FIVE

POTTERY LANDSCAPES

In the West, wine drinking is a transparent affair. The enthusiast well knows that in order to appreciate the colour of the wine, the only acceptable glass is one of absolutely clear crystal. The purist will even frown on the finest cut glass, since the added sparkle denatures the visual experience. This is why drinking from the rarest vessel, be it a Tiffany Favrile floriform goblet or a Gallé cameo glass beaker, a silver chalice or the Holy Grail itself, is oenologically superfluous, even counterproductive. Such beautiful glasses are too fragile, too rare, too decorative. Their particular beauty detracts from that of the wine, such that their use is pure ostentation. The ideal is, as M.F.K. Fisher so astutely put it, ‘glasses no more ornamented than the bubbles they imitate’.1 In Japan, the opposite is true, for it is the wine, sake, that is crystal clear, giving centre stage to the drinking vessels. There are most notably three forms of pottery sake cups: the largest, the guinomi, exists in a great variety of shapes, often similar to both the larger and taller yunomi teacup and the classic chawan of the tea ceremony; the choko (o-choko), which resembles in size and function a shot glass; and the saucer-shaped sakazuki. The guinomi shares most of its aesthetic characteristics with its larger and more famous counterpart, the chawan, though while the guinomi and choko are about as small as a drinking vessel can comfortably be, the chawan can only be held comfortably in two hands.

The tea bowl is near the top of the Japanese aesthetic hierarchy, making it an object of the utmost prestige.² However, though the guinomi is often referred to as a mini-chawan, its use is neither codified nor ritualized, governed not by arcane ritual refined over centuries, as is the case for the chawan, but by the commonplace rules of quotidian etiquette and politesse. Thus the guinomi may be of any shape and quite variable in size, as long as it can contain sake and be pleasant to drink from, while the chawan must easily permit wiping and whisking, and the tea must form an attractive pool and be easy to consume. Removed from the aesthetic expectations demanded by the tea ceremony, the guinomi is less bound to tradition and thus more amenable to experimentation. In behavioural and gestural terms, even though sake is offered sacrificially at both Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, sake drinking is a secular activity circumscribed by the contingencies of the gastronomic context. One might add that the intoxicating effects of sake are most certainly deritualizing, to say the least. The guinomi exists as an individual entity (not as a type, as is the case for most Western wine glasses), which makes all the more unfortunate the recent trend of serving sake in Western-style crystal glasses.3 Pottery sake cups share all the aesthetic principles of the tea bowl, though to different effect. The value of a tea bowl is in part determined by the manner in which it highlights the colour and texture of the frothy, light green tea (macha) particular to the ceremony, thus traditionally limiting the acceptable chromatic spectrum. (Rikyū basically reduced the possibilities to red and black.) On the contrary, the practically colourless transparency of sake, permitting all forms, motifs and colours, makes it the ideal liquid to reveal the beauty of the cup itself. The chawan is best admired empty, the guinomi is most intriguing half full. Here, the same aesthetic reveres both the opaque and the transparent, the brightly tinted and the colourless, the stimulating and the intoxicating, plenitude and the void.⁴

Certain philosophers would insist that to grasp any single object fully, one must know the entire universe. This holistic approach is central to Japanese aesthetics, where each and every art form shares certain central principles, most notably a strong link to the seasons. Each season, divided into three parts for added refinement, is figured by highly coded norms of motif, colour and form, often expressed in the most subtle allusions, metaphors and correspondences. Yet the most immediate context in which to grasp (figuratively and literally) the guinomi, which is after all a drinking vessel, is that of gastronomy, the art of the table. While table settings in the West tend to consist of matched sets of identical dishes, Japanese cuisine valorizes unmatched ensembles chosen not only to celebrate the beauty and rarity of individual objects, but also according to numerous ambient exigencies: the complexities of seasonal cuisine (where many foods are traditionally matched to specific forms of pottery); the unique decor of the restaurant (including woodworking, painting, calligraphy, ikebana, kimono fabric patterns); the seasonal state of the local and regional landscape. Most spectacular are the platings, where food often appears as miniature landscapes: sometimes the entire plate, sometimes just a minute detail, might evoke the decor and exterior landscape. Murata Yoshihiro, chef of the famed Kikunoi restaurant in Kyoto, offers a definition of kaiseki cuisine, the multi-course meals originally related to the tea ceremony, having over the years become not only the refined cuisine particular to Kyoto but also typical of Japanese haute cuisine in general. He quite simply says that it is ‘eating the seasons’.5 Another Kyoto chef, asked by a Zen monk about the reasoning behind his cuisine, responded, as had so many ikebana masters before him, ‘To reflect nature precisely’.⁶

