Japanese Tea Culture

Front matter

KUMAKURA Isao

Japanese

Tea Culture

Contents

Chapter1 The Creation of Wabi-cha

Solitary Chanoyu 16 The Singularity of Japanese Culture 17 Japan and Korea 18 The Place of Sen no Rikyu 22

Nijiriguchi and Mawashinomi:

Preface to the English Edition

The history of tea in Japan began in the ninth century. Enthralled by Chinese Tang-dynasty (618—907) tea culture, Japanese aristocrats imported tea and fostered its cultivation in Japan. However, as their interest in China waned, the custom of drinking tea also essentially disappeared. At the end of the twelfth century, the Zen monk Yosai (1141-1215) brought tea production and drinking methods back to Japan from China, this time newly developed Song-dynasty (960-1279) techniques. This is the origin of the powdered steamed green tea (matcha) now produced only in Japan. In his book explaining tea-drinking methods and effects, Kissa yojoki (Drinking Tea to Nourish Life), YOsai also heralded tea as an effective medicine, a panacea, for all illnesses. As a result, tea-drinking culture took root and flourished in Japan.

Through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, land set aside for tea cultivation expanded in Japan, and tea-tasting competitions in which participants attempted to distinguish between various kinds of regional teas became hugely popular. Tea was more than a medicine; it found favor as the drink of choice among aristocrats and powerful military men. They in turn became interested in the utensils used for tea drinking, such as tea bowls and powdered-tea containers. As they refined methods for making delicious tea, a new lifestyle culture was born: chanoyu (literally “hot water for tea”), the art of preparing tea.

Yet, whereas the chanoyu of the upper classes was a luxurious affair, another style of chanoyu was also emerging, one that sought spirituality in the preparation and drinking of tea and held

12 Preface to the English Edition that true sufficiency was to be found in insufficiency. The Buddhist monk Juko (1422-1502) expressed these new ideas in his Kokoro no fumi (Letter of the Heart; see appendix 1). This was wabi-cha, or wabi tea, which drew on the aesthetic concept of wabi to elaborate a sparse, spiritual approach to tea.

Takeno Joo (1502-1555) of the next generation deepened the link between Zen Buddhism and wabi-cha. From his position as a merchant and master of linked verse (renga) in the town of Sakai, Joo brought the then-popular aesthetic of linked verse—that is, an aesthetic of elegant simplicity—into chanoyu.

In turn, JOO greatly influenced Sen no Rikyū (1522-1591), who is credited with the full formulation of what we know today as wabi-cha. Rikyw’s accomplishments were numerous: first, the elaboration of the tea room and the architectural structure for wabi-cha; second, the creation of original utensils for use in wabi-cha; third, the formalization of tea-preparation procedures (temae) in a tea gathering; fourth, the refinement of the format and content of the tea-gathering meal, known as kaiseki; and fifth, the conception of a wabi-cha philosophy. Indeed, Rikyū’s tea was so innovative that it provoked the anger of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), the preeminent military ruler of the time. Hideyoshi feared Rikyū as a political threat, and ordered him to commit ritual suicide.

The development of wabi-cha over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—and the distinctive culture which emerged from it, accommodating everything from food and clothing to dwellings—made for a new Japanese lifestyle culture, but it also drew on the worldview and folk customs of Japanese antiquity. The history of wabi-cha spans only a little more than six hundred years, but it is in fact linked to far older periods of Japan’s history. This could well be one reason why chanoyu continues to have such a significant influence in Japan today. This book aims to

Preface to the English Edition 13 analyze the origins and purpose of wabi-cha from its emergence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the vantage point of Japanese lifestyle and culture.

The Japanese version of this book presents a chronology of historical materials related to the history of tea. For this English edition, I have prepared a new appendix of historical sources comprising summaries of a selection of texts that will hopefully aid the reader’s understanding of the book’s contents.

The first Japanese edition of this book was published in 1977. I was then thirty-four years old; it was a time when few scholars studied chanoyu, and almost no research on tea was being conducted outside of Japan. Great advances in scholarship have been made since, including the 1989 publication of Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu (University of Hawai’i Press), coedited by Paul Varley and myself, and that of the eleven-volume Chadogaku taikei (Compendium of Tea Studies; Tankosha, 1999- 2001), a project overseen by Sen Soshitsu, fifteenth head of the Urasenke tea lineage. Notable, too, was the founding of the Japanese Society for the Studies of Chanoyu in 1993. An increasing number of fine works on chanoyu have also appeared overseas. I hope you will have a chance to encounter them.

