Before I met tea, I had thought that tea was a ceremony only with strict rule and manner. But after I began to learn tea ceremony, I found that tea didn't mean only to make tea at a tea hut. Many utensils used at tea ceremony have their own inscriptions, and especially tea scoops' inscriptions are often named seasonal phrases, like "Harugasumi(spring haze)". Therefore I had to sharpen my sense of the season.After few years since I had begun to learn how to make tea, I thought we could arrange tea ceremony with simplest procedure, and I got the permission to try tea ceremony by ourselves. Then I was very surprised to find that tea covers very wide range of Japanese cultures. To follow the the procedure to make tea is only a small part of tea ceremony, and I had to understand almost every element of Japanese culture.
Calligraphy, flower arrangement, kaiseki(Japanese style cuisine), Japanese architecture, Japanese garden, Japanese old courtesy and manner, kind of tea bowls and their history, and sense of season as a main theme of the tea ceremony. Japanese culture and tea ceremony seems to be fused into one, and which is leading the other is not clear.
These components should be kept within a certain level in a tea ceremony. Tea ceremony takes about 4 hours, and guests enjoy all through the procedure by leaving themselves to the host's heartful treatment. If they find any point that the host cuts corners, the level of the tea ceremony falls down to that level. It isn't necessary to use expensive utensils, but all the element should be harmonized by one rigid concept which the host wants to say. That is the best treatment to the guests.
I think Nuclear Engineering has same kind of character. When I learned nuclear engineering at my university, we had to master not only all the area of faculty of engineering, such as electricity, machinery, civil engineering, chemical engineering, but also biology, mathematics, and medicine.
In order to understand the nuclear phenomena, we had to utilize all these knowledge. Nuclear technology handles not only the phenomena of molecular level activities, but also atomic level activities. Therefore, it cannot be handled perfectly and safely without considering physical, chemical and biological effects. The knowledge of these areas technologies are essential, and none of them can be missed.
From this standpoint, I think tea and nuclear have same character as synthetic culture and composite technology. Therefore, I always learn tea from all round basis. Without this view point, it may be very difficult to understand real meaning of tea.
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