Discipline, Limber Legs Help : Students Study Japanese Way of Tea : Ancient Ceremony Is Considered an Allegory of a People’s Way of of life and Culture

Four times a week, for about two hours each time, Yoshiko Koizumi of Villa Park deals in tranquillity, harmony, sincerity, humility, respect, purity, beauty, cleanliness, reverence, orderliness, naturalness, peace and instant tea.

The last item is the easiest to come by.

The rest, however, requires a disciplined and receptive mind, a limber pair of legs and several years of hard study, for they are all high ideals of the gracious philosophical and social ritual that is the Japanese tea ceremony.

Koizumi teaches the centuries-old techniques and mannerisms of the ceremony in an authentic and starkly beautiful tearoom appended to the Western-style home where she lives with her husband, Edward, an architect who designed the room. There she teaches the Way of Tea (known in Japan as chado ) to 22 students, mostly women of Japanese descent who live in Orange County. She does not charge a fee for the class but asks that her students bring a donation of materials, such as Japanese sweets which are served with the tea or other materials for the ceremony.

More than 400 years old, the tea ceremony is considered by many to be allegorical of Japanese life and culture as a whole. It is a harmonious blending of the spiritual and the social with a strong grounding in Zen Buddhism, Koizumi said.

“Once you get into it, there’s no end to it,” she said. “I started studying (the tea ceremony) when I came to the United States as a student in 1953 and I’m still studying.”

It was not always so, she said. In Japan, when she was 15, her mother sent her to a tea teacher but she thought it was boring then. “My mother kept taking me, and many times I escaped. I didn’t like the long time we had to sit. When I would arrive, I’d count the number of the . . . slippers at the door, and if there were a lot I knew the tea ceremony would last a long time, and I’d say, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want to go today.’ ”

Koizumi credited maturity and a different teacher in Los Angeles with inspiring in her a new interest in tea. After 15 years of study, she herself became a teacher, taking the “tea name” of Soyu, and is now considered a professor of tea, an expert.

At the heart of the ceremony are four basic goals and one overriding guiding principle, Koizumi said. “We try to master all four of these: harmony, respect, tranquillity and purity. And you must always think about other people first. This is my belief.”

The purpose of chado is not merely to drink tea, although the tea is the center of the very deliberate action in the tearoom, she said. The ceremony is actually a feast for the senses--albeit a spare one--as well as a means of slowing down both mind and body.

On a recent weekday morning, Koizumi held class with six of her students, who ranged in their tea experience from three to 10 years’ study. The ceremony began with a thorough washing of the traditional bowls and utensils in an adjacent preparation room as the students playing the roles of guests sat on tatamis in the tearoom and admired a wall hanging that read (in Japanese calligraphy), “Every day is a very good day.” A small and simple flower arrangement was placed next to the hanging, another simple delight for the eyes.

As the students took turns serving, each motion--the ladling of water out of the heated crock set into the floor, the stirring of the powdered tea in water with a bamboo whisk, the offering of bowls to the guests--was performed with striking deliberation and adherence to rules laid down by the tea master Rikyu, who inspired the Urasenke school of tea in the 16th Century.

(Koizumi studied under the Urasenke tradition and teaches it today. There are nearly 30 teachers of tea in Southern California who teach according to the traditions of several different schools of tea, she said.)

Neatness not only counts, it is insisted upon absolutely. Before the tea is prepared in the already clean vessels, the server performs a second ritual cleaning with a carefully folded silk cloth. Humility also is highly prized. Each guest, as a gesture of humility, will turn the bowl twice in the hands before drinking, thereby turning away from the lips the most beautiful side of the bowl--the side which faces toward the guest as the host offers tea.

Like everything else in the tearoom, the utensils are simple and elegant in their beauty. They can also be expensive, but, Koizumi said, “hardly any of them are ever broken.”

The most physically taxing part of the tea ceremony involves the tradition of sitting on the tatami on one’s heels, often for half an hour or more in even the simplest ceremony, she said. “There used to be quite a few Western people interested in the tea ceremony,” she said, “but the problem is they have trouble sitting down for so long.”

Practice becomes all the more important when students realize they must not only sit for long periods but rise to their feet gracefully at any time, sometimes while carrying tea utensils.

“When their feet start to bother them, they start to goof,” Koizumi said. “It gets hard to concentrate.”

(Men have been in the minority as practitioners of the ceremony since Western culture began to influence Japanese life nearly a century ago, Koizumi said. “They started to think tea was a sissy thing to do.”)

To her students, Koizumi’s classes are havens of peace and order in the often harried and cluttered Western-style life of Southern California.

“My life is so busy with kids and a job that I need this time in my life,” said Yumiko Takemasa, a student from Lake Forest. “It’s tranquil, and you can sit quietly and concentrate.”

Each has learned the proper, deliberate and exquisitely slow ways of sliding open a door, removing the lid from the water crock, holding the bamboo water ladle, even tapping off any excess tea on the tiny tea ladle in a single gentle motion.

Inside Koizumi’s tearoom, time seems to slow down, if not stop altogether. The only element that involves any speed at all is, paradoxically, the tea itself. It is green, made from powdered leaves and requires no steeping at all, only blending with a whisk. It makes Koizumi smile. “We have had instant tea for more than 400 years,” she said.