What is kaishi? The paper guests carry at a tea ceremony

If you are invited to a tea gathering, there is one small thing guests carry with them: a pad of white paper called kaishi. It is what you take your sweet onto, and what you wipe your fingers on after you drink. It costs very little and does a surprising amount of work.

The short answer: kaishi (懐紙) is plain white paper, usually a pad folded in half, that guests carry at a tea gathering. Dry sweets are taken by hand onto your own kaishi, and after drinking thin tea you wipe the rim of the bowl with your fingers and then clean your fingertips on it. The name means "bosom paper," because it is kept in the fold of the kimono at the chest.

I study tea in Tokyo, in the Urasenke school. Here is what kaishi is for, and the small wooden pick that goes with it.

What kaishi is used for

• As a plate for dry sweets. Dry sweets (higashi) are served heaped in one dish, a few more than there are guests. You take yours by hand and set it on your own kaishi.
• To clean your fingers after drinking. When you finish a bowl of thin tea, you wipe the place you drank from with your index finger and thumb, then clean those fingertips on your kaishi.

Kaishi and the wooden pick

A fresh sweet (omogashi) is not picked up by hand. It is served with a kuromoji, a pick cut from the branch of the kuromoji tree, a member of the laurel family, and you eat it with that single pick. The pick and the paper go together: kaishi under the sweet, kuromoji to cut it.

The sweets themselves change with the season. In autumn, chestnut sweets appear; I write about them in autumn Japanese sweets with matcha.

Guests also carry a square silk cloth, the fukusa, and a smaller patterned one, the kobukusa.

A second meaning

The same word is also used for a sheet on which a poem has been written. Such a kaishi can be mounted and hung in the alcove of a tea room as a scroll, alongside lines of Zen calligraphy and letters written by tea people of the past.

The other kinds of scroll hung in a tea room are in what is a kakemono.

At home

You do not need kaishi to make matcha at home. But if you serve a Japanese sweet before the tea, setting it on a square of white paper rather than a plate is a small, easy way to bring the tea room into the kitchen. The order is the same as in a tea room: the sweet first, then the tea. More in wagashi and matcha.

Questions I get asked

What is kaishi?

Plain white paper, usually a folded pad, that guests carry at a tea gathering for sweets and for cleaning their fingers.

Do I need to bring kaishi to a tea ceremony?

Guests carry their own. If you are not sure whether to bring it, ask the host or the place you booked.

What is kuromoji?

A small pick for sweets, cut from the branch of the kuromoji tree. A fresh sweet is eaten with one pick.

How do you eat a dry sweet at a tea ceremony?

Take it by hand from the tray onto your own kaishi, and eat it before the tea.

Where this fits

For the bowl that follows the sweet: a 100-prong bamboo whisk made in Takayama, Nara, a wide bowl and a bamboo scoop. If you are going to a gathering for the first time, what happens at a tea ceremony walks you through it.

Written by Mio.K, who chooses everything in this shop by hand in Japan.