Tearoom Tip-Toeing into 2024: A Dance of Fire, Water & Natsume Lacquerware, Powered by Asahi Latte at 7T+ & Koicha at ○間 [ma] -(aka Kyoto Cuplets Part IV)
The fourth and final poem inspired by a December visit to other old capital as I explore Kamakura’s famous Samurai-sword-cleaning spring water to start the year.
My first natsume. Call it a tea canister if you must. A matcha jar if you prefer. But I like natsume best.
I’ve been drinking matcha most mornings of my life since the year 2009 when I transitioned from an electric frother to a bamboo (chasen, if you will). That’ll be 15 years of matcha-ing this year. And yet, I feel nothing if not a novice. A beginner. A gerb (as in Gerber, as in baby food).
I only sat for my first formal tea lesson in 2022, an invitation to an Edo Senke School session via my dear friends Diagoro San and Kanako San at Tea Master. The location was a Silver Lake adjacent tea room that had survived since the Japanese American Incarceration period of World War II. The walls had seen things. Tea things. Other things. Perhaps I will write more about that experience another day.
My second lesson was only this fall, an Urasenke School trial at my neighbor’s home, which I wrote briefly about here. Tea is a silly topic to try to write about, as you have all witnessed over nearly a year of my attempts. But matcha, or any tradition of tea ceremony, is even more of a challenge. It’s part of the reason why I’m in a kind of analysis paralysis about when, which, how, where, and how much I want to study a tradition.
It's why I stand before the prospect of building a hearth in the floor of my tea room trembling in my pleated trousers. As I’ve alluded to in the past, as much as I admire and am drawn to tradition, I’m terrified of it. I don’t know if it has room for me. Or if I have room for it.
Consider this natsume—a piece made by lacquerware artist Takahiro Yamamoto of that stopped be in my tracks when I saw it at the Kyoto gallery Nichinichi last month—my tip-toe twinkle step closer to the leap out of the airplane.
While were at it, let’s ask the other most important tea questions of 2024:
How wide is the taste gap between waters? Rather, between reverse osmosis and spring for samurai sword washing. And fires? Gas flame versus electric clicking kettle.
Besides, what qualities must a spring have to properly wash blood off a sword?
The electric heated R.O. is thinner, flatter but easier to whisk. The gas boiled spring water on the other hand—from Kajiwara Tachi-arai no Mizu (Kajiwara’s sword water) where the character played by Nakamura Shido II in 13 Lords of the Shogun (the big-budget 2022 NHK Drama about Kamakura) washed his sword after slaying Chiba Tsunetane (played by Nobuto Okamoto) at least according to authors, my friend Frank, and Burritt Sabin—is fuller bodied, deeper and much harder to whip into fine bubbles. So much so, in fact, that even my camera refused to cooperate this morning to take a focused photo of the brew.
The short of it is that I’ve wanted to delve into fire and water after so many years in the woodlands (the teas themselves) and, like the natsume, I’ve dared place my hand on these two dials to start 2024. Consider these two more centimeter-sized tiptoes toward the edge of deeper study. Lucky that Kajiwara’s sword-washing spring is a short bike ride away at the stunning Asahina Kiridoshi, one of Kamakura’s 7 mouths, or narrowly carved mountain entrances to the capital. The photos of the water collecting are by the one and only Martin Hsieh (http://reception.cc/rps).
Both bowls this morning featured a ujihikari-varietal matcha from Gokasho (Furukawa Seicha 古川製茶to be exact)but carried by probably the tea shops where I felt most at home in Kyoto,7T+. Ujihikari is a savory varietal. A soupy, chewy, stew of a brew. A delicate sprinkle of sweetness on an otherwise wedge of umami cake.
