Wagashi (和菓子）literally means “Japanese sweets.” In tea ceremony, it plays a vital role as an appetizer for the main course; matcha green tea. Having wagashi first mitigates the bitterness of matcha, creating perfect harmony in your palate. The visual presentation is just as important as the taste. For generations, wagashi craftsmen have been trying to …
March 11… It has become the day no Japanese can forget. But the nature didn’t have any discrimination by nationality. Some foreigners living in that region then lost their lives. Young Montgomery “Monty” Dickson from Alaska was one of them. After graduating from University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), Monty worked as an English language teacher …
Obtaining interesting images for the update articles is a hassle, I admit. The press announce from the Metropolitan Museum of Art last month, therefore, is a great news for me! Especially they have over 300,000 digital images of Japanese items. On February 7, 2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art implemented a new policy known as …
“The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! He will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not …
“The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; …
Since I wrote about ikebana, Japanese flower arrangement, it seems to be a natural transition to move to tea ceremony, another practice that represents Japanese culture. Well, I first tried to introduce it with my own words, but I give up, since Kakuzo Okakura has already so eloquently explained in English 110 years ago. Rather, I will …