters of wa written on the outside of the tea bowl nested inside the wood stump to the left of the hut. Another bowl, to the right, has the characters for mizu, water, written on its surface. This could stand for the tsukubai, fresh water basin, that is always present in a roji, the garden in which a tea hut is situated. The guest will walk through the small garden en route to the tea hut as a liminal journey, a path of purification to leave all mundane cares and concerns outside.

Just for fun, I'm showing a comparison of Mizuno's nijiriguchi (center) with guests entering Shogetsuan at Hakone Gardens in Saratoga CA, (left), and Tom Sachs' (pictured, right) seen as host through his guest entrance at his installation at the Isamu Noguchi Museum (2016). 

A chaji, informal tea gathering, can be held just about anywhere one can whisk matcha in hot water and enjoy the company of friends.

Below (left) is the Water Pavilion created for the 1st Los Angeles (City) Public Art Triennial (2016 in Balboa Park) by Rirkrit Tiravanija, for which I produced a weekend of tea demonstrations celebrating the LA River. Right is a photo of my making tea for Eric Lloyd Wright and Mary Wright atop their yet-unfinished home in Malibu overlooking the ocean. (I used the rebars to contain the space.) 

For more information on contemporary interpretations of the chashitsu, I recommend Japanese Designers and Tea Houses. 

Lauren "Sochi" Deutsch has been a LACMA school docent since 2014. She is a licensed instructor of the Urasenke Tradition of Chanoyu and has done many tea demonstrations at schools, colleges and public events. She studied under the late Matsumoto Sosei, sensei beginning in 1985, and also was a guest in Kyoto at the Midorikai program. Lauren is a long-time contributing editor and board member of Kyoto Journal. Professionally, she currently is a free lance grant writer mostly in the arts and environmental issues. In addition to volunteering at LACMA, she is on the Community Advisory Board of Public Media Group of Southern California/KCET and deckhand-in-training for Los Angeles Maritime Institute. More info @ www.pacificrimarts.org. (All photos from the author.)
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Sensei, Okeiko Domo Arigato Gozaimasu!

Sensei, Okeiko Domo Arigato Gozaimasu!

Reflections on Studying Chanoyu in Los Angeles with Sosei Matsumoto, Sensei

By Lauren W. Deutsch, Sochi. 4/21/2019

Matsumoto Sosei, Sensei passed away February 21, 2019, on her 103rd birthday. While her given name was Shizuye and her nickname was Susie, her tombstone prominently identified her by her professional name: "Sosei S. Matsumoto". She died a chajin. It brought me to tears.

In the beginning, I felt as if I were Alice falling into the rabbit hole. What started out as a 10-week class through UCLA Extension became a 34-year journey into chado, the Japanese Way of Tea. I didn’t follow a rabbit scurrying about with a pocket-watch, rather the soft-spoken kimono and tabi-clad woman into the large tatami matted room set into her mid-city Los Angeles home. Week after week, sitting seizasometimes as guest, other times as host, I was given the opportunity to practice the choreography of the Urasenke school from an extraordinary teacher. Sometimes, I would just watch in awe from the sidelines of her hachijo(8 mat) room-within-a-room as one student after another let her direct them in the movements that resulted in whipping a bowl of matcha from her teaching position.

Natural?

Being a student of Sosei Matsumoto Sensei was an extraordinary experience for so many reasons, the least of them being the fact that despite her frequent admonition that things should be done “natural”, none of it was “natural” to me. I am an extremely left-handed, Jewish, cross-country skiing, feminist middle-age woman. Aside from developing some (literal) “dexterity” handling the utensils, walking on tatami, putting on kimono, etc., I learned how to clean a traditional tatami mat room with papered lattice shojipanels, to arrange the wooden shelves of the mizuya, preparation room, sweep a garden, wash charcoal, etc. I was truly honored when she applied to Urasenke headquarters to request that I be granted chamei,professional license as a teacher. It took about a decade, but was in no hurry.