I would like to hereby express my thanks to Martha J. McClintock for her translation of this volume, to Tashiro Mari, John Breen, and Gretchen Mittwer for seeing it through the checking and editorial process, and to Tanimura Reiko for her invaluable help with the reference materials. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Kondo Seiichi, who not only recommended this book for translation and publication but also supervised the entire undertaking.

Kumakura Isao October 2022

Chapter 1 Idiosyncratic Culture

Solitary Chanoyu

The chajin, or tea devotee, is a solitary figure.

Of course, tea gatherings (chakai) are always a great success, and if a special event is held by a particular tea organization or lineage then attendance can rival that at gatherings held by new religious sects. And yet, in the end, the chajin, one versed in the art of chanoyu and a true follower of the way of tea, is solitary. Chanoyu itself occupies a solitary place within Japanese culture.

What I mean by “solitary” relates first to the question of how many people actually talk about chanoyu. For example, it is unlikely that it would feature in a discussion among businessmen about shared pastimes. So is it perhaps a topic discussed by young female office workers? Again, this is unlikely to be the case. Even if there are many people who have taken tea-ceremony lessons or attended a tea gathering once or twice, there are really only few who would claim chanoyu as a pastime of theirs.

Let me make a brief comment about pastimes here. Some may frown on pastimes as being play without purpose. However, this is absolutely not the case. I hardly need to cite Homo Ludens (The Person Who Plays), that 1938 book about the importance of play in culture by the famous European historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), to make the case that a culture that loses the element of play is a culture that is spent. People play. And indeed, the spirit of play is at the basis of all that enriches human culture. Pastimes are, in a sense, the straightest expression of that spirit of play.

Pastimes transcend questions of personal advantage; they make life worth living. Therefore, a person whose pastime is chanoyu is someone who finds chanoyu to be a reason for living. But there are probably fewer people than we might imagine who truly spend their days with chanoyu as their raison d’étre.

Those for whom chanoyu is a reason for living will find true companions among others who similarly live in chanoyu. It may well be that the act of exchanging conversation about the joy and wonder of chanoyu can only occur between those who are trying to live in the spirit of chanoyu. Such people are a minority within society as a whole. The pursuit of tea is a solitary endeavor.

The Singularity of Japanese Culture

The culture of Japan itself is solitary. When we think about Japan, we see the mixing of the culture of the broadleaf evergreen forest region and the maritime cultures of the Pacific Rim, with a later layering from China, Korea, and Europe and America, all contributing to what we now call Japanese culture. Few cultures are made from such a complex admixture of so many diverse sources. While one might suppose that this would result in something with a global or universal quality, that is not necessarily the case. Rather, it resulted in an extremely singular culture. There exists some sort of Japan-style mold, and no matter what type of culture flows in from other countries, it is pressed into the mold and emerges as something very compatible with the existing culture. I have a sense that such a mechanism exists within the structure of Japanese culture, allowing it to voraciously consume all kinds of other cultures; once absorbed, they become intensely Japanized and practically impossible to export elsewhere. Historically speaking, no other country has assimilated imported cultures as effectively as Japan. At the same time, very little culture is exported from Japan to other countries in pure form. Even though other countries value

Japanese culture, they find it hard to engage in dialogue. In that sense, too, it is solitary.

Of course, I am fully aware that there is, counter to this theory of the singularity of Japanese culture, the idea that it has a universal quality. Anime and sushi, for example, have certainly taken the world by storm. And yet this is surely the result of globalization’s rapid advance, and so there is at work here something other than a true understanding of Japanese culture.

Basically, a culture with a universal character acceptable anywhere in the world enters Japan and undergoes an extremely singular refining process, only to become something hard for the rest of the world to accept. Tea is a typical example of this.

Japan and Korea

The drinking of tea is entirely commonplace. Undoubtedly, in an age when tea was yet unknown, water, flavored hot water, or alcohol were about all there was to drink. Even today, there are any number of cultures unfamiliar with tea. Nonetheless, the fact is that the culture of a very confined geographical region spanning southern China to Southeast Asia, where a beverage was made by processing the leaves of an indigenous tree, has today spread across the globe. Throughout the world, tea is referred to by a word derived from either cha or té, both words of Chinese origin; they are essentially global words. Despite the universal adoption of this beverage, it is curious that only Japan has created a distinctive culture like chanoyu.

