The Pioneer of Tea Soup
As the wars of the Northern and Southern Dynasties and the Ehito Rebellion continued, a time when the future was uncertain, the culture of tea degenerated into the gambling practice of “tea fighting”, and the culture of tea was truly degraded. This was only one of the activities that were popular among the new samurai class, but among the nobles of Kyoto, the so-called “T’ang-like tea” was popular, but the content of it was to compare the precious tea utensils that they owned. These were part of the Higashiyama culture centered on Ashikaga Yoshimasa, and according to the historical materials such as the “Juntai Kanno no Jikan” and the “Goujishu” written by the Shogun’s sidekick at that time, there was already a systematic specification for the arrangement of the tea room and tea utensils, etc. MpA Tea.net
Yoshimasa established a tea room in Higashiyamaden (present-day Ginkakuji Temple), Togokudanri, and there was Tongensai, which is known as the originator of the four-and-a-half-stacked tea room, and the soup of this kind of tea is usually called the Shoin-style tea ceremony in the later times. mpAtea.net
However, there was one person who guided the Yoshimasa tea ceremony from the beginning to the end, and who became the original pioneer in the history of the tea ceremony, and that was Murata Jumitsu. MpA Tea Net
A native of Nara who made tea his ambition, Jumitsu became a disciple of Zen Master Ichigo at Daitoku-ji Temple and incorporated the ideals of Zen Buddhism into the tea ceremony. Striving for frugality, he replaced the original high-class lacquer table with a bamboo table, replaced the original ivory tea ladle with bamboo, and replaced the pottery from the Tang Dynasty with a tea bowl made in Japan, so striving for simplicity in the soup of tea, which was later called Kusoan Tea. mpAtea.net
Because of the disaster of the Ehito Rebellion, most of Kyoto was turned into ashes, and people with cultural literacy fled to faraway places. At this time, Sakai-cho in the Wazumi Kingdom, which was next to Kyoto, had a prosperous and free economy because of its good geography and because it was the only overseas trading port at that time, as if it were a strong contrast with the surrounding war. Under such favorable conditions, it was natural to carry the burden of cultural inheritance, and in such an environment, there was a man called Mukeno Shououou, later known as Chirikyuu Jushi. MpA Tea Net