The Japanese tea house: how it is built and where to see one

A Japanese tea house is a place built for a single purpose: preparing and drinking matcha with other people. Traditionally the ceremony takes place in a purpose-built chashitsu, featuring a tatami-mat floor with a hearth built into it, and the materials and design are deliberately rustic.^1,2 The Japanese tea room is a quiet box with a few strong features, not a shop or a restaurant.

The room does not stand alone. The Omotesenke school writes that the tea room, called the chashitsu, and the tea garden, the roji, form a single unit for the purpose of holding a tea gathering.³ Guests pass through the small kuguri entrance and walk through the tea garden to reach the room.⁷

That is why a visit feels like a walk as well as a seat. You cross a threshold, then a path, then a basin, then a door, and each of them tells your body to slow down before the host has said a word.

Sen no Rikyu, who lived from 1522 to 1591, pushed the idea furthest.²⁹ He made a revolutionary change to a tea room that was exactly as the word soan implied, a tiny two mat space in which only wabi-cha could be done, and the Tai-an tea room at Myoki-an, a Rinzai temple in Yamazaki in Kyoto, shows it.¹⁶ Urasenke says Taian, the two-tatami room, can be seen today at Myokian temple in Yamazaki, a suburb of Kyoto city.⁵

Power noticed. Hideyoshi was invited to that tea room and was completely captivated, so he built a two mat tea room in Osaka Castle.³⁰ The older ideal had been the four-and-a-half mat room: Dojinsai, in the Togudo at Ginkaku-ji, has an open hearth and is thought to be the origin of the tea room.¹⁷

Rikyu's own story ended in Kyoto. He continued to study Zen at Daitokuji,³¹ and his grave is at Jukoin temple within the Daitokuji compound.³² If you want to feel the connection, plan an afternoon that touches both the temples of Rikyu and one tea room where you can sit.

Before the room comes the roji. At Urasenke the walkway is surrounded by dewy moss and luxuriant foliage, and gives a sense of leaving the hustle and bustle of everyday life for a mountain hermitage in the city.⁵¹ The waiting room, the Mushikiken, has a main room of five tatami and an anteroom of three daime-size tatami.⁵²

In a formal tea event, the host and guest greet each other silently, crouching, at the garden gate.⁵³ The guests then wash their hands and rinse their mouths at the basin.⁹ The same sequence, shortened, is what a visitor sees in a garden tea house in Higashiyama.

Treat the path as part of the room. When a tea house has a garden, as in the Sannenzaka area near Kiyomizu-dera, the ceremony is read against the seasons of that garden, and the garden changes your sense of how big the tea room is.

A garden tea house gives the whole picture in a short time. The session booked from this site is a 45 minute ceremony in the Sannenzaka area near Kiyomizu-dera, with an English-speaking instructor, from $49. Kodai-ji and its tea houses are close by, since Ninen-zaka and Sannen-zaka streets and Kiyomizudera Temple are all easily accessed from there.⁵⁵

If your knees or schedule matter more than the architecture, choose by seating. Tatami benches at Taiho-an in Uji exist for guests not used to seiza,⁵⁶ and a separate Kyoto lesson with a licensed tea master lasts 45 minutes, with English and Japanese instruction, from $22.

In the end the tea house is only half of the experience; the other half is the person who prepares the bowl. Pick the room that makes you want to sit down quietly, and then pay attention to how the host moves inside it.