Kaiseki is an elaborate meal the complexity of which, always attuned to locale and season, offers a microcosm of Japanese cuisine. It will typically include dishes representing all styles of cooking (boiled, braised, sautéed, fried, grilled, steamed), all modalities of rawness (simpliciter, dried, smoked, salted, sugared, fermented), and all sources of food (mountain, field, ocean, river, sky). As in all Japanese art, such meals take part in a complex representational matrix, suggesting the landscape, season, climate and even time of day, by a subtle yet codified set of analogies and juxtapositions. The perfection of each element (food, sake, pottery and so on) is made even more complex by the dynamic and non-hierarchical relationship between the varied elements. This culinary aesthetic is manifest, in a highly condensed version, in the Japanese bento lunchbox which in its most sophisticated examples features kaiseki cuisine. The holistic-cosmological symbolism of the bento is evident in its form, as is attested to by the shokado lunchbox, whose square shape with four equal compartments approximates the kanji for rice paddy, , the core of Japanese agriculture. Sometimes the representational allusions are purely metaphorical, sometimes literal, as in the planked barracuda served in Kikunoi one evening in December 2009, which arrived in the form of an autumn landscape. In the cookbook from this restaurant, entitled Kaiseki, one of the dishes for February is anago (saltwater eel) with rice, where the long eel fillets are wrapped around a savoury rice mix; the accompanying photo is of the dry garden of Ryōan-ji, where the form and colour of the roofed walls surrounding the white gravel parterre is evidently homologous with the eel dish. Such correspondences are neither mannerisms nor pretensions, but an integral part of the Japanese culinary arts.

Kikunoi restaurant, Kyoto, December 2009, planked barracuda.

The passion for the diminutive is typical of Zen-inspired aesthetics, where the cosmos can be compressed into the form of a small garden, the garden reduced to the disposition of food on a plate, and the plated ‘landscape’ represented by the patterns on the plate or guinomi, whose constituent features derive from the macrocosmic five elements of the Shinto and Buddhist cosmos: fire (kiln), wood (ash), earth (clay), metal (glazes), water (cooling agent). Representation implies both abstraction and metaphorization, such that – just as the qualities of each morsel on a plate are enriched by the adjacent foodstuffs – the profundity of metaphor depends on both the specific beauty of each of the terms and the vast range of qualities that simultaneously link and separate them. That said, the appreciation of a guinomi must begin not in metaphor, but with its uniqueness as an object, not with symbol but with material. It might seem superfluous to stress that the guinomi has a front, back, lip, interior and foot. But since the particularities of Japanese aesthetics, especially in relation to pottery, diverge greatly from Western forms of connoisseurship, these terms take on different significance in each context. If the conventions of aesthetic judgement are different in the West and in Japan, so too are the protocols of etiquette. In the West it is generally considered ill mannered to turn over the dinner plates in order to discover their mark of origin, and to refrain from commenting on the table setting is in many circles considered a mark of refinement. In the tea ceremony, on the contrary, close observation is part of the ritual, and to neglect to do so would be disrespectful. During the much less formal situation of a dinner, in Japan standard etiquette demands that bowls be lifted to the mouth, while in the West one needs great dexterity and subtleness to get the last drop of soup from a bowl, which should never leave the table, and never even be tilted in certain directions. This suggests that in Japan the everyday relations to utensils are of greater familiarity and ease. Politeness demands detailed, prolix examination and praise, not silent appreciation. Every aspect of the chawan must be observed and commented on, and contrary to most Western pottery, the foot (kōdai) and the interior (mikomi, pool) are essential. Thus, while a strictly formalized procedure does not exist for examining and appreciating guinomi, in fact the experience is not unlike that of examining a chawan, though without the ritual. Such heightened attention spans the difference between the functional and the aesthetic, bringing connoisseurship into the everyday realm. One finds, for example, that front and back are often equivocal, variously determined by visual cues on glaze patterns, by a curve or thickness appropriate for the placement of the lip, or by the very form of the piece; that the stone-like inertness of pottery is often made dynamic by an inner spiral that forms a veritable whirlpool, or through glaze drippings that suggest continual melting; that the formal features of the interior are transformed by the mobile yet transparent presence of the sake, with its shift from horizontal surface at rest to diagonal flows and eddies, as well as by its refracting and reflecting optical qualities.7

Nishiki restaurant, Kyoto, December 2009. Fish purée and fried noodles in the form of a chestnut.

