At W&L, It’s Time for Class, Tea, Tradition

A host walks into a Japanese alcove with guests behind him. Each takes a turn to admire a scroll painting with a Buddhist scripture.

All are seated on mats with their legs tucked beneath them, and a charcoal fire is lit. It's the opening of a Japanese tea ceremony. And it's class time at Washington and Lee University.

The school had an authentic tea room built this summer as a cultural exhibit and an instructional tool to help students learn about Japan in the context of an important ceremonial tradition.

"I really like to think of it as study abroad without ever leaving Virginia," said Janet Ikeda, associate dean of the college and professor of East Asian Languages and Literature.

The tea room has been a goal of Ikeda's since arriving at Washington and Lee in 1999 and will be the only such functioning room at a Virginia college or university.

"I want to get students to step out of their comfort zone and watch and listen," she said.

The Japanese tea ceremony, or Chanoyu, is a performance and art form carried on by families and schools that teach it. Ikeda studied it at the Urasenke School of Tea in Kyoto before she earned her doctorate from Princeton University in 16th-century Japanese literature.

Far more than eating and drinking the ceremony is a microcosm of Japanese culture. The greetings, motions, the art surrounding the people on scrolls, ceramics and gardens, and the spiritual invocations are a window into Japanese traditions, Ikeda believes.

"It's tied to almost every aspect of Japanese culture that you can imagine," said Ikeda, a Japanese-American who learned her Japanese secondhand.

She plans to use the room for her class, "Food and Tea in Japan."

W&L's Reeves Center for Research and Exhibition of Porcelain and Paintings funded the tea room construction in the Watson Pavilion. The center hired master tea room carpenter and tea performer Seiji Suzuki to construct the exhibit and class "lab."

The rooms are typically built with paper-covered sliding doors, a cedar ceiling, a round window and staggered shelves of cherry, ash, fir and other woods. Walls are made of plaster and mud. The school had 700 pounds of Japanese mud shipped in for the project, Ikeda said.

School officials hope the tea room helps bring to life the Watson Pavilion, a small structure that opened 13 years ago, but has since been a mystery to many W&L students. It is usually unoccupied and always locked, said Peter Grover, the school's director of special collections.

"This gives us the opportunity to open the doors and allow students and the public to come in," Grover said.

Hank Dobin, W&L's dean of the college, is an enthusiast of Japanese culture who threw his weight behind Ikeda's tea room project. Americans traveling abroad often learn native cultures the hard way, he said.

The future professionals at Washington and Lee will now have a tool to help them function as citizens of the world, Dobin said.

"This is a wonderful example of that, and a very tangible example of Washington and Lee's commitment to that kind of education," he said.