Vince loved beer and never cared for tea. Tea, he had stated more than once, was far too much trouble. There might well be the odd bar room brawl on account of beer, but tea had been the cause of revolutions. When Vince thought of tea, he remembered the Boston Tea Party and that it had been one of the fundamental reasons for colonising Asia. Within Japan, tea was a major area of contention. Some factories and companies victimised individuals by refusing en masse to drink any tea made by their scapegoat. Furthermore, tea making was a mark of sexism within Japanese society. Highly educated Japanese women joined top companies as office ladies (OL) only to discover that their job was to make the tea. It was hardly surprising that, in a country where there was a ritual way of doing anything, that one of the most complicated and rigid ceremonies was Chanoyu, the gentile art of tea making. When the basic rules were formulated and finalised under the great tea master, Sennorikyu, tea making had been a purely stag affair. Sennorikyu's granddaughter was the first woman to take it on and Vince reflected that perhaps she was the first ever OL.
Vince was well aware that Chanoyu wasn't the only rigid art form in Japan. All Japanese art forms, from Shodo calligraphy to Sumie ink painting, from Kyudo archery to Ikebana flower arrangement, required painstaking repetitive practise, so that no action was spontaneous or fortuitous. Such was reality of Zen, where the mind and the body became one.
The big difference with Chanoyu was that Vince had perceived something similar among Australian tea makers. The Japanese tea ceremony was indeed a complex process that Vince had witnessed first in Chiba and only later in Yokohama's Isogo Ward at the Kuragi Noh theatre. The tea maker would approach the room with a bow and move around with a succession of sliding motions in a kneeling position. He watched the endless succession of napkin folding and unfolding, the washing and warming of the drinking bowls, the careful ladling of the macha powdered green tea into the bowl, the brisk whisk action that turned the macha into a frothy green mix.
When he thought about it, Vince recalled the way his mother and older relatives had made a pot of Bushell's during his childhood. Boiling water was left to sit for three and a half minutes in the pot to warm it before the tea was added. This water was then thrown out and then it was like anteing up in a poker game, one scoop of tea for every cup and one extra for the pot. When the boiling water was finally added, the pot was turned two and a half times counterclockwise. The milk was always poured into the cup before the brew or else it tasted like varnish. The second cup was never as good as the first, although the first cup was always so good that you were compelled to have a second.
For Australians, the ritual ended with the making of the tea. They hardly drank their cha with pinky fingers extended and Vince had witnessed his grandfather many a time pour the contents of the cup into his saucer and drink it from there. With Chanoyu, the drinker was as much part of the ceremony as the pourer. They had to turn the bowl around two part turns before sculling the whole bitter brew in one gulp and eating a small confectionery to mellow or completely kill the taste. Even doing the dishes was part of the ceremony, cleaning the bowl and whisk, and refolding the napkin.
For someone who was part of the tea bag generation, Vince rather liked the taste of macha, although perhaps he could have done without the ceremony. Connie, on the other hand, came from a long line of coffee drinkers and she had absolutely no appreciation of why it should take so long just to make a cup of tea. Even grinding and percolating coffee was a totally sensuous pleasure in comparison. You always had that satisfying aroma of freshly ground coffee beans and this was in some ways even better than its taste.
If Connie hardly appreciated Australian tea making, she found Japanese Chanoyu exasperating in its deliberation. At one point during the ceremony, Connie burst out laughing and remarked that the bamboo whisk looked just like a shaving brush, which Vince had to admit it did. Vince, however, was also aware that one should never laugh at tea ceremonies. This was a serious business and laughter would be interpreted as an insult. He was, however, relieved that, for once, it had been Connie and not himself who had offended the collective sensibilities of the entire Japanese people.
It was also true that Noh was a serious business. Indeed, it had flourished in the 15th. and 16th. centuries at the same time as the tea ceremony and Japanese landscape gardening had become formalised. It was obviously a very serious time as Noh theatre afforded even fewer laughs than tea making. There were no Noh comedies.
As Kuraki Noh was a theatre in a magnificent setting of rocks and bamboo, they were permitted to see some rehearsals. The stage itself was more colourful than the action on the stage with dyed cloth streamers in green, yellow, red, white and purple and a mock roof affair over the main stage area like the ones you might see over sushi kitchens.
Vince had always thought that Noh was an all male affair, but the main performers in everything he saw at Kuraki Noh were women. It occurred to him that the Noh theatre had only recently been liberated, even though most of these women were in their sixties or seventies. He was able to draw some parallel between these dour-looking ladies and Sennorikyu's granddaughter.
The main actress moved across the stage like a Queen on a chess board, vertically, horizontally or diagonally while a chorus of four men accompanied her vocally in what sounded like a Gregorian chant. Vince had no translator to tell him the story line, but he was able to assume that it was a tragic and slow moving piece. The expressions of the main actress and her backing vocal group looked to all intents and purposes as if they had all just seen their parents, spouses and children hung, drawn and quartered before their very eyes.