The aesthetics of tea bowls and sake cups demands total visibility. If we wished to reduce visibility to its rhetorical dimension, it might be said that in the West the perception of most traditional pottery depends on a unique perspective (a sort of synecdoche, where the whole is intuited from a single view), while the Japanese tea aesthetic demands panopticism and even pansensorialism, of the sort only available through manipulation of the object. These different epistemological and ontological protocols result in the fact that while much Western pottery bears only one surface meant to be primarily visible, most Japanese pottery is created to be seen from every possible angle. Furthermore, tactility is of the essence, a fact well expressed in Nooteboom’s Rituals, when Taads first handles the tea bowl by Ryōnyū mentioned in the previous chapter:

Kawabata Kentaro, guinomi, 2008.

there are also rules about the shape, all of which were drawn up by Rikyu, how the bowl should feel when you hold it, its balance, the way it feels to the lips . . . and of course the temperature. The tea must not feel too hot or too cold to your hand when you hold it, but exactly as you would like to drink it.8

Though it goes without saying that the visual is also essential, the stress on the tactile is fundamental and profound. There is a ‘beauty of intimacy’ exemplified by the fact that, as Yanagi Sōetsu (the modern philosopher and founder of the Mingei folk craft movement) explains, the tea masters ‘embraced the shape and kissed the thickness’ of the chawan.⁹ Here, the effects of sabi, patination by long use, determine aesthetic value: not only visually, not only for the implied sense of longevity connected with the passage of time and history, but also to indicate that a tea bowl was adoringly caressed by the lips and fingers of a great tea master, which adds immeasurably to the value of the piece. The sensitivity to sabi effects is highly refined. For example, the white Hagi pottery glaze is particularly prone to change after use, and one speaks of ‘the seven changes of Hagi’, which include discolouration, crackling, blackening of the cracks and so on. Such discolouration is considered a transformation rather than a stain, a poetic effect rather than a defect. These changes may completely transform the iconography of a piece, as when a ‘snowy glaze’ crackles, consequently losing the appearance of snow as the materiality of the glaze becomes evident. This predilection is very different from the Western collector’s sensibility, where damage or wear usually diminishes value, and provenence adds mainly to the monetary, not the aesthetic, worth. Sabi implies that use value augments aesthetic value: the more famous the user, the more refined the ceremony, the more acute the aesthetic intuition, the more valued the cup. Consequently, the use of priceless vessels is not a sign of conspicuous consumption, but of aesthetic delectation.

This is why it would be an error to consider such drinking vessels according to criteria specific to the appreciation of Western ceramics. Even more crucially, this is why Eurocentric aesthetics in general is ill equipped to interpret Japanese art. Consider, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art and taste, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement,10 which distinguishes between the aesthetic sensibilities of the learned (docte) and the worldly (mondaine), played out in terms of a series of existential dichotomies: specialist / aesthete; scholar / apprentice; erudite / connoisseur; schooled / autodidact; viewing / touching; acquired taste / inherited taste. These in turn translate into metaphysical dichotomies: knowledge / experience; reflection / sensation; concept / pleasure; discourse / contemplation; comprehension / appreciation; form / substance; consciously formulated aesthetic laws / unconscious, though no less strict, apprehension of aesthetic rules. In Japan, there is decidedly less distance between art and craft, scholarship and pleasure, transcendence and immanence. Japanese connoisseurship continues to be on the side of the worldly, while modern Western art history has become more and more slanted towards the learned, the specialized, the academic, indeed the scientific. One can immediately see how the ceremonially necessary physical contact with a tea bowl greatly complicates these issues and forces not only the disintegration of such dichotomies, but also that of the distinction between art and craft so long held in the West. Yanagi expresses this in particularly pithy form: ‘If we want to see a thing well, we must use it well.’¹¹ The beauty and use value of a chawan are inextricable; form not only follows function, but art follows life, and craft is indistinguishable from art. For mastery of the tea ceremony is a rite of passage into the world of chawan connoisseurship, where erudition is concomitant with worldliness and where tea bowls are near the summit of the Japanese aesthetic hierarchy, unlike the lowly pottery relegated to the realm of ‘craft’ in Western aesthetics. Such is perhaps what Nietzsche called a ‘joyful wisdom’, a term that would be an oxymoron for Bourdieu.

