Fuden-an: Leaves from a Tea-journal

　　From times long past, in Japan the start of the sixth month has been made the point during the year at which warmer winter clothing is abandoned, for lighter, unlined clothing better suited to surviving the heats of the Japanese summer. At the same time the solid, opaque, more wind-proof sliding-doors of traditional housing have always been replaced by sliding doors of horizontal reeds contained within wooden frames (these both affording some degree of privacy, and yet also allowing breezes to pass from room to room throughout a house); and the shaping of the purified ash in the standing floor-brazier is changed, from the most formal form, used in May, to a more relaxed form. Thus, for both spirit and body, the sixth month is one characterized by fundamental change.

　　In the Enshu School, the Tea-napkins (fukusa) used from this month onwards, too, are made from a lighter silk than those used during the winter months. And, when these are folded in order to purify the dry utensils used in offering Tea, because the summer material is more gauzy the impression received is one of greater coolness. Again, wind-chimes, which delicately sound in response to the slightest welcome breeze, are hung from the eaves of the Tea reception-room; and, on the verandas beneath such eaves, are set to send up their wavering smoke coils of smouldering mosquito-repellant. The total effect is inexpressibly that of 'summer'. One's wish here is to maintain as irreplaceable the wisdom and cunning devices, developed as a part of everyday life, and by which Japanese people have made changes in meteorological conditions opportunities for addressing life afresh.

　　Though this is what I feel, I do also catch an undertow of murmuring from my readers: What can we do, if we happen to live in a high-rise apartment? Here, flexible contrivance must be one's first principle. The land of Japan is formed from an archipelago; and, season by season, those that live in its most northern parts have to deal with conditions quite other than those that face people living in the extreme south; and those that dwell on its western seaboards must combat conditions that considerably differ from the problems of persons that reside along its eastern coasts.　And, therefore, what is most important is what may emerge from the hearts of those that have long lived with, and therefore well understand, the requirements of such various conditions.

　　I myself cannot but feel that the principles that guide the wise aesthetic of cha-no-yu are replete with hints as to how to do this. Every individual is unique; consequently, what is visible to one person may be invisible to most others, and what one individual may notice can often be neglected by almost everyone else. Given such facts, one of my greatest desires is to become more able to discover, within what is physically imperceptible, what is there to be discovered, and then expressed. In this respect, however, any clinging to stale preconceptions must prove the death of any hopes of artistic renewal. The function of artistic fundamentals is that of affording the birth of new discoveries; and the maintaining of a spirit of freedom appears - to speak only of my own self-awareness - essential to artistic growth.

　　The greatest reason for cha-no-yu having survived down through so many centuries can only be ascribed to the validity of this perception. It is because received forms are transmitted that those received forms can, as the occasion requires, also be boldly changed, or even abandoned. Would one be in error in assuming that it is only through maintaining a spontaneous balance between what is given and what defies that given that one can best act in accordance with the spiritual essence of cha-no-yu? For this is the spirit with which it seems to me that our founder, Lord Kobori Enshu, was most deeply endowed.

　　It further strikes me that Lord Enshu's Tea-master, Lord Oribe, could only find his own way to free himself of the weightily persuasive burden of his own Tea-master's - Sen-no-Rikyu's - very distinct and severe aesthetic, by himself likewise striving to break through Rikyu's given forms. What Enshu then did was to add, to this resistance, a strong element of elegant 'class'. Those elements with which he wished to imbue and thus renew the Tea of Rikyu, and then the subsequent, and necessarily somewhat eccentric, development of that, undertaken by Oribe, were threefold: (1) the by-then ancient yet still deeply respected aesthetic of the court nobility that had seen its heyday during the Heian period, (2) the aristocratic elegance of poise that that particular class had most esteemed, and (3) an almost global awareness, of the wares that were then being fired in places as far from Japan as China, Korea, southern Asia, and even the Netherlands. The results of this tripartite vision are what are now regarded as the very embodiment of 'elegant spareness '. And it seems to me vital that we that should all both draw artistic sustenance from the main-stream of Lord Enshu's aesthetic principles, and also not neglect the patterns of praxis that he left, and are still faithfully handed down within our School.

　　But, finally, I should like to return to the theme of seasonal change of wear. It seems to me a fact that global warming makes no longer reasonable any waiting until the traditional date for changing to lighter, unlined, and thus more bearable summer-wear. Recently, come the end of spring, the rate of humidity can now rise to appalling levels; and so I myself feel that, should the May of any given year happen to prove both hot and muggy, substituting lighter and more ventilated summer wear for the heavier and well-lined robes of winter should be seen as only good sense. With respect to this point, I myself should wish to urge the drapers that furnish us all with kimono, etc., to take this view, and of course the needs from which it springs, into far greater account. What is important is neither time of year, nor cut, nor mere fashions in fabric-design, but, instead, the offering of the possibility of the experience of being dressed in a kimono that is breezily loosely-woven and also welcomely unlined. My own impression is that this point may not be generally understood. What may here be most vital is a greater nurturing of a true understanding, of just why Japanese people have every year chosen to replace one kind of clothing with another, and of why they have for so long found doing this more than merely physically refreshing.