WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP — Dressed neck-to-toe in silk, the two guests in the Orchard Valley Middle School Instructional Media Center last week certainly garnered the attention of the sixth-grade art students who served as their audience. Drew Hanson and Shoko Kato then maintained that attention while providing the students a lesson on the Japanese Tea Ceremony and the tradition of the...
WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP -- Dressed neck-to-toe in silk, the two guests in the Orchard Valley Middle School Instructional Media Center last week certainly garnered the attention of the sixth-grade art students who served as their audience. Drew Hanson and Shoko Kato then maintained that attention while providing the students a lesson on the Japanese Tea Ceremony and the tradition of the kimono.
Students in Peggy Davis's and Veronica Akhtar's classes are currently creating clay tea bowls, and soon will be dyeing their own kimono designs. Knowing that this was part of the curriculum, the teachers applied for and received a Washington Township Education Foundation mini-grant that allowed Hanson and Kato to visit and fully integrate the arts of Asia.
"By experiencing the performance aspect of the traditional tea ceremony and by dyeing their own kimono designs, students will obtain a deeper meaning and have a better understanding of Japanese art and culture," Akhtar said.
Kato started the presentation by talking about the tradition of wearing the kimono, their immense costs -- the most inexpensive kimono will run at least $2,500, with some costing $30,000 or more -- and how rarely now the Japanese wear them. She then picked out sixth-grader Morgan Velykis and spent a good 20-30 minutes dressing her in a kimono, including the undergarments and accessories. Some kimonos can take more than an hour to put on, and most Japanese women require assistance in getting dressed in one, Kato said.
Once Velykis was dressed, the program moved on to the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Hanson, a retired former professor who has studied the tea ceremony extensively, led the proceedings. Dressed in a man's kimono, he cleaned all the items involved in the ceremony before brewing the powdery green tea for volunteers Billy Givens and Caden Morrell. Givens went first -- it's tradition that one person at a time drinks their tea at a Japanese Tea Ceremony -- enjoying two sweets before drinking his bowl of tea. Hanson then cleaned the bowl and repeated the process for Morrell. Only one mug is used during the ceremony.
"That's why a traditional tea ceremony can take several hours," Hanson said. "It's a very long, strict process that must be followed."
A Burlington County resident, Hanson has a Ph.D. in American Literature from Penn State University and has spent more than 20 years teaching writing, literature and poetry at the collegiate level. He started studying the tea ceremony in 1995 at the LaSalle University tea house. He still does some teaching at Rutgers-Camden. That's where he met Shoko, who is one of Hanson's students and an adjunct professor in her own right.
Hanson and Shoko are active at the Philadelphia's Shofuso Japanese House and Garden, located in Fairmount Park. Hanson is the vice president of Shofuso's Board of Directors. In addition, he runs the Boukakuan Japanese Tea House and Garden out of his home in Columbus.