The main tenets of the wabi-sabi-shibui tea aesthetic inform pottery connoisseurship, privileging certain types of material effects and representational forms, guiding both the hand of the potter and the eye of the collector. Emblematic of this passion for materials is the particular importance of the favoured technique of leaving exposed areas of undecorated clay to reveal the ‘clay flavour’ (tsuchi-aji) of the work, since recognition of the type, quality and treatment of clay are keys to connoisseurship, and it is for this reason that much pottery, whatever the glaze, has at least one place, however tiny and usually on the foot, where the clay is left unglazed. This spot, safeguarded from the transformations of fire and ash, most clearly and literally reveals the potter’s touch. This appreciation of clay flavour is not unlike the sense of terroir in French gastronomy, signifying those site-specific characteristics of taste so often evoked in wine connoisseurship. In pottery, this clay flavour is a function of the relations between earth (clay) and tree (fuel) as they interact through combustion in the kiln. For example, the preferred wood of many potters has long been black pine, because of both the high heat that can be obtained and the particular glaze effects caused by its ash. But might one not ask whether this preference is also symbolic, in some small part due to the fact that the pine is one of the most important trees in Japanese iconology? Or the irony that this evergreen, the symbol of longevity par excellence, is destroyed in the flames of the kiln? Yet beyond the many conscious manners of treating the clay – spinning, moulding, throwing, carving, cutting, incising, texturing, inlaying, impressing, dipping, dripping, trailing, glazing, under-glazing, overglazing – there also exist those accidental features so cherished in Zen-inspired art, a perfection of the imperfect inherent in effects particular to the art of pottery such as finger impressions, spur marks or shell imprints from stacking, scratch marks, ash deposits, firing cracks, crazing, glaze crackling, fusings from adjacent pottery, scorch and fire flash marks, breaks caused by tooling, glaze drippage, running slips.12 Aleatory and partially indeterminable firing effects are most highly valued, as exemplified by a Shino guinomi made by Arimoto Kuugen, with its dripping white glaze and pitted surface.

Sato Satoshi, foot (kōdai) of sakazuki on p. 168, c. 2007.

Sake cups are produced by practically all of the over 100 major kilns (and over 50,000 minor ones) in Japan, utilizing almost every possible technique, in traditional, folk and experimental styles, ranging from the purely decorative and abstract through such stylizations as sharkskin, oilspot, hare fur and sesame spot glazes, to full-blown figuration and calligraphy done in underglaze or overglaze painting. Following the tea aesthetic, many connoisseurs prefer works from those kilns (Bizen, Hagi, Shino, Karatsu, Iga, Shigaraki) that emphasize the more or less aleatory effects caused by natural ash glaze, undecorated mineral glaze, or fire on unglazed surfaces, where figuration, if any, exists in the form of the most subtle similitudes. As Robert Yellin explains: ‘Keshiki [landscape] involves how the glaze flows, stops and pools, or the color of the clay, the creating process, or how certain kiln occurrences play out on the surface.’13 Though the figuration and symbolism in individual cases may occasionally seem either oversimplistic or unduly remote to the outsider, it must not be forgotten that the representational value of a piece, which exists in a complex aesthetic web, is but one aspect of its existence. Quite often, Japanese connoisseurs might see representational correspondences on pottery surfaces where many Western observers would only discern abstract patterns.¹⁴ While for most of the history of Western art and aesthetics potential images have been marginal if constant features of artistic practice and discourse (such as Leonardo’s interest in images seen in clouds and fire, and various sorts of anthropomorphization), modernism from Symbolism onwards has increasingly brought such equivocal and potential images into its purview, both pictorially and theoretically, though hardly to the extent that such images are recognized and sought after in Japan. This has been crucial for epistemology, as the roles of appreciation, interpretation, suggestion and imaginary perception have taken on increasing importance in grasping the sort of ‘open work’ that has characterized so much twentieth-century art, where following Duchamp’s famous dictum, the role of the spectator in completing the work of art is crucial. Figuration and abstraction are relative terms: every aesthetic system determines a different threshold between the two, and even the most blatantly representational art is founded on a non-figurative material foundation that is essential to the perception of the work.

Arimoto Kuugen, Shino guinomi, 2011.