7T+ is a place for tea freaks, made by a tea freak. Nakano Kenji—who allegedly owns a color-wheel’s worth of warm-ups featuring 中国 (the Chinese characters for China) across the chest and was rocking a blue one on the day I visited—sources teas from all seven genres (plus herbals) from across Asia. Kenji uses his own swatches (white, yellow, green, blue (for oolong), red (for what we in English often call black tea), and black (for pu’erh and other fermented teas)) and has all the teas out in little petri dishes that you are invited to pick up, smell, touch. The informal—let’s call it a tire-shop or mechanic’s garage of tea drinking—vibe allowed me to chop it up with fellow tea heads George (of George With Tea and Obubu Tea Farm fame) and Daimon (a young tea enthusiast and musician).
Then, to top it all off, Kenji lifted two phrases out of my own heart and spoke them aloud.
1. That he prefers Chinese tea to Japanese teas for most non-green teas.
2. That he drinks matcha every morning.
I’d long be led to belief that my decade and a half informal AM matcha habit was a sort of white-guy appropriation exercise that I had been borderline ashamed of in “serious” tea circles. To meet a shop owner in the stronghold of traditional tea who avowed to the joy of whisking a morning bowl in his own way gave me yet another centimeter of encouragement toward the leap into the wide-open sky of tea traditions that I’ve tip toed around doing for over a dozen years, wondering only if I was allowed.
After nearly a football matches’ worth of tea banter with George, Daimon, Kenji, and his staff, I topped off the whole experience by ordering an asahi-varietal matcha latte. Let’s get that shortly.
As single cultivar matchas grow more popular—and shops like Tea Dealers, 05, and Kettl have sold them for a while, as opposed to the blends long preferred by tea schools—I’ve been curious about asahi in particular and had just tried a thick bowl of asahi koicha a couple hours before at ○間 [ma], a another excellent tea room not far from the 5-story pagoda of To-Ji temple, where the first recorded tea vendor in Japan (1403) still quasi-operates at the south gate flea market on the 21st of every month (according to Tyas Sosen’s book “The Story of Japanese Tea”).
The asahi koicha at Ma blew my measly matcha mind, and I informed the gent doing the whipping that it was the best koicha I had in my life (out of an Asato Ikeda bowl, no less). And it was. So when I had the opportunity to try it in latte form at 7T+, I couldn’t turn it down (even though neither shop carried Asahi to buy, hence the Ujihikari cop).
Okay, now that the above recap has exhausted us all to start the year, let’s turn to the poem inspired by said latte. I wrote it while scurrying through the streets of Kyoto and it concludes these old capital cuplets, for now.
Wishing that you all tip-toe closer into spaces you love this year, especially if they scare you.
Asahi Latte
Drinks it every day,
He says
Makes me want to jetpack across
The ocean
& into the arms of my teacher
And scream
“Daigoro San, we’ve got a dragon
on our hands.
Wait.
In our hands.”
To walk around Kyoto and drink it
Is to type poems on notes apps
Because you simply can’t help
Yourself
“No texting”
I promise
I’m rating
No
I'm ranting
No
I’m writing
A latte poem
Fit only
For the outside
Of a plastic cup
About the best day
Of my life
On the day when
We lost a cup
Because if I’m part
Microplastic
At least I belong here
Fully
And if all the glass
In every cup left
Shatters
Drag your tongue
Along this umami ice rink
A slab head cold bath healer
After the burn of sauna-hot
Moreness
And laugh and get it
When someone says
“I don’t fuck with Chinese green tea like that”
As you get gut punch
Pulverized by the fresh
Strong
Sophistication
Of a powder fashioned
With all the crass subtleties
Of Kabuki face twists
And I’ve never been miles from a stage
So maybe
Let’s compromise
And call it
“A St. Patty’s Rerun”
And watch me graze upon thee
From straw thatched bunkers
Wearing tinted four-leaf clover shades
Because I’m the luckiest guy on earth
And those mechanical crab legs could
Reach down and squeeze me dead
And the smile wouldn’t so much as bend
A single fiber
Of my green stained mustache grin