July 14, 2000 at 12:00 am #40904
Jerome
Participant
Nearby Kansas City has a Japanese sister city and an annual Japanese festival. I recall seeing an abbreviated tea ceremony and what stood out was that the host(ess) did not partake of tea, and that there was a lot of ritual to it, so that the American in the ceremony had been studying it for well over a decade and is still studying it. The Japanese language and customs show a deep appreciation for one’s relative place–much deeper than ‘tu’ versus ‘vous’.