The fifth season of Genndy Tartakovsky’s masterwork, Samurai Jack, was stunningly animated—perhaps even more so than its original run, which was remarkable in and of itself. The final season’s seventh episode, “XCVIII,” was particularly magnificent, with no small thanks to its centerpiece scene: a meditating Jack finds himself in a tea house of the mind, where he conducts a pithy, much-abbreviated version of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, and presents a cup of green tea to a Zen monk conjured up from his subconscious.
But how accurately is the ceremony portrayed in the show? Well, according to Keiko Kitazawa Koch, who conducts tea ceremonies and teaches the art form, chanoyu, to aspirants at Manhattan’s Globus Chashitsu—a tea house located in a penthouse apartment in the Flatiron District converted into two tatami rooms—it’s not quite wrong, but it’s not quite perfect, either.
“The [clip] is cute and interesting,” Keiko Kitazawa Koch said. “However, some details are not accurate—some of the movement is not our school’s style, or it may be wrong.”
Kitazawa Koch invited The Dot and Line to join her for an authentic tea ceremony this past weekend, where we got to witness and learn firsthand just how the art is practiced. It’s an experience that simply cannot adequately be boiled down (sorry) into words, replete as it is with centuries of tradition, highly intricate movements, and particular schools and forms. Some more formal ceremonies, for instance, called “thick tea” ceremonies in English to reflect the denser nature of the matcha used, last four hours, and have highly specific rules governing the speech of guests. Less formal ceremonies like the one we attended, which serve “thin tea,” might last just one half hour.
One things is for sure: Jack’s tea, made of chopped tea leaves and not powdered matcha, would never be served at one of Kitazawa Koch’s ceremonies. But you can see that for yourself below, in a video Eater filmed at the tea house in 2016, which hints at the complexities of the art.
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