Word: chanoyu
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...January is national tea month. To celebrate, peruse Tea Culture of Japan: Chanoyu Past and Present at the Yale University Art Gallery. Brought to Japan from China in the 9th century, it took a few hundred years for tea to catch on, but by the 1500s it was all the rage in Japan to have tea masters prepare powdered tea in elaborately choreographed ceremonies. About 100 objects, including kettles, bamboo tea scoops and ceramic tea bowls are on display through April 26. 1111 Chapel Street, at York Street, New Haven...
...colored substance that had the most influence on the structure of Japanese taste is a green powder called matcha, or ceremonial tea. Whisked with hot water to a bitter jade froth and served in coarse-looking, irregular bowls, it is the basis of chanoyu, the tea ceremony. The aesthetic of tea has permeated all visual culture in Japan, from architecture to the appreciation of nature...
...wholly Japanese practices. In time, tea came to define the difference between the Chinese and Japanese ideals of exalted beauty: the former based on symmetry and minute gradations of fixed etiquette, the latter on irregularity and "natural" grace. Sen No Rikyu (1521-91), greatest of the tea masters, established chanoyu as a kind of psychic enclave in which warlord, samurai, priest and scholar could shed the burdens of rank and power by refreshing themselves at the well of nature. A developed Japanese form of Rousseau's "natural man," living in harmony with a world he has not made...
...commercialization of chanoyu illustrates a wider fact about Japan: namely that it is the best country in the world in which to study the impact of mass audiences on elite cultural forms. When something like tea becomes so popular, is it democratized? Not necessarily. It may become more snobbish, taking on a coercive preciousness to sustain its mystique when the old mechanisms of aristocratic patronage in small groups have corroded. Japanese snobbery, Japanese cultural insecurity, are hog heaven for merchandisers: once they get into a cultural feeding frenzy, the Japanese can make Rodeo Drive look modest...
JAPAN. The ancient Japanese ritual of chanoyu takes place in a little teahouse beside a stony brook rimmed with flowers. Guests learn how to kneel, bow, and savor the subtleties of the venerable ceremony while munching sweet cake and sipping bitter green...