About the Author

Everything on this site — the journal, the product descriptions, the guides — is written by one person. This page exists so you know who that is before you decide whether to trust any of it.

I practise tea. I do not teach it.

I study in the Urasenke tradition, in Tokyo, with a teacher. I hold no tea name. I am not a master, I am not an instructor, and I have no certificate to show you. What I have is a practice: the same forms, repeated, in a room where someone more experienced tells me what I am doing wrong.

That is a smaller claim than most shops selling these tools make. It is also the honest one, and it is the reason this site reads the way it does. I am not explaining tea down to you from somewhere above it. I am a little further along the same path, and I still remember which parts were confusing — mostly because a good number of them still are.

What that means for what you read here

• I use the tools I sell. The whisk descriptions are written from having ruined whisks. When I say a cheap chasen sheds its tines within months, that is not a sales line borrowed from a supplier; it is what happened to mine.
• I separate fact from preference. Water temperature is a fact. Whether you prefer a wide summer bowl is not, and I try never to dress the second one up as the first.
• I say when I do not know. Tea has a long literature and I am reading it, not reciting it. Where a claim is contested, the article says so rather than picking whichever version sells better.
• I do not use the phrase “ceremonial grade”. It has no legal or traditional meaning in Japan, and there is a whole article here explaining why. It would be an easy word to sell with. That is exactly the problem with it.

Where the things come from

I choose every item by hand in Japan. The whisks are cut in Takayama in Nara, where a small number of families still split each one by hand. The bowls are Mino-yaki, from Japan’s oldest and largest pottery region. The incense includes classic Kyoto blends from houses that have been at it for centuries.

Nothing is drop-shipped and nothing passes through a third warehouse. Each order is packed in Tokyo and posted from Japan, ceramics double-boxed by hand. The longer version of why this shop exists is here.

If something here is wrong

If you find an error — a term used loosely, a history flattened, a measurement that does not hold up — please write to me. I will correct the page, and I will say on the page that I corrected it.