I was invited also to become part of a unique community, sangha, of practitioners of the Way of Tea, of which she was recognized and highly respected as an undisputed teacher-as-leader. While there were many nuances that seemed “natural” extension of other students’ traditional Japanese cultural upbringing, Sensei would respectfully explain when I had made an error, such as when to ask her permission to attend a program presented by another tea school. This and other similar subtle teachings were as important as knowing the poetic name of the matcha, powdered green tea.

My Dear Student. My Dear Teacher.

Over the years, I have been privileged to have met many individuals – mostly middle-age Japanese women -- who became teachers; she had hundreds of “grand-students”. Some teenagers studied with her because a parent wanted them to be familiar with their Japanese heritage. Other would-be students left relatively soon, when they felt they had “learned ‘it’”; an even rarer fewer, especially those not of Japanese heritage, have continued like me for decades. She was sought out by folks who had practiced for a lifetime and accepted rank beginners. Like a favorite calligraphy scroll she hung in the alcove for class notes, each of us came to chado along a different path. Sensei’s eyes would light up at demonstrations when a child would be handed a bowl, and she would instruct him or her how to lift it up and turn it before drinking. I learned that a great teacher (of anything) teaches the student through the course material. She would often refer to me as “My dear student!” I would reply, “My dear teacher!”

Performance Art

For my first public demonstration, a Nisei Week program in 1986, Sensei had me wear one of her kimonos, a lovely light blue silk summer one withkumadori, Kabuki makeup, designs. With the help of other students with more experience, I was tied into the outfit for the first time in my life. My recently slimmed body, now packed with towels around the waist to affect a kokeshi doll fit, was not sure what had happened to its mobility, while my mind scrambled to recall the order of procedure. I then remembered that the kimono itself likely had more experience than I did, so I took advantage of the obisash to help support my possibly slumping posture, and the long sleeves gave me a practical reason to hold my arms erect as if to hug a tree. Now, with years of practice within my body, I try not to over-think the temae, procedure, rather to rely on my sensei’s indelible trust that I have met her standards to let the tea happen while the mind plays shotgun.

Special Occasions

I had the honor to accompany Matsumoto Sensei to Washington DC when she received her National Heritage Fellowship award from the NEA. We presented tea to the other NHF awardees at the Japanese ambassador’s residence.  In addition to celebrating each decade of her teaching Urasenke chanoyu, she held a special thank -you event at the elegant chandelier-studded Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the LA County Music Center during which time another student and I demonstrated in tandem a mirror image temaewith me doing the gyakugate,left viewed, version. It was a perfect balance to other demonstrations such as the annual Peace Begins in a Garden observance of the nuclear bomb drop on Hiroshima on August 6 at the sparkly Garden of Oz in Hollywood and the Osaka-Glendale Sister City event at a private house where Sensei offered me a can of sweet tea from a six-pack during our rehearsal.

With her approval, I attended the Midorikai program at Konnichian, Kyoto (Urasenke headquarters) as a short-term guest student a few times and have met so many wonder practitioners from around the world. Merely mentioning that I was her student would open doors of tea shops in Kyoto, with the proprietors’ proffering gifts for your Sensei. 

Sensei’s hatsugama, new year’s tea celebration, was held for over 60 years at her home. Upwards of 100 invited guests – accommodated in four to five sittings -- would be treated to a chakai, tea gathering with thick and thin teas and a kaisekimeal. It took about 20 – 30 of her students helped clean the first floor of her house, move furniture, prepare the intricate meal, refresh the two roji, tea garden, set up three chashitsu, tea rooms, create the parlor game in which each person will get a small gift, plus serve tea and sweets. It took an entire week to prepare with each person learning and doing their tasks with focus and appreciation. At the end of the long day, everything was put back exactly into its original place. She also presented tea with her students at the annual Obon Carnival at Nishihongwanji Temple in Little Tokyo, monthly for seniors at the Keiro Home in Boyle Heights and in alternate years at Nisei Week.