Representation in pottery fills the entire spectrum from trace to icon, and given the potential richness of something as primary as the fissure, it is clear that Zen-inspired representation is a dynamic system oscillating between abstraction and figuration. Not only is there an aesthetic imperative to view certain traces within a representational framework, but many pieces are even named – by potter, tea master or collector – according to such resemblances, such as the famed tea bowls Fujisan and Seppo. Two contemporary examples are a Bizen guinomi by Kakurezaki ryūichi named by Robert Yellin ‘The Cup of Humanity’ for a small crack in the form of the Japanese character for hito, (person), and a Shigaraki guinomi by Matsuyama Suketoshi called ‘The Grand Canyon’, because its colours evoke those of the canyon walls at sunset.15 It is interesting that, given the modernist allure of abstraction, the naming of pottery continues primarily to evoke the figurative. Perhaps this is because the longstanding Japanese passion for the materiality of pottery already implies an appreciation of abstraction, of a pure materiality prior to the imaginative function that seeks iconicity. The evocation of figuration is necessary to locate the image in a symbolic web: however abstruse, the name given to a piece or the image revealed will often have a bearing on the time of day and season in which it will be exhibited or used, which is to say on the very meaning of a work, and its relation to both nature and culture. These representational values depend on factors spanning the entire duration from production to use: the potter’s work in conceiving and creating each piece within a specific tradition and with an individual style; the kiln effects that are partially planned and partially aleatory; the potter’s choice of which pieces are worthy of display after having survived the generative violence of the flames, a choice that implies a hierarchy, consisting of works to be sold and those to be saved for museums or the potter’s own collection; the critic’s discourse, which outlines the complexities of changing taste, temporary fads, historical transformations, aesthetic revisionism and international influences within the never-ending history of pottery; and the collector’s vision which, through the arcana of connoisseurship, contextualizes the work by positioning it within the ineluctable seasonal symbolism demanded by the tea ceremony.

Suehiro Manabu, Bizen guinomi, c. 200d.

We are currently in the midst of a major museological shift that has extenuated, if not totally abolished, the strict hierarchy that had so long separated art and craft in Western art history. The result is that many museums, pioneered by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, now exhibit ‘craft’ and ‘art’ alongside each other, to the great benefit of both. This innovation in Western aesthetics, which has greatly benefitted the ‘arts of the table’, should help in our appreciation of Japanese art, where the line between art and craft has been drawn very differently, and with radically different consequences. Japanese conventions of viewing pottery are quite different from those in the West, and are made even more complex by the profound interconnectedness of all the arts in Japanese culture. While there are viewing protocols and modes of connoisseurship specific to pottery, pottery also shares, to differing degrees, the viewing conventions of the other arts: painting, calligraphy, sculpture, cuisine, gardens. The chawan or guinomi is both sculptural object and painterly surface: irregularities enhance figuration, curvature suggests depth, play of light evokes motion. The piece may reverberate with landscape allusions, thus playing a central role in the arts of the table by articulating food and drink, pottery and decor, ikebana and landscape. A discussion of all the possible contexts for appreciating pottery would fill an entire book, so a single emblematic example related to landscape, by the Kyoto potter Sato Satoshi, must here suffice. While determinate, central, guiding perspectives constitute a major design feature of most Western gardens, they do not necessarily imply the primacy of a single fixed viewpoint, from which the garden should be viewed. In Zen-inspired gardens there exist controlled views, framed views, partial views, multiple views, counter views, hidden views and, most famously of all, borrowed views (shakkei), which have entered garden design the world over. The borrowed or captured view is a manner of relating proximate and distant space, created by opening up a foreground or middle-ground perspective such that the distant landscape is precisely framed and consequently integrated into the garden. In a greatly reduced sense, the guinomi ‘landscape’ may exhibit such a borrowed view every time it is examined or drunk from. As the cup is raised, its lip serves as the ‘horizon’ that links the proximate scene on the front to the ‘distant’ landscape beyond the lake of sake within, as is the case for the cup by Sato Satoshi, where the bamboo branch forms the proximate field for viewing the distant mountains. That the sake is transformed into a cascade as the elbow is bent and the guinomi is tilted is rarely an unwelcome effect.

KAWABATA YASUNARI, in the preface to a book by the landscape painter Higashiyama Kaii, recounts his reaction to having seen the famous Three Pines at Kanazawa, one of the great natural sites of Japan, celebrated in painting and poetry through the ages:

They struck me to the point that I wondered if there existed a comparable beauty anywhere in the world. I was overwhelmed with thanks for that state of mind among the Japanese that would not hesitate to consecrate centuries to transmitting the beauty of a single tree.16

Sato Satoshi, sakazuki, c. 2007.

