aug2009

KOBORI Sojitsu (the 13th Grand Master of the Enshu Sado School )

The summer has finally come.

When I visited many places like Fukuoka, Iwakino, Fukui and others in the middle of rainy season, I’ve been keenly feeling to be anxious about the heat of weather, instead of raining. In Tokyo, there are more and more occasions of torrential rainfall just for a certain period of time, rather than merely a seasonal rain.

I have perceived once again that changes in the weather, driven by the global warming, effect changes about what’s going on around us.

The other day, we welcomed the delegation of OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, at our dojo. Their visit is to come into contact with the Japanese culture in spare moments from their important meetings.

Mr. Akio Tanaka, the current Japanese Ambassador to Austria, was kind enough to play a guide for the delegation. Its visit was for more than 3 hours by overrunning 1 hour and half from the original schedule.

For the visit, each member of delegation has properly learned procedures; not only how to drink a tea, but also how to purify hands with a ladle at Tsukubai in the adjacent garden of the tea house. Furthermore, they seemed to relish this moment by straining to listen to the sound of Dosuimon .

Even during the tea ceremony, they looked at not only scroll picture at alcove but also flowers, vase, kettle, tea utensils and tea ceremony bowl with a great respect. It seems to me that they have understood the assortment of tea ceremony as a whole.

In the situation where both of us share the moment and commune with each other, I assume that this sort of occasion enables us to be what we should be as human being, such as beautiful is beautiful or fun is fun, instead of getting us to feel the frontier or various cultural differences among us.
As I have always been telling you that tea ceremony makes you enrich the mind and spirit, thanks to that day’s event, it brought the above-mentioned point home to me in a proper manner.