Lessons

My lessons relied on my keen sense of learning by oral method; there were no books in English about the seemingly endless ways one can put down or pick up a small object on a tatami in each of the four seasons and seemingly manifold micro-seasons. Most of the time her comments were in Japanese, a language I still don’t speak very well. After many post-work weekday classes ending after 10pm, I would retire to a nearby late-night sushi bar and scribble notes about what I had learned on the paper sleeve of the chopsticks, only to realize that I didn’t remember one nuance. It would not be until a month later that I would have the opportunity to try to do it again. Still, there were maxims I will never forget:

"No short cuts!"Every gesture needs to be accomplished in full for the entire temae, procedure to be considered complete. Like walking in the garden toward the chashitsu, tea hut. The destination is in sight, but one really needs to step on each stone to get there. This is especially important at the beginning of any pursuit. She emphasized this at the beginning of each student’s practice as host by admonishing, “Center yourself!” during which time she also took an initial breath.

“1 – 10; 1 - 10” ... Sensei would say there is no “graduation”. “If you graduate, you stop learning, generally.” She truly never stopped.

“Appreciate First!” Among sensei’s corrections / directions the term kansha,in the practice of the guest raising up a bowl of freshly made matcha, is the most important. While the teishu, host, places the chawan, teabowl containing the tea on the tatami mat rather than to hand it to the guest, it is not drunk until it is raised up ...  and received as if from a higher source.

"Show your mind!" Every gesture on the outside reflects our inner nature. During one class, I was about to replace the tea scoop on the tea container. Just before the bamboo touched the lacquer lid, she said that. No other explanation. Never repeated it. It shook me to the core.

“Zen Philosophy” The Way of tea is steeped in philosophy, but it’s not religious by any means. It’s not even a “ceremony”, but a way in which everyday activities – especially those offering genuine generous hospitality -- can be conducted in full awareness. While sensei’s husband, Eddie, was an engineer who contributed expertise to the 1969 moon landing, she felt that computers took people, especially younger generations, away from this moment, here and now. Everything is too fast. This was the portal into one of chado’s maxims: Ichi go. Ichi e.The irreproducible preciousness of this very moment. 

Having experienced the racism that surrounded World War II on all sides of the conflict, Sensei welcomed a wide diversity of people to experience chanoyu.It was a demonstration of her understanding of another tea maxim: wa kei sei jaku, harmony, respect, purity and tranquility. “My dream is always to make people feel relaxed and happy,” Sensei said.

Practice of the ‘Broken Heart’

I will miss my Dear Teacher of course! But I believe that my practice, as nurtured since 1985 by Matsumoto Sensei, is truly a Way of life that is firmly imbedded in my soul. Like Zen poets, the Jewish sage Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810) suggested that we must practice, even with a “broken heart”. 

So What?!

Like much of the social-cultural practices encountered by me during my first of 30 years practicing chanoyu with a traditional master teacher, it was many years before I realized why so many of the tea folk in our shibu had similar first names, those beginning with So ... They were listed in the front of the directory, alpha by last name, followed by other folks, alpha by last name. Since it was one of many, many questions I might have asked of those who seemed more entrenched in the way, I gave it up as a priority.

When it appeared that a chamei, professional name indicating a level of accomplishment (or endurance), would be mine, one evening in okeiko, something like the following transpired:

Sensei: I wonder what you tea name gonna be.

Me: I’d love to be So Nu, Sensei.

Sensei: Iemoto will pick it.

Me: Sensei … is there any way that I can be So Nu (putting down chashakuscoop, holding hands like two juggling balls in the air just went up as two coming down, eyebrows in an ironic uplift). EEdish-go, sensei … So Nu?!

Sensei: So Chi, So Do …?

Me: It could mean that I’m still a baby after 30 years sitting seizaand still only a beginner … or would that be presumptuous, like Suzuku’s Beginner’s Mind. If only, Sensei …

Sensei: So I, like Do I Chi? (The way a Japanese person would say Deutsch, as in the land of Germany.)

Me: It’d be OK if it were So La … like Do, Rei, Me … Fa … Da … Da …Ti … Do!