“A special place where time doesn’t really exist:” Practicing the Japanese Way of Tea
“We step outside the world that we inhabit for most of our lives into a special space where time really doesn’t exist, and the only thing that has any importance at all is the dynamic that develops between the host and his or her guests. In the tea room we say: Let’s not be on a schedule. Let’s just take the time that it takes.”
Interview by Caitlin Coad with Drew Hanson
Drew Hanson is a licensed teacher of the Urasenke Tradition of Japanese Tea. He demonstrates the Japanese Tea Ceremony throughout the Greater Philadelphia area, and teaches students at Boukakuan Japanese Tea House and Garden in Columbus, New Jersey. I sat in on a couple of his lessons at his tea house, and we talked one afternoon about the tradition.
How did you get introduced to this?
My interest in Japan started when I was in high school I became interested in Japanese ceramics. And I grew up in Connecticut, not terribly far from New York, and when I could on weekends I would take the train into New York and go to the museums, and just stand and look at these ceramics that interested me so much. Initially I didn’t know what it was about them that I found so interesting, but over time I understood more about the hands that made them. They weren’t perfect, they weren’t glossy and shiny, they were different, like something that an ordinary person could make. And that fascinated me. As I proceeded through college and grad school my interest in Japanese art kind of spread out and I became interested in other forms of Japanese art.
And then when I moved here and we were beginning to build the garden, we wanted to follow some principles of Japanese gardening…I thought, “Hmm might it be nice to have a tea house here in this garden, the way a lot of Japanese gardens have.”
About halfway through the building of the tea house I thought, ‘Well, if we’re gonna have a tea house maybe I should know something about the Japanese tea ceremony.’ And I just by chance went to Shofuso on a Sunday during the summer of 1995 and it happened to be the day that they were doing the monthly demonstration for visitors. So I sat in on it, and I was hooked. I’ve been doing it ever since. And I’ve grown through all the licenses… to the very top.
Is there a title for it, if you’ve reached the top?
I have a license, which I suppose if we were to translate it into Western academic terms would be like a professor. That was granted to me after 21 years of study.
How would you describe a Japanese tea gathering?
At its most basic, it is a social interaction between at minimum two people, where one person hosts a second person and shares time in the preparation of a bowl of tea, with a pure and open heart and no expectation of return.
You share time with people in a social situation that is rather unique, in that we step outside the world that we inhabit for most of our lives into a special space where time really doesn’t exist, and the only thing that has any importance at all is the dynamic that develops between the host and his or her guest or guests. And then it’s over, and it may never ever happen again.
Right before you enter there’s a stone basin with water in it and each guest symbolically washes hands and mouth. You are kind of symbolically washing off the outside world. Our everyday life we symbolically wash away; we don’t take that into the teahouse. So we are kind of coming in mindless.
But it does require focus?
Ultimately it does, but it is something that happens. You kind of get caught up in what is going on, what the host is doing, and you almost melt into that experience.
What is the typical flow of a gathering?
I tend to refer to it as a ritual. It starts the same way, every time, and it goes through a step-by-step process to the end, and it always ends the same way. It’s actually like a three-act play: the first act is the cleaning, purifying; the second act is making and serving the tea; and the third act is cleaning up. And at the end, everything is put back to where it was at the beginning. So it’s kind of this circle.
I noticed too there’s a lot of attention paid to the materials, and discussion about who made them, where they’re from — is that also a part of it?
Yes it is. Alongside teaching the actual process, we also teach a kind of connoisseurship. Because there are so many different types of bowls, so many different types of tea containers, so many different types of tea scoops, that we admire the workmanship that went in. All of these items are handmade; they’re not mass-produced. And we want to take time to examine these pieces and get some sense of the hands that made them.
Each gathering is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It will never ever happen the same way again. It can’t, because time has passed and we are different; we have grown, we’ve changed. So we take the time to look at these items and say, ‘oh I really like the way this feels in my hand,’ you know, getting your senses involved. We’re so conscious in our daily life of time; we’re always on a schedule. Well in the tea room we say: Let’s not be on a schedule. Let’s just take the time that it takes.
Thinking about the ceremony as a social interaction, that makes sense to consider the people who made the utensils you’re using–you’re looking at the person behind the piece.
Exactly. They’re kind of an invisible presence. We’re using their creations.
So it sounds like the process is standardized. But there are ways you are creative too, like the way you choose the theme for each gathering for instance.
There is this continuity to the preparation and the serving, but there are elements within that that may change. Using utensils, for example, that may never have been intended to be used in the tea ceremony. I have different utensils that I have found over time that can be used, but they aren’t the traditional forms. That’s okay, because back in the 16th century when Sen no Rikyu was revolutionizing the whole process, he started bringing things into the tea room that had never been there before, bamboo for example, and soup bowls from the kitchen, handmade from local potters. And we have a number of talented potters in this area and why not use their pieces? They don’t have to be from Japan. They don’t have to have a provenance as long as your arm. They could have been made last week, and you look at it and say, ‘I really like that, that’ll work.’
