One of Japan's grand masters of the tea ceremony died recently. His obituary contained an interesting anecdote from his service in World War II.
Sen Soshitsu XV, who has died aged 102, was known in Japan as the 15th Urasenke Grand Tea Master and descendant of Sen Rikyu, the Japanese sage who perfected chado – “the way of tea”, commonly known as the Japanese tea ceremony – and raised it to the level of art.
Though tea-drinking was taken to Japan from China in the 9th century, it was Rikyu in the 16th century who laid down the rules of chado, incorporating elements of Zen Buddhism, Shinto and even, it is said, elements of the Catholic Mass, creating a ceremony which, though elaborate in its combination of ritual, meditation and aesthetics, celebrates the beauty of simplicity.
Rikyu’s legacy has been preserved by the members of the San-Senke, or “three tea ceremony” schools of the Sen family – of which the Urasenke is the most famous. Sen Soshitsu assumed the position of Grand Master of the school from his father in 1964.
. . .
He was born Sen Masaoki (he would inherit the name Soshitsu on succeeding his father as Grand Tea Master) in Kyoto on April 19 1923, the year of the Great Kanto Earthquake which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama; he was the eldest son of Sen Soshitsu XIV, the 14th head of the Urasenke tea school, and his wife Kayoko.
While reading economics at Doshisha University in Kyoto during the Second World War, he was called up for service in the Imperial Japanese navy. He volunteered as a kamikaze pilot but was turned down because the imperial authorities did not want to jeopardise the future of a revered hereditary tea dynasty.
There's more at the link.
Considering the disregard for human life - their own and the enemy's - shown by Japanese military leaders before and during the Second World War, it's incongruous to think that they would rate their traditional tea ceremony and its practitioners as more important than killing the enemy by committing suicide in a last-ditch defense of their homeland. The Western mind doesn't work that way. That's probably an indictment of our own "if you kill enough of them, they stop fighting" approach, which would seem to rule out any and every consideration of culture and tradition on both sides.
Peter
8 comments:
Except, of course, that they *did* stop fighting. Even more strange, to my mind, is the latching on to diverse elements of decadent western culture. Jazz. Rock and roll. Baseball. Mickey Mouse. They also seem to highly value traditional culture such as orchestral music and it's instruments such as violin and piano.
“I am Richard Strauss, the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome." Some are spared. Not Archimedes, though.
The Third Reich sought to create "traditions", whereas Imperial Japan already had a "superior" ones. Preserving those traditions was integral to Japanese identity.
I wonder if he fought at all, or was put in a safe support position?
While I am not a tea drinker, I do love the ceremony and tradition of things like the Japanese tea one. It brings a way to remain in touch with our ancestors, much like the laying of a wreath on the grave of the unknown soldier every year by our president. It is important to remember our past, lest we be doomed to repeat it.
Not that incongruous, if you think about it. Their purpose was to preserve Japan, and keeping the tea ceremony around would have been seen as a part of that.
According to my father's observations that is exactly what the US government did with baseball players.
I describe Imperial Japan as the closest we have ever faced (except for Islam) an actual alien power. We didn't understand them, we expected them to act like the Germans or Italians.
To be fair, we also didn't and still don't understand Russia, or China (though we understand Taiwan more than Red China.)
What made sense to Imperial Japan didn't and still doesn't make sense to the typical American.
On the other hand, treating certain people as living masterpieces is a pretty darned good thing to do. How much of our past have we lost because we let 'ancient' arts disappear in this modern world?
Or tried to, anyway. Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians joined the Navy and was assigned duty as an athletic instructor. He pushed to get a front-line posting and ended up in charge of a 40mm mount aboard USS Alabama.
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