Vince had seen performances of rakugo classical stand-up comedy, bunraku puppet drama and the vivid kabuki theatre and they were all incredibly entertaining genres. Noh, in comparison, seemed a dreary theatrical form. In a cynical frame of mind, Vince hummed: "There's no business like Noh business, There's no business we know ..." However, whatever Vince wanted to say about Noh theatre, he had to admit that it had had a lasting effect on all later dramatic art forms. While all Vince's other theatre experiences were in Tokyo, he witnessed the other extreme of Japanese theatre in downtown Yokohama. In America, it would have been called Vaudeville. In England, it was the music hall tradition. In Japan, it's called sukkyo and is performed in engeijo theatres in the downtown shitamachi districts of Japanese cities. Only one of these still existed in Yokohama's Minami ward. It was Miyoshi Engeijo Kaikan and was run by Ms. Tamae Honda, who had fought the popularity of the cinema and television all through the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's to maintain this style of theatre.
Connie and Vince were to discover that it was hard to get a couple of seats to Miyoshi Engeijo Kaikan. They nevertheless managed to get seats at a matinee session on a Saturday afternoon. The theatre was ancient. The seats had no springs and there were bare floor boards which dated back to an era when Vince used to accidentally drop his jaffas and hear them cascading down to the front of the theatre. It was traditional to buy an obento to eat during the the performance. Sushi was the most popular snack so Vince and Connie bought up half a dozen makizushi rolls filled with natto, cucumber or tuna from a sushiya in nearby Bandobashi.
The interior of the theatre was very much of the Kabuki style with a hanamachi ramp, so called because it was where favoured actors had once collected flowers from grateful fans. Vince looked around and noted that the audience were not young. They were mainly women in their late fifties and older. People had come from all over the country. There were folk from Osaka and Hiroshima, Kagoshima-ken in the south of Kyushu and Aomori-ken in the north of Honshu. Vince was even surprised to discover that there were quite a few foreigners in the audience on that particular day - American, Australian, Belgian, Burmese, Cambodian, Canadian, English, Malaysian and New Zealand. Who could blame them? At 1500 yen a ticket, it was substantially cheaper than going to the movies. The pinnacle of Vince's brief acting career had been the role of the villain, a certain Desmond Darkacre, in a melodrama, a major component of the music hall style review. It had been produced in order to raise money for a school gymnasium. He liked to think that his performance had been a good one, but, even so, he had recognised that the acting had to be pretty damned awful for you to miss with such a form of entertainment. Even as the curtain rose, Vince recognised similarities not only with the western style melodrama, but also the more traditional Japanese television comedies. Vince automatically reached down to grab a jaffa only to feel his hand sink into the gooey natto centre of a temakizushi roll.
The first play was about three suitors who all managed to extract a promise of marriage from a beautiful young maiden called Mochiwaka-san, or Miss Young Rice Cake. They all had names symbolising strength in Japanese folklore - Ume-san (Mr. Plum Tree), Take-san (Mr. Bamboo) and Matsu-san (Mr. Pine Tree).
Mochiwaka's obasan helped her make the decision between the three suitors, but, rather incongruously at the end, all three are reluctant to marry the girl when they discover that she is, in fact, as bald as a rice cake. If the plot was a trifle thin, it was chocked with gags, topical jokes and jibes at the expense of the other characters and the audience as well.
The second play had far more tragic proportions as a young yakuza gangster finds his long lost mother who deserted him when he was just five years old. His mother is now the madame of a brothel and has a young daughter who has to be protected. She spurns the young man and sends him away, only to realise her mistake too late. She then sends messengers to find him and bring him back, but they report that one of her assistants has ordered her son's assassination.
The play ended with a chainbara sword dance. Vince had automatically expected something like the flash of steel which characterised the samurai dramas on television, but soon discovered that they were akin to real sword play of samurai times. The blows were rhythmic, definitive and fast. Each fight was of short duration and began with samurai poise as the opponents eyed each other off waiting for one false move. The play, of course, ends with Chotaru, the young yakuza, victorious and walking off into the sunset.
The second half of the performance was devoted to enka and dances with fans. Many of the men were dressed up as women and one in particular was very beautiful. Another was actually a woman and because of the number of characters in drag, Vince had to ask Connie if it was a bloke or a girl.
"Of course, it's a woman!" Connie hissed.
Vince excused himself by noting that some of the men looked extremely feminine and beautiful. Vince was most amazed by the audience at this stage who would run up to the front and deposit 10,000 yen notes into belts or lapels of the performers. The largest cash gift he saw for the night was 60,000 yen. Some received gifts of cloth and these were displayed to the rest of the audience while the performer was still giving his number and then taken back stage.
The performers threw envelopes weighted with 50 yen coins into the audience at one stage of the proceedings One collected an elderly man right between the eyes and damned near knocked him out. Connie caught one of the envelopes and discovered that they either had Atari or Make, win or lose. Hers read Atari and she collected a small hand held fan.
If Vince had thought that the men were sexy in their kimono, he soon discovered as they lined the stairway on the way out that their faces were literally caked with make-up. Vince had never fancied make-up on women and was happy Connie wore very little. He would have to be content with watching these actors from a distance.