Scenes from a Country Tea Room: New Japanese-American Poetry

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Ronald Phillip Tanaka’s Scenes from a Country Tea Room is an exploration of the Japanese tea ceremony as seen through the eyes of a Japanese-American high school student, Laura Toyoda. Her poems and drawings of various types of pottery often associated with the tea ceremony are an attempt to represent the basic principles of tea, e.g., sabi, wabi (which have no real English equivalents) and wa (harmony). However, in a manner typical of tea, they do so indirectly by allusion, parable and inference. In viewing the tea ceremony through Toyoda’s eyes, Tanaka is examining the interface between traditional Japanese culture and some of the core assumptions of our modern global community. It addresses the question of whether or not the principles of the traditional arts have anything of value to teach us other than California zen, the Ninja Turtles and octopus sushi. Finally, Scenes from a Country Tea Room pays homage to the thousands of Japanese and Japanese-American teachers or sensei who, like Matsui Sensei of the poems, have taught and continue to teach traditional Japanese arts in the Japanese-American community since the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the United States over a hundred years ago.