The tea room 500 years after Rikyu's birth...
The year 2022 marks the 500th anniversary of Rikyu's birth.
The form of the tea room was almost perfected during Rikyu's time, and tea masters of the time continued to create their own unique tea rooms. However, it is a pity that in modern times, tea rooms are simply copied from the past or built based on taste, and no innovative tea rooms have been created. (Although there are many tea rooms that are simply innovative...)
Rikyu was always an innovator of innovative beauty within tradition, and is still alive and well today, 500 years after his birth. However, in order to pass on Rikyu's spirit to the next generation and create another 500 years of history, we of today must become innovators of innovative beauty, otherwise the tradition will be lost.

 

Another idea behind "Shousouan" Turning a tea room into an office COVID-19 has completely changed our lives. Teleworking has become commonplace, and the nature of offices has changed. Until now, offices were places where people gathered to work, but in the future, I think they will become places for business exchanges and self-improvement. In that sense, tea rooms may be in demand in offices with excess space because people are no longer coming into the office due to teleworking. If it is a prefabricated room like "Shousouan," it can be moved flexibly to match the relocation of the office.

 

Long ago, Toyotomi Hideyoshi brought a golden teahouse to the Siege of Odawara, and both Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi adopted the tea ceremony into their teahouses as a place for lobbying instead of the battlefield. This shows that the tea ceremony, which is deeply linked to Zen, will continue to be put to good use in modern business settings.
In particular, when I treat guests from overseas to a cup of tea before a meeting and talk about meditation and the Zen spirit, it's like we've already got the piece in our hand and the business deal is done.

 

In the past, feudal lords, samurai, and nobles would request the best work, regardless of the cost, and craftsmen would go above and beyond their own skills, which led to the refinement and development of traditional Japanese techniques. In the future, the role of the younger generation, who are active in the business world, will lead to the development of Japanese culture. In the Meiji era, people who were active in the financial world, led by Masuda Don'o, enjoyed the tea ceremony and built a culture. Shibusawa Eiichi, who appears in the historical drama "Seiten wo Tsuke," also had a tea room called "Mushinan" in his Asukayama mansion, where he would hold tea ceremonies and invite people from the political and financial world. Particularly famous is the tea ceremony on July 22, 1905, when he invited Ito Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru, Katsura Taro, and Masuda Takashi (Don'o) to restore the power of Tokugawa Yoshinobu.

 

This time, I talked about why tea rooms are so popular now, focusing on the prefabricated tea room "Shosoan."
From now on, I will be giving regular talks on tea rooms, each with a different theme, including details.
Please look forward to it.

 

Representative Director of Tsubaki Architectural Design Institute Ltd.

Kuniji Tsubaki