Further Updates: Tea, Kimonos, and Engrish

As part of HIF, there are number of after-school classes covering various traditional Japanese arts. Recent classes have included the art of sado (tea ceremony) and the etiquette of kimono wearing. For the tea ceremony, we all trooped to a local high school to observe the tea ceremony club there in action. Like all Japanese arts, tea is full of highly specific rituals detailing how exactly one must pour the tea, the number and direction of rotations of the tea cup to be made before drinking, etc. During the ceremony we foreigners were permitted to sit normally rather than adopting seiza, the highly painful traditional kneeling pose, and were generally given a great deal of latitude, but it nevertheless struck me as highly regimented. What also surprised me was the amount of difficulty the Japanese high school students had with seiza, even after years of practice. One girl had to be lifted up by her friends because her legs became so stiff...
The tea ceremony club, with teachers seated at left.

For the kimono wearing ceremony, teachers came to our school bringing cotton yukatas for us to all practice wearing. Even for just a simple yukata, the process of tying the obi is quite intricate, and I doubt I would be able to do it on my own.














Helen, wearing her yukata, then all the participants in our kimono etiquette class.

Amusing Engrish watch: The other day I shopping at Dai-Ei, this sort of continuous indoor mall, where I saw these shirts for sale