Foreigners in Kimono

Have you ever had the experience of being invited to a casual gathering of foreigners interested in Japanese culture and have it turn out to be that you're the foreigner centerpiece of the social highlight of a small Japanese town's springtime festivities?  Because I have!

The company that manages the house that I'm living in right now frequently organizes events so that tenants can learn more about various aspects of Japanese culture.  This weekend, the company advertised an open invitation to come to the company offices and learn about Japanese tea ceremony and kimono.  I had nothing else going on, so I decided to go.

Once we all arrived at the meeting point, we set out for the location of the event, which turned out to be both a yoga studio and a private residence in one.  I was rather surprised when we walked down a cherry blossom-lined street that was strewn with posters that said

I hold a spring tea party of the leave, and to go.  Please come if you are interested in Japanese kimono and tea.  Japanese tea party of Mrs. Okajima Style.  Mrs. Okajima who teached a Tea ceremony more than 40 years show the manners of official and casual tea way to you. China de China Tea party.  Want you to be healed by a tender fragrance of the Chinese tea?  The person who wants to enjoy Chinese tea please join willingly.  The first kimono dressing class.  A professional with experience more than 50 years help you and we prepare the kimono.  We prepared the light meal associated with in Japanese spring.  Be hungry a little and come to this party.

It turns out that a woman who lived near the offices was throwing an open party (I think this is kind of unusual in Japan) for her town and extended the invitation to the entire foreign community in Tokyo.  Kind of strange.  There were many Japanese housewives with their children in the house when we arrive and a steady stream of guests came in and out the entire time we were there.  I'm still unclear if this woman just loves entertaining, if she's kind of a foreign friend collector or if the party was an opportunity for her to advertise her yoga studio, located in the basement of her house.

So... she had a bunch of her friends come over in kimono to do an abbreviated version of the Japanese tea ceremony, which involves using beautiful instruments (water heater, silk purification cloth, bamboo scoop, bamboo whisk) in a series of elegant, highly ritualized motions to whisk up a strong cup of green maccha tea.  Guests drink the tea with very sweet Japanese cakes called wagashi, as the sweetness of the cakes is said to enhance the flavor of the bitter tea.

Her Chinese husband set up shop as well to instruct foreigners in the ways of Chinese tea.  This involves making a series of 5 or 6 pots of tea, each time reusing the leaves and noting the change in fragrance and taste.  The tea is brewed and poured into a tall thimble-sized thin cup, which is then tipped into the shorter cup for drinking.  The taller cup is used for taking in the fragrance of the tea, which you do before drinking.  Similar to Japanese tea ceremony, very dense cakes are eaten with Chinese tea to enhance the flavor.

As for the "light meal associated with in Japanese spring", our host prepared small onigiri rice balls made from white rice and teeny little red shrimp and maybe mushrooms or bamboo shoots.  These were served with even more tea and tsukemono pickles.

After the meal, all of the foreign women (there were 3 of us) were taken upstairs to a tatami room and changed into our host's personal kimono by a wiry, spunky the host's mother.  We were then paraded around the party for people to oooh and aaaah and take photographs of what a novelty it was to see foreigners in traditional Japanese dress.

As the lovely grandmother pointed out many times and as is evident in my awkward photos, many foreign bodies shapes are not suited to kimono!