Newsletter No. 7 - Book Tsuruko

''Look, there is a real tea master here.''

One day, my friend told me about a tea master living in Japan and sent me a documentary film about her tea ceremony. I took a look into the film and as soon as I starting watching, I became immediately pulled into the world of this tea master, Tsuruko Hanzawa.

She is living in the house surrounded by plants, that she actually cooks for her tea ceremony.
Just as other tea masters in Japan, Tsuruko is organising the tea ceremony for the formal groups normally. But what makes her so special is that she pushes the border for new challenges in the age of almost 80.
She packs all her tea- and -cooking utensils for Kaiseki* meals to make Chaji* and drives throughout Japan by herself to find the ideal place to organise her tea ceremony.

*Kaiseki: traditional Japanese course meal served before a ceremonial tea
*Chaji: a type of tea ceremony which is served with full course of Kaiseki meal. It may last up to 4 hours.

During this film, she mentioned: ''People often ask me, who I learned the way of tea from? Who is my master? I always answer, the trees and the plants are my master. There are so many things to learn from them, still now.'' She often uses the vegetables and the plants that she grows by herself, but during traveling, she takes a walk to find the wild vegetables and plants in the field.

Tsuruko let the things happen as they do: she organises the tea ceremony for whom she bumped into during the travel. Her guests can be the fishers in a small fisher village in the west or can be the high school students living in a rural area in the north. For them she prepares and serves everything outside at the fisher's harbour or the open field surrounded by hills.

Her purpose of doing this is to keep questioning herself, if she could keep the same quality of tea ceremony equally to everyone independent on the social classes, and if she could appreciate the blessing of Ichigo Ichie (one time, one meeting) from her heart, as Rikyu, the tea regend and the master of Wabi-sabi, meant in 1500.

I myself don't learn the formal tea ceremony, as I find often that tea ceremony today takes little too much into account on the surfaces such as the form and the name, although, I have great respect toward the original concept of the way of tea, which Rikyu started.
The essence of tea is all about simply to enjoy the moment and the taste of tea, sometime with people, sometime alone - every occasion is appreciable.

This book, Tsuruko, was published on behalf of her wish, in which she wanted to archive somewhere in some form the wisdom of ancestor and her practice to pass down to the next generation. This book delivers the essence of her tea practice while introducing her handmade meal for Chaji with beautiful photographs and texts. In this book, she doesn’t explaining a lot, but only the essence with great respect toward nature.
I strongly wanted to introduce this book to you, because her tea is not only about the way of tea, but also the way of living.

For more information, please have a look at here.

Thank you very much for taking a moment.

Warm regards,
Ena