Japanese Tea Ceremony

Every Tuesday is interesting for me, since I have Japanese Culture Class. It`s about Japanese Tea Ceremony. First time when I knew that the class will be held for one semester, I was really questioning about the reason. How come it take so long time "only" for a tea ceremony.

But then I know the reason. It`s a culture, every single step is really meaningful. I try to find out the reasons from search engine.

A Japanese girl doing Tea Ceremony

There are 4 principles in Japanese tea ceremony: harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility (wa, kae, sae, jubuo)

• Harmony: with other people and with nature. The tea ceremony is the way of bringing one’s self into harmony with nature.
• Respects: a harmonious relationship with others.
• Purity: clean yourselves through the five senses - sense of hearing when hearing the sound of water(which remind one of the silence outside), sense of sight when see the flowers, sense of touch when touch the utensils, sense of smell when smell the scent of the flowers, sense of taste when drinking tea.
• Tranquility (Means : Quite, calm or something similar)

I will tell you later about the detail of this Tea Ceremony. The hardest thing to do is sitting like the girl for one hour. It was so painful T_T All students are injured for today`s class.. Hahaha.. I don`t have the pic, waiting for Husna to upload it in her Blog. Hehehe

The most interesting thing for me is eating okashi (sweet snack) :p It is sweet in order to minimize the bitterness of the green tea itself.

MOCHI. Okashi for today are like this. Not the original pic ^_^

I really love this class (the snack) hahaha.. ^_^