Much the same may be said concerning the beauty of a single bowl. In general, wine drinking is really about the wine and its intoxicating effects, be they euphoric, inspiring or depressing, and accounts of bacchic exploits in which the receptacle is of great importance are quite rare. On the contrary, ceremonial tea drinking is of the greatest material refinement, and is thus the source of endless discourse about the objects, such that the interrelations between the arts in tea-oriented aesthetics cannot be overestimated. Writing of the formative influence of Murata Jukō on the modern form of the tea ceremony, Louise Allison Cort explains:

The transformation that Jukō and his associates wrought in the tea ceremony sprang from a deeply felt and widespread spiritual undercurrent – the fruit of war – that manifested itself in the forms of the other arts as well, including Nō theater, flower arranging, and poetry. The emergence of Jukō’s aesthetic and of parallel aesthetics in other fields is usually explained by the dissemination of Zen Buddhist concepts. The importance of the influence of Zen Buddhism has been overemphasized, however, to the point of concealing the vital role of the perception and vocabulary developed within the tradition of classical court poetry in the form known as renga, or linked verse. Jukō’s most lasting achievement was to apply for the first time to material objects the vocabulary – expressive of a particular and deep-rooted strain of Japanese perception – that had theretofore been developed as purely verbal imagery within the art of renga.17

Not only did this new poetic vocabulary greatly enrich the perception of pottery by establishing a vast range of imagery that provides a sort of mental grid according to which such works can be seen anew, but it also implicitly reinforced and perhaps augmented the already high status of pottery by verbally, iconographically and conceptually linking it to poetry. Within this poetic system, the natural world, and especially the most famous sites of Japan such as Mount Fuji, were transformed into veritable commonplaces (in the root sense of the term, stressing the locus or topos, the sense of place) and fully codified as poetic tropes, ‘toponyms so abstracted from their geographic reality that, practically delocalized and often reduced to simple epithets, their only function was to evoke images’.18 Thus poet and reader could travel throughout the country without ever leaving home, by means of the continual circulation between poetic allusion, pictorial image, reverie, dream. Once Rikyū established the priority of Japanese pottery, and once the great Japanese kilns became distinguishable by their clays, forms and iconography in the multitude of their specificity, such general poetic geographic tropes were concretized in the tea ceremony by the very materiality of indigenous pottery.

Tea is both performance and paradigm: each ceremony is a unique and unrepeatable event, celebrating the ephemeralness of the passing moment and the changing season, as well as a particular grouping of people whose sensibilities are attuned to the images, objects and allusions of the instant. Yet simultaneously, each ceremony is also a formal structure – inspired by previous ceremonies and perhaps destined in turn to influence the future of tea – with only minor variants in gesture and choreography, and where certain objects may reappear and accrue new significations. Tea is thus an aesthetic paradigm stressing spiritual concentration and psychological interiorization, based on the synaesthetic inmixing of the arts. It is also a form of etiquette that is formalized by a veritable choreography of gestures, as well as that attention to detail particular to connoisseurship as a form of material knowledge. Tea also imposes social and ethical imperatives, as the eighteenth-century tea master Zuihosai Issoku summarized by the principles of harmony, reverence, purity, calm: ‘The guest must fully realize the pains taken by the host, and try to give him as little trouble as possible. The ideal relation between them is a mutual understanding and appreciation that needs no words to express.’¹⁹ The appreciation of the effort need not be articulated, but that of the objects demands precise, even poetic, commentary. Of course, the foundations of such understanding and appreciation are erudition and connoisseurship, which establish a vast range of acceptable allusions. Eccentricity, exoticism, bizarreness and excessive obscurity are to be avoided, which is the reason that, for example, many tea masters insist that only flowers that are generally familiar and sung about by the poets are permitted in the tokonoma. The degree of connoisseurship, as well as the level of proficiency in the ceremony, indicates the appropriateness of certain objects.

Tea proposes not only an aesthetics and an ethics, but an epistemology. In the tea world, the arts are all linked through a metaphoric and synaesthetic imperative. To begin with a chawan in the palm of one’s hand and end up imagining a garden, poem or painting reveals the richness inherent in Japanese culture.

Jikkō-in, Ohara.