honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Monday, May 13, 2002

Japanese master performs traditional tea ceremony

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

The foamy green tea swirling in the bowl had a sharp taste, a hint of seaweed.

"It is too hot, so take care," said Mari Mizuhara, the shy, kimono-clad student of Hisao Arakaki, a leading Japanese master who brought the ancient tea ceremony to an exclusive Hawai'i audience yesterday.

On the postcard-sized kiri wood tray, atop a red-bordered paper napkin neatly folded askew, a white and purple sugar candy in the shape of a wisteria blossom spoke of late springtime.

Allison Yanagi drew her bow across the stringed kucho, pulling a mournful whine out of the old instrument, while Shizue Afuso and Takako Miyazaki, tabis whispering across the wood floor, danced stories of women stringing flowers for their lovers.

For a few drowsy moments, the small local audience at the East-West Center might have been in old Naha, Okinawa, the homeland of thousands of immigrants who came to Hawai'i to work the sugar-cane fields more than a century ago and became a major force in business, government and culture here.

"It's all right to fall asleep," said Norman Kaneshiro, leader of the Honolulu musical ensemble playing the old songs, "Kashikaki," and "Mutu Muchibana," after the rarely seen tea ceremony at the center.

"In Okinawa, falling asleep is a compliment to the musician," said Kaneshiro, a University of Hawai'i Press publications worker who has played the uta/sanshin for 13 years. "It is considered a wonderful thing to be able to sing someone to sleep."

The performances, and a complimentary ikebana floral display, were inspired by Arakaki's second visit to the center to perform the tea ceremony as a good will cultural gift to the people of Hawai'i.

Arakaki is director of the Okinawa division of the Omotosenke Suigetsukai school of the tea ceremony, which he said is based in the restraint of Zen philosophy and the purifying nature of a drink regarded as a medicine to strengthen the body and the mind.

The ceremony, which can last four to six hours at his center in Ginowan City in Okinawa, is usually open to only a handful of people at a time, he said.

While preserving the art of the ceremony and sharing it with others, Arakaki also pursues cosmopolitan interests far beyond Japanese culture and history, Kaneshiro said.

A teacher who meditates 45 minutes every day, "trying to see myself outside myself," the 65-year-old Arakaki is also an accomplished chef who loves Italian cooking.

"He is a great fan of opera, and of western popular music," Kaneshiro said, as Arakaki, clad in a grey kimono, smiled and broke into few bars of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."

Arakaki's wife, Mitsuko, a teacher of ikebana, also reached across cultures yesterday: one of the floral displays, a dandelion-shaped explosion of straws of red, white and blue standing out from the calm and elegant arrangements around it, was entitled, "American Liberty."