I visited Korea for the first time in 1977. There I traveled around to investigate its tea culture, and what I had in mind as I walked from place to place was the singularity of Japan’s chanoyu. Korea in July was horrendously hot. I walked along treeless roads, searching for shade, and I dwelt on the similarities between Japan and Korea. The Korean farm villages were beautiful. Rice paddies stretched out as far as the eye could see, like the wide blue ocean. There were none of the gaudy, dirty billboards or rest stops that spoil Japanese farm villages. There were only diligently working farmers here and there among the rice fields. Perhaps this was rural scenery of the sort that I saw on returning to my family’s ancestral village as a primary-school student after World War II. It felt as though the rural landscape of old Japan had been moved to this spot. Maybe it was because the flora looked so similar to Japan’s that I thought Korean farm villages were beautiful; and maybe that explains why I searched for something Japanese within them.

In Korea, particularly the south of the country, the flora are essentially the same as those in Japan. From the wildflowers and weeds along the roadside to the trees lining the streets, and beyond to the shape and taste of the vegetables that appear on dinner tables, all are the same as in Japan. Naturally, I thought there would be tea plants, as well as a tea-drinking custom, but I was wrong. There is no general tea-drinking custom in Korea today, and with rare exception, there are no tea plantations.

If we look back through history, we see that Korea is rich in tea history, but then at a certain juncture tea rapidly disappeared. That process began in the Yi dynasty (1392—1910). So when did tea first appear on the Korean Peninsula? Historical chronicles such as the Samguk sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms; 1145) and Samguk yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms; 1281) reproduce the traditional explanation that tea was brought from China in the early seventh century. Essentially reliable records, however, indicate that Korean envoys dispatched to China brought back tea seeds on their return to the Kingdom of Silla in 828, and planted them on Jirisan Mountain in the south. This seems close to historical fact.

If this is the case, then it would appear that Japan and Korea followed a very similar trajectory in terms of the period and environment in which tea seeds were imported. In brief, the influence exerted by the Tang, a particularly powerful Chinese dynasty, on surrounding smaller states was immense. Outstanding cultural products flowed out from the Tang dynasty to surrounding countries. Tea was one such product. Around the time that envoys from Silla were heading to the Tang court, Japan, too, was assembling a fleet of ships to carry envoys to the Tang. Japanese monks enamored of Tang Buddhism took passage on those ships. The earliest record of tea in Japan appears in an entry in the Nihon kōki (Later Chronicle of Japan) for 815, just thirteen years before the record for Silla. When Emperor Saga (r. 809-823) and his entourage embarked on a progress to Karasaki in modern-day Shiga Prefecture, the most senior monk at Sūfukuji Temple, Eichū (743— 816), made tea for the emperor. Fichū had traveled to China as part of an official mission, and had spent some thirty years in the Tang capital of Chang’an. He brought the Chinese custom of drinking tea with him back to Japan.

It is unclear how tea developed in Korea after the Goryeo dynasty (918-1392) unified the Korean Peninsula, but the tea brought to Japan gradually disappeared from society, barely surviving in the limited context of court ritual. However, as the dynastic rulers of China shifted from Tang to Song, the quality of the culture also changed. A new type of tea appeared. It is generally believed that it was the Zen monk Yosai who was responsible for the introduction of a new form of tea to Japan. Some seventy years before YOsai brought tea to Japan in 1191, the Song-dynasty style of tea had already spread to the Goryeo kingdom. After Song envoys visited the Goryeo court in 1123, they left a record of their travels in a book titled Xuanhe fengshi Gaoli tujing (Illustrated Account of the Embassy to Goryeo in the Xuanhe Era; 1124).

The book mentions the envoys’ experience of tea rituals at the

Goryeo court:

The tea prepared in Goryeo was bitter and disgusting, but everyone was thrilled to drink the Chinese brick tea (tuancha; Jp. dancha). During the ceremony they used a tenmoku-style tea bowl and a celadon water pitcher, and the silver brazier and kettle used to boil the water were all in the Chinese style.

During the twelfth century—which corresponds in Japan to the late Heian period (794-1185) when retired emperors exercised political power—Song Chinese tea was enjoyed by Koreans principally in the Goryeo court. Koreans and Japanese accepted tea in an extremely similar fashion.

