Tranquillity lies in ancient tea ceremony
As the pace of modern life grows increasingly frantic more and more Calgarians are finding solace and tranquillity in learning the secrets of the ancient Japanese tea ceremony.
Twice a week — on Thursdays and Saturdays — the city’s foremost expert and teacher of this ancient art spends up to five hours with eager pupils at her Woodbine area home in the city’s southwest.
Takako Yokoyama has been studying the tea ceremony for 63 years, since she was a girl in her native Japan. For the past half a century she’s been unveiling to others its intricate and delicate mysteries.
Tea was first introduced to Japan in the ninth century from China and was originally used for medicinal purposes but the drinking of the powdered green leaves gradually became an exacting science and a cultural phenomenon that has now spread worldwide.
“In Japan the tea ceremony is seen as something vital and important,” said Yokoyama, who came to Calgary in 1982 and received her masters’ certificate in teaching the tea ceremony 15 year ago.
Calgarian Dale Rossetti has been studying under Yokoyama since 2004 and has found the tranquillity the precise ceremony embodies goes beyond the hours he spends each week kneeling at the floor mat on which the tea is served.
“Ever since I was a kid and saw a tea ceremony on the TV I wanted to learn how to do it,” said Rossetti.
“There is a lot of minutia dictated — how to fold the silk cloth and the purifying of the tea container and even between men and women it is done differently,” he said.
For Rossetti, a computer technician, the wisdom to be found in this ancient Japanese art form has changed his life. “For me it has brought peacefulness, tranquillity and relaxation. The big thing is in realizing to take things easy, especially in western culture where you have to get everything done so quickly and it is all now, now, now.”