Spring Break
Tea master helps students learn 'art of tea'
By John Rogers, Associated Press
Issue date: 9/4/08 Section: Verve
LOS ANGELES - She stands several inches under 5 feet tall, a diminutive, delicate looking woman of 88.
But place her on a chair in her traditional Japanese tea room and Sosei Matsumoto becomes a larger-than-life figure.
This tiny woman is a tea master, skilled in what the Japanese call chado or "the art of tea."
To her students, she is much more.
"She's not teaching you a certain skill but teaching you a way of life," says Jon Lin, a 49-year-old businessman who has been studying with Matsumoto for three years, arriving almost every Monday night to sit in an uncomfortable looking posture, legs tucked under torso, on the floor of her tea room.
As green tea and its purported health benefits have captured Americans' fancy in recent years, it has become hip to swig various concoctions of it out of plastic bottles or down it out of paper cups.
Those who venture into Matsumoto's home learn quickly that, under a ceremony developed over the centuries, that's hardly the way it's done.
Utensils are often intricate, like the whisk that is used to stir the beverage.
An object more closely resembling a work of art, it has been meticulously fashioned into 100 or more tiny tentacles from a single piece of bamboo. Cups, bowls and other items, some hundreds of years old, also vary from season to season.
But place her on a chair in her traditional Japanese tea room and Sosei Matsumoto becomes a larger-than-life figure.
This tiny woman is a tea master, skilled in what the Japanese call chado or "the art of tea."
To her students, she is much more.
"She's not teaching you a certain skill but teaching you a way of life," says Jon Lin, a 49-year-old businessman who has been studying with Matsumoto for three years, arriving almost every Monday night to sit in an uncomfortable looking posture, legs tucked under torso, on the floor of her tea room.
As green tea and its purported health benefits have captured Americans' fancy in recent years, it has become hip to swig various concoctions of it out of plastic bottles or down it out of paper cups.
Those who venture into Matsumoto's home learn quickly that, under a ceremony developed over the centuries, that's hardly the way it's done.
Utensils are often intricate, like the whisk that is used to stir the beverage.
An object more closely resembling a work of art, it has been meticulously fashioned into 100 or more tiny tentacles from a single piece of bamboo. Cups, bowls and other items, some hundreds of years old, also vary from season to season.
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