It is nice to think that if you came to a tea ceremony here, it would feel special or different than if you went to one somewhere else.
Yeah exactly. It makes things really interesting because you take a different experience away with you. If you go to another place, where the house is much more traditionally Japanese in architecture, it’s going to be a different experience. Because this is a historic property I wanted the [teahouse] building to look from the outside as if it could have been an outbuilding to the [main] house. So it has more of a American 18th century look to it than a typical Japanese tea house would have. However, when you open the door and you enter, you’re not in 18th century America. You’ve kind of transported yourself.
Is there some way you discern that a ceremony was really great?
Initially you may not quite understand how this is possible, but you feel it. There’s something that happens among all these people by the end, there is a sense of having been through an experience together. And you come to the end, and you are in a slightly different place from where you were at the beginning, and you kind of just feel it.
How would you describe the feeling?
Peaceful that you’ve had this kind of interaction with other people on a level that you wouldn’t normally have. Let’s say if we had a cocktail party where people are milling around and sipping this and nibbling on that, you don’t get the kind of unanimity of experience and feeling that happens in a tea event.
The conversation during a tea gathering will be about what is happening right now. The conversation might be about the taste of the tea, or how well the sweet went with the tea, and also the utensils that were used. But we don’t talk about religion. We don’t talk about politics. We don’t talk about the stuff that we preoccupy ourselves with outside the Tea Room. We’re focused on what is going on right now, not in the past, not in the future, but right now.
As a teacher, how do you evaluate students?
In our school, the Urasenke school, we have a very clearly defined curriculum. Every student begins at the same place and progresses step by step to the end, and they all end at the same place. As a teacher I instruct them and observe them, and watch their proficiency grow. It’s very subjective on my part, when I feel that they have reached a point where they not only know the procedure, but they are presenting it without the agenda of having to prove anything to me or to anyone else, where it just comes out of them. That student then would be ready to take the next step forward.
How can you tell when somebody has lost the agenda, and is more in the flow?
At the beginning, students tend to be very tense, and you can see a lot of tension in the shoulders. And you notice the folding of the the cloth, in the beginning it’s really hard, and you can see tension in the arms and even in the student’s breathing. And eventually all of that goes away. And as they gain more and more confidence in doing this, it seems to just come out of their body.
You have to have a kind of kinesthetic sense of where your body is in space, and it has to be there all the time at that same location. It doesn’t register when you’re wearing western clothing, why you’re doing that. But if you were wearing kimono, which has very long sleeves with the arms open, the sleeves hang straight and you get this almost dance-like movement you can see with the arms, and the way the sleeves hang. And the whole body moves differently in a kimono than it does in western clothing.
Why do you think most of your students come and practice?
I think they come to it for a variety of reasons, all of which I don’t really know. But there has been over the past, I would say 20 years, a tremendous interest in Japanese culture. It seems Japan has become a tourist destination in the last 20 years, much more so than before. And when people go to Japan, I mean you’re blown away by the country and the cultural traditions. In Japan you can find cultural practices that go back hundreds and hundreds of years that people are still doing. And I think in the rush of life now people do like sometimes just putting on the brakes a little bit and doing something different.
One of my students is a chemistry professor, and very science oriented, very quantitative in her orientation. And I remember her first few lessons when she started folding the the fukusa, the napkin, she had to have it exactly measured. I would try to explain to her that it’s okay, it doesn’t have to be you know, x number of centimeters this way or that way. And it was difficult for her at first to kind of break that. But here we want to get away from that.
Right. For so much of what we do, there are markers of achievement. If you do x, y, and z, you get this result. And for this, it seems like you’re forced to be measured on a quality that isn’t really measurable.
It’s not like putting two numbers together and getting a sum let’s say, it’s not that. People have that agenda, they want some sort of quantitative result that they can see, and we have to say, ‘You’re not going to know an answer.’ There is no concrete answer, you just kind of have to be free.
And the way you achieve is by, sort of not thinking about achieving.
Mhmm. Exactly.
This conversation has been condensed and edited.
Interview by Caitlin Coad. Illustration by Fe Melo.
Boukakuan Japanese Tea House and Garden – located in Columbus, New Jersey and open by appointment. Drew offers lessons for beginners and advanced students here, and the site has information and resources for anyone who wants to learn more
Urasenke Philadelphia – nonprofit educational organization dedicated to supporting and promoting awareness of Japanese tea ceremony (chado or chanoyu in Japanese) in Philadelphia and the surrounding region
Shofuso Japanese House and Garden in Fairmount Park
