The retired grand master came to town. I volunteered at all the associated events as an armchair anthropologist, sure, and as a student of chado and of histories generally, but also just for the experience of something far-fetched and unusual.

He is an affable, tirelesslsy energetic man, tall with bright eyes. He smiles constantly and exudes kindness. He is exceptionally outgoing and polite, and earnestly connected to all aspirations within his sphere. If he has met you once, he will remember you the next time. It is because his vision for peace that chado courses exist at several universities, and he personally funds many branches of the foundation to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars for each branch each year. When I do the numbers, I can’t imagine that the wealth that supports that outreach is newly generated. Relativelly few people study chado in Japan, and when they do it can’t cost as much as it would need to cost in order to fund overseas operations. Income from signing commissions or other appearances also cannot add up to the support needed. The only thing that makes sense to me is an ordained and deep well of wealth. His son is now the current grandmaster, and he is not quite the visionary or as outgoing. Beneficiaries worry what will happen to the support when the former grandmaster dies.

I had wondered how wide the chasm between himself and the rest of us, given all the socioeconomic changes in Japan since the war and the gradual disappearance of chado from the national consciousness. Turns out that the distance between is untraversable. He is like the Last Emperor of China, a vital part, if yet a vestige, of an old way of being, shielded from the anachronism by a group of servants who carefully construct events and arrive in advance to inspect and revise plans so that, upon his arrival, all goes according to their plan. He exists in the bubble of perfection they contrive for him. I wondered about that kind of relationship, about the problems of possibly never confronting your own insignificance or mediocrity, and what can be gained by those who ensure that you can maintain that denial. Who decided that it should be that way?

Watch everyone who shares the view of his elevated importance dance on the hot coals of inferiority. He enters a room and everyone bows and shuffles to the walls. He calls to someone and they hop over a bench to present themselves immediately. はい！He says, Please make us some tea. The person sits down where a kettle is already boiling and the tea utensils poised, and starts in, as though they had planned it all along, but they hadn’t, and, if you’re me, this is a marvel to behold, the power to command such fearful attention, and the capacity of the supplicant to respond and perform a complicated task with grace. I had heard when we were in Kyoto that a tea person always carries the contents of the fukusa basami 「ふくさばさみ」 on their person because they could be called to participate in a tea gathering at any time. When I heard that, I thought it sounded quaint, a nod to a time when the only possible positions for people in those neighborhoods of Kyoto were to be noble tea people or monks, or the servants thereof. But, no, it happens yet today, if you are still in the company of those people, which I was, for this little bit.

The gyotei 「ぎょてい」 are the men in black kimono who are the teachers or advanced students from Kyoto. They are professional tea people who scout venues moments before the grandmaster’s arrival, devastating someone’s painstakingly crafted flower arrangement to create a new arrangement worthy of the grandmaster and invading kitchens「みずや」 to correct the heat of the water and the general flow of tea-making. They can make tea anywhere, with anything. Traveling the world, in some places rather impoverished and as culturally distant from Japan as it is possible to get, making tea from whatever vessels have been provided by the locality. In Seattle, they take the lid off the ornate, silver-plated three-gallon coffee urn and rest a hishaku 「ひしゃく」 across the opening. They ladle directly from the urn into the bowls, using the same arc of the elbow used when making tea in public. They scoop one giant scoop of tea into each bowl, instead of the customary one and a half scoops, and whisk in broad sweeping strokes. The tea looks like eggs whipping. Sometimes they palm the bowl while they whisk. They don’t say a word and when they do it’s an instruction to each other.

I wondered about them off duty. Like the old paintings of the court, I sometimes spied them in corners when they thought they were out of view, laughing with each other or looking at their cell phones. Are they ever in their own capacity when they travel? What do they like to do? At our dinner in Kyoto, one of them joked that the reason they teach geisha chanoyu is because all the teachers hang out in Gion.

He had another grandmaster traveling with him, the latest heir in a famous line of potters. The man was young and garish, pompous-seeming. The day I saw him most often he wore what I think was a bespoken suit. It had strangely Western-cowboy flourishes such as metal-tipped collars on the shirt and jacket. Same for the boots. His wife was as a doll, immobile in a thickly painted face and erect posture. She said hardly a word but nodded and bowed. He sat spread-legged and comfortable in privilege. By contrast, he made the grandmaster seem all the more humble.It made me think about how inherited rule generates a wider variety of personalities than democracy does. In a democracy, the people who seek to rule tend to be the same sort of person. (But, then, perhaps there is something about the coddling and meticulously maintained myopia of a kingdom that evens out this variability.)

On the last day, I went to the hotel to see off the grandmaster as it was important to have a group to send him off. Everyone waited an hour before he arrived, all the ぎょてい, the photographers, the assistants, his traveling companions. All were in Western business clothes. For days we’d only seen each other in kimono, workers in the palace kitchen silk to silk and silent. Now we were loose with each other. The photographer smiled at me, and the ぎょてい chatted. Finally, he arrived, dressed in an exquisite Italian suit, ready for air travel. His entourage departed (do they fly first class?), and then he thanked and hugged everyone and stood for countless photos before stepping alone and with, daresay, intention onto the escalator leading down to the roundabout where the car waited.