MR. YAMASAKI, DR. NITOBE, THE AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR NASU.
THE HOME IN WHICH THE TEA CEREMONY TOOK PLACE.
One of my hosts, who was thirty-two, hoped to see all his tenants peasant proprietors before he was fifty. The relation of this landlord and his tenants was illustrated by the fact that on my arrival several farmers brought produce to the kitchen "because we heard that the landlord had guests." The village was very kind in its reception of the foreign visitor. A meeting was called in the temple. I told the story of Wren's Si monumentum requiris circumspice and pointed a rural moral. Some months afterwards I received a request from my host to write a word or two of preface to go with a report of my address which he was giving to each of his tenants as a New Year gift.
This landlord's family had lived in the same house for eleven generations. The courtesy of my host and his relatives and the beauty of their old house and its contents are an ineffaceable memory. From the time my party arrived until the time we left no servant was allowed to do anything for us. The ladies of the house cooked our food and the landlord and his younger brother brought it to us. The younger brother waited upon us throughout our meals, even peeling our pears. At night he spread our silk-covered futon (mattresses). In the morning he folded them up, arranged my clothes, swept the room and stood at hand with towels, all of which were new, while I washed.
When on our arrival in the house we sat and talked in the first reception-room we entered, I noticed that outside the lattice a company of villagers was listening with no consciousness of intrusion, in full view of our host, to the sound of foreign speech. It was a Shakespearean scene.
Out of its setting, as it is often witnessed to-day, the tea ceremony seems meaningless and wearisome, an affected simplicity of the idle. But as a guest of this old house of fine timbers weathered to silver-grey I found the secret of Cha-no-yu. This flower of Far Eastern civilisation is an æsthetic expression of true good-fellowship, and a gentle simplicity and sincerity are of its essence. The admission of a foreigner to a family Cha-no-yu was a gesture of confidence.
Five of us gathered late in the afternoon of an August day in the cool matted rest-room in the garden. We looked on the beauty that generations of gardeners of a single vision had created. Our minds rested in the quiet as in the quaint phrase, we "tasted the sound of the kettle and listened to the incense." At length at a signal we rose. Led by the priestess of the ceremony, our host's aunt, a slight figure in grey with snow-white tabi and new straw sandals, we passed by the dripping rocky fountain, with its lilies, and the azure hydrangea of the hills which, some say, suggests distance. The hut-like tea-room, traditionally rude in the material of which it was built but perfect in every detail of its workmanship, we entered one by one. According to old custom we humbly crept through the small opening which serves as entrance, the idea being that all worldly rank must bow at the sanctuary of beauty. The tiny chamber held, besides the wonderful vessels of the ceremony, a flower arrangement of blue Michaelmas daisies, and an exquisite scroll of wild duck in flight in the miniature tokonoma,[ [28]] the tea mistress, our host and four guests. We drank from a black daimyo bowl which had been made four hundred years before. We passed an hour together and in the twilight we came out from the little room as from a sacrament of friendship. A year afterwards my host wrote to me, "Yesterday we had Cha-no-yu again and you were in our thoughts. During the ceremony we placed your photograph in the tokonoma."
After dinner we had kyōgen[ [29]] by distinguished amateurs, one of whom, a neighbouring landowner, had lately appeared before the Emperor. After the plays he painted kyōgen scenes for us on kakemono and fans. He painted the kakemono as he knelt with his paper lying on a square of soft material on the floor.