Tea drinking gradually spread in Japan, and just as it was becoming a pleasant pastime, a massive change happened in Korea. In 1392, the Goryeo dynasty gave way to the Yi dynasty (1392—1910). The Yi dynasty took a strict Confucian ideology for its governing principle. This rigid Confucianism chose corrupt Buddhist temples as its first targets. Temples were subsequently destroyed, and many monks were branded as pernicious and sent into exile. The aftershocks of the persecution struck tea practices. Tea was not simply a beverage in Buddhist temples; rather tea-drinking situations amounted to banquets where alcohol and food were served. This is precisely why tea was condemned by rigid Confucian ideologues. And yet it would take another several centuries before tea was effectively eliminated from everyday life in Korea, and people lost interest in it.

Here I must note that steeped or infused tea (sencha) was the only form of tea that barely survived in Korea. In China, tea preparations changed from the Song-dynasty use of powdered and whisked green tea leaves (matcha in Japanese) to the Ming-dynasty (1368-1644) practice of steeping tea. Chinese-style steeped tea differs from the present-day Japanese variant in that it is primarily pan-roasted green tea mixed with semi-oxidized oolong-style tea; a vestige of this Chinese style of steeped tea survived in Yi-dynasty Korea. While Song-style powdered whisked tea grew ever more popular in Japan, tea culture faded and declined on the Korean Peninsula. Up until then, tea had followed a very similar historical trajectory in Japan and Korea. But, from around the fifteenth century, these two peoples headed off in separate directions, as is symbolized in their tea culture. Japan now began to embark upon its own distinctive path.

The Place of Sen no Rikyū

Was it not the appearance in Japan of wabi-cha that led Japanese tea to set off on its own unique, and hence solitary, path? Up until this point, tea played a part in the special occasions in people’s lives, nothing more. There were no specialist makers of tea, nor facilities for tea-making. People enjoyed their own personal styles of tea, and enjoyed drinking tea in banquet settings or during festivities. But then, in the Muromachi period (1336-1573), tea appeared as a new performing art. Tea changed the various formats of the banquet themselves, and eventually accommodated them within the art of tea. This led to the creation of the tea gathering (chakai).

Tea gatherings inspired new forms of the meals served at banquets. The “formal meals” (honzen ryori) served on official occasions throughout the Muromachi period also gradually began to change under the influence of chanoyu. As Portuguese missionary and sailor Joao Rodrigues Tcuzu (1561—1633) wrote in his unfinished Historia da Igreja do Japão (History of the Japanese Church; 1627), a new chanoyu style influenced banquets, replacing the previous seven- or five-course meals. This was in the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568-1600), the age of Rikyū. In the established formal seven-, five-, or three-tray meal format, meals comprised cold, hard-to-eat foods, in quantities greater than anyone could possibly manage. Conversely, in the new chanoyu meal style, which was known as kaiseki, guests were served with ready-to-eat warm food prepared in an edible quality and quantity. Chanoyu now transcended the simple drinking of tea, as it incorporated a meal and alcohol, demanding beauty of the utensils and adding to the mix the beauty of etiquette. It involved the presentation of all these elements in a single, complexly structured manner. This novel, stylized way of consuming tea, drawing on the refined simplicity of the wabi concept, is what is known as wabi-cha.

You can remove one component of wabi-cha and that component will certainly not lack meaning on its own, but wabi-cha is complete in its totality. Architecture, gardens, utensils, cuisine, tea-making procedures (temae), and style (shuko): it was Sen no Rikyū who in a single masterstroke perfected and gave striking new emphasis to all these elements. Rikyū heralded the arrival of a new culture. The creation of wabi-cha reached its fulfillment in Rikyū.

And yet, precisely because the structure of Rikyt’s wabi-cha was so sound, it could not tolerate the accommodation of any other tea style. This is what I meant when I referred at the outset to the solitary nature of chanoyu. Rikyi’s tea was not comprehensible to all. Or, rather, it was a tea that was possible to understand but not always possible to perform. Was Rikyū himself aware of that? The Nanporoku (Southern Record; 1690), an authoritative seven-volume source on Sen no Rikyi’s way of tea, states:

There is no question but that, within ten years, the fundamental way of tea will die out. When it dies out, people in society will believe, on the contrary, that it is flourishing. The miserable end —when tea becomes completely a matter of worldly amusement

—is visible now.*

I do not know if these are actually Rikyii’s words. But at least the person who created the Nanporoku a century after Rikyū’s death knew in his heart that Rikyti’s chanoyu (wabi-cha) was not something that could be understood by the many; it would go out of style and survive in solitude. The people who did carry it forward were “outsiders,” so to speak.

Today tea is striving once again to walk the main road of Japanese culture. Or I should say, rather, that it seems to be trying to find its way as a universal culture for the world, not just for Japan. What possibilities are there for chanoyu to shatter its solitary shell and walk the cultural mainstream? One belief has it that the more singular it is, the more universal its appeal will be. Indeed, the question of whether chanoyu can find a universal path is one that remains to be answered.

In this book, I am in fact setting out in pursuit of the before and after of the creation of wabi-cha. To investigate the styles and forms that wabi-cha gave rise to, and the traditions it was rooted in, is to be struck yet again by the enormity of Sen no Rikyū the person. What Rikyū created—or, conversely, what Rikyū excluded —is truly immense. Rikyū invented a new paradigm with his establishment of wabi-cha. He drew on elements of ancient Japanese belief systems and folk culture and gave them a new life in the tea room (chashitsu), in the tea-making procedures, and in the utensils.

In so doing, he invented a new cultural common sense for Japan.

* Nishibe, “Zen Monks and the Formation of the Way of Tea,” trans. Hirota Kimiko, 46.

Nijiriguchi and Mawashinomi: The Crawl-through Entrance and Passing the Bowl

The Birth of the Crawl-through Entrance

I am sure I am not the only person to hit my head or knock my back as I entered the tea room in my early days of studying tea. The crawl-through entrance, or nijiriguchi,* is extremely small at only around 2 shaku 3 sun tall in Japanese traditional measurements; that is, about 69 centimeters tall. In width it is just 2 shaku 1 sun, about 63 centimeters. How odd to have to enter and exit via such a narrow entrance! This is just one awkward thing people encounter when starting tea. Indeed, since the Edo period (1603— 1867), some people have ridiculed the need to crawl in and out of a tea room. Tamiya Kitsuan (d. 1815) wrote in his Guzasso (A Collection of Foolish Thoughts) of 1833 that “snatching up one’s straw sandals and squeezing inside is as becoming as climbing into the sack with a streetwalker [yabochi].”* (The Japanese term yabochi refers to a streetwalker who, with no fixed place of abode, sells sex to clients outside on a straw mat.) Undoubtedly, Tamiya made his comment in a spirit of malevolent ridicule. And yet somehow it conveys the strangeness felt by anyone unfamiliar with tea on first seeing a crawl-through entrance.

* The nijiri of nijiriguchi derives from the verb nijiru, meaning to shuffle forward or backward in the formal seiza posture. The -guchi (kuchi) here means “entrance.” To enter through the nijiriguchi, one must kneel down on the threshold and bend forward and, with the help of arms extended in front, crawl forward into the room.

t Kumakura, “Rikyu and the Birth of the Nijiriguchi,” trans. Alfred Birnbaum, 41.

So who invented this extraordinary entrance that seems to forbid entry, and why?

It was Sen no Rikyū who invented the crawl-through entrance. Incidentally, the Japanese word used during Rikyū’s time was typically Ruguri (stoop-through), not nijiriguchi. In any case, the boats floating by the river’s edge in the Hirakata district of Osaka are thought to have been the prompt for Rikyt’s invention.

The entrances to the cabins of the Hirakata riverboats were small, and [Rikyū] thought there was an interesting wabi quality to how people had to bend down to enter them, so he adapted that form of entrance for the small tea room.*

Riverboat cabins have low ceilings. Samurai and commoners alike had to bow their heads and crouch down to enter. This posture was wabi in feel, and for that reason interesting. There is an inventiveness in Rikyu’s idea here that suggests the insight of a real master.

Inspiration from the riverboat cabin entrance led to yet more new imaginings. Cultural historian Hayashiya Tatsusaburo (1914-1998) proposed that in a riverboat, people have a shared destiny. With the riverbed just a single plank of wood away, it amounts to a case of “bitter enemies in the same boat.” People who emerge from the tight entrance into the cabin come to constitute a new group with a shared fate. Indeed, this is one possible interpretation.

Architect Horiguchi Sutemi (1895-1984) researched Rikyū’s

* Matsuya, Rikyu-den [Transmissions Pertaining to Rikyū]. The original text of the Chado shiso densho dates to the first half of the seventeenth century, and was compiled by Nara tea master Matsuya Hisashige (1567-1652).

tea rooms and recorded his impressions of the Myokian tea room as follows:

If I were to use a more familiar expression to convey my feelings on entering the Myokian tea room via the crawl-through entrance, I would say I felt a shiver run down my spine. I was thrilled, and I completely forgot myself. Surely this is what it means to say you are mesmerized.*

This was indeed the formative experience that led Horiguchi to study tea rooms. When he declared himself mesmerized, he was speaking not only of the crawl-through entrance, but it clearly played a major role in shaping his experience. We, too, can often get a cool, refreshing impression on our first sight of the tea room from the crawl-through entrance. Surely, though, we experience some doubts when we try to explain that the invention of this extraordinary entrance was inspired by nothing more than that of a riverboat cabin. After all, the crawl-through entrance marked a 180-degree reversal from the usual Japanese entrance into a room from a hallway via a sliding door panel.

When the renowned figure Rikyū invented his crawl-through entrance, which seems to refuse access, did those around him meekly accept the idea? Historical documents indicate that critiques of the entrance, like Tamiya Kitsuan’s, appeared in the mid- Edo period, but during Rikyū’s own day, the crawl-through entrance encountered no criticism. Rather, people promptly took to it, and it proliferated. If that was indeed the case, then was there perhaps some preexisting knowledge that made it easier for people to accept the concept? For example, was there something in

* Horiguchi, Rikya no chashitsu [Rikyt’s Tea Rooms].

Crawl-through entrance (nijiriguchi)

that era which people thought resembled the crawl-through entrance, an entrance through which people could only pass by crouching and folding their legs beneath them?

A search for something similar in that period suggests the so-called “mouse gates” (nezumi kido or nezumi do), the entrances to the box seating for audiences at noh and kabuki theaters. In the theater pictured on page 30, there is an entrance beneath the surrounding curtain. In the kabuki theater of the early Edo period, the announcer would read the titles of the plays by the entrance, and those who had paid an admission fee would crouch down and enter the theater via a narrow entrance next to a guard. The entrances got the name “mouse gates” from the fact that they were so narrow that only a mouse could get through them.

Mouse gates have a surprisingly long history. The author of the Kiyü shoran (Survey of Interesting and Entertaining Facts; 1830), Edo-period scholar Kitamura Intei (1783—1856), references a “fox gate” (kitsune do) mentioned in the early thirteenth-century Kokon chomonju (Notable Tales Old and New), explaining that it meant the door was as small as a foxhole. He went on to say, “There is a still smaller one called a mouse gate. It serves as the entrance to theaters that stage sarugaku [the performance arts of noh and kydgen].” And yet the example quoted in the Kokon chomonju was like a simple wooden back door. We can find countless examples of visual evidence for mouse gates in early genre paintings. Because the majority of those pictures postdate Rikywi’s death, they are inconclusive as evidence. However, let us take one example—namely, the Rakuchu rakugai zu (Scenes in and around the Capital) screens. These screens, said to have been painted approximately a quarter-century after Rikyū’s death, show a narrow hole-like entrance at the front of a theater in the Shijo-kawara district of Kyoto.

The term “mouse gate” or nezumi do dates back even earlier. It actually appears in a document from the fourteenth century period of the northern and southern courts. The entry for May 13, 1339, in the records of Zenrinji Temple in Wakayama Prefecture refers to a fundraising performance of sarugaku performance art. The term “mouse gate” appears there. This means that in Rikyū’s day, and, indeed, long before, a mouse gate served to separate the space of the performing arts from the everyday world.

The inner spaces marked off by the mouse gate were those of

“Mouse gate” (nezumi do) in front of the Edo-period Nakamuraza kabuki theater—detail from the Edo fuzoku zukan (Edo Seasonal Genre Scenes). Reproduced by permission from Suwa Haruo, Kabuki kaika (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1970).

sarugaku performance art and of kabuki drama. This was a realm apart, ruled by a space and time distinct from that of the quotidian world. Any who entered that world were drawn headfirst into a dramatic space. Can the same not be said of the crawl-through entrance in chanoyu? A tea-room interior is a realm apart from the everyday world. What might occur between host and guests once they enter the tea-room? The sense of anticipation reaches a peak as one stoops though the crawl-through entrance. This is an entrance that turns back the unregulated flow of the everyday world. The entrance has an almost religious quality, in the sense that the world into which the guest has struggled to gain access is completely transformed. Is this not the essence of the crawl-through entrance?