by Nogami Yaeko
The golden tearoom was a sensation, which was surely Hideyoshi’s intention when he asked Rikyū to create it. It was similar to the two occasions when he had put 30,500 ryō of gold and silver on display at the south gate of Jurakudai and then generously distributed the money to upper-class lords. The golden tearoom was another way to show off his wealth and prestige.
Visiting lords who came to pay their respects to Hideyoshi were given permission to see the golden tearoom. It became a kind of badge of honor to brag about when they returned home.
Despite the widespread fascination, there were also murmurs of criticism aimed at Rikyū. Wasn’t he the one who promoted the way of tea in a grass hut? How could he reconcile the ideal of wabi with such an ostentatious display?
One of the most open critics of the golden tearoom was Yamanoue Sōji, Rikyū’s head disciple. He had also worked for Hideyoshi as a tea instructor, until he displeased Hideyoshi and was dismissed. Among the tea practitioners in Sakai, he was the most honest and straightforward. Sōji respected Rikyū more than anyone except Jukō, but he, along with the other tea practitioners of Sakai, firmly believed that tea should be practiced only as a mental and spiritual discipline, not as a source of profit. He didn’t trust the golden tearoom; to him, it was a sign that Rikyū had compromised his ideals to keep Hideyoshi’s favor.
Rikyū could quite understand Sōji’s dissatisfaction and doubt, although they never discussed it. It was hard for Rikyū to explain the contradiction to him. Sōji was a very good-natured and genuine person, but he tended to be stubborn. Once he got an idea in his head it was hard to change his mind. After years of study, immersed in the teachings of Dōchin, Jōō, and Jukō, Rikyū was fully aware of the contradiction. Finally, he had come to the conclusion that the essence of tea ceremony was simply to boil water and drink tea. From that perspective, it didn’t matter if you were making tea in the older, more formal style with Chinese utensils or if you were following Jukō’s grass-hut style.
Those two different ways of making tea captured him in different ways. He was attracted both to the extreme wealth of the Chinese style and the extreme poverty of grass-hut style, and he didn’t know how to express that. The original idea of the golden tearoom had been Hideyoshi’s. But in building it, Rikyū did not see himself as flattering Hideyoshi or compromising his own principles, despite Sōji’s doubts.
In making Taian, he had completely eliminated one form of beauty, but he had poured the same joy of creativity into the making of the golden tearoom. Hideyoshi’s Ōsaka Castle had been built to emulate Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle, which had been destroyed shortly after his death. With its lavish, seven-story donjon, Azuchi Castle was regarded as the model castle of the age, and Ōsaka Castle was created to reflect the same excessive tastes characteristic of the era. All of this richness was condensed within the small space of the three-mat golden room. For Rikyū, Taian and the golden tearoom were two expressions of the same thing. Using the golden utensils in the golden tearoom was the same as drinking tea at Taian. And sitting next to the rough walls in Taian was equal to sitting in a hundred-mat room and looking at gorgeous screens painted by Eitoku and Sanraku. That was the way Rikyū thought about tea, although Sōji and his other disciples did not understand the long, painful mental struggle it had taken him to reach this point.
The discipline of tea had supported him throughout his life, and because of his strict adherence to this discipline, he had not allowed himself to indulge in the pleasures of men when he was young. Even his marriage to his previous wife, the mother of Dōan, had been simply for the sake of custom: to him, it was just like opening the sunken hearth in the tearoom when winter came. His marriage to Riki when he was in his late forties, however, was much different. He loved Yahei’s sister very much, even though she was half his age and had her own children. In a way, she was like his first true wife.
“Chōjirō-san left a message that he has fired a bowl, and he would like you to look at it.” Riki brought in a black tray that held a tea bowl with thick, uneven glaze, red like the dawn. In the bowl there was hot water with a single petal of pickled cherry blossom floating on the surface.
Rikyū, who had recently developed a negative view of well-known Chinese tea utensils, had asked the potter Chōjirō to make a new tea bowl. He never drank matcha, the powdered tea used in tea ceremony, outside of the tearoom. Like a sake maker who never drinks a whole cup of sake but rather spits it out after just a taste, he didn’t want to spoil his tongue. Chōjirō knew this, so when he sent him a newly made bowl, Rikyū always tested it with water.
“Oh, this is very good.”
“The color is beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It has a nice round shape.”
As he examined the bowl, running his hands over the inside, bottom, and outside to check the thickness of the clay, his face returned to its usual expression. Riki knew it was better to leave him alone when he was worried about something; today, she thought his mood was the result of their conversation about Kisaburō, and she had felt sad. Seeing him relax now, she felt as if a nagging thorn had been removed from her finger.
Outside, street vendors’ voices mingled in an endless stream. The streets to the left of their house were laid out in an evenly spaced, centuries-old grid pattern, making it easy for vendors who carried their goods on their heads or on poles to go about their business. The high-pitched voices of seaweed sellers from Awaji Island echoed like songs. The seaweed grew in Naruto, where the waves were rough. After the seaweed was harvested, it was covered with ash made from burnt beach grass until it was half-dried and ready to be sold. When the seaweed was soaked in water, its tenderness, color, and taste returned, and it smelled like the ocean.
“Summer has come when the seaweed sellers from Awaji arrive, hasn’t it?” commented Rikyū as he put Chōjirō’s bowl back on the tray. He genuinely enjoyed the sound of the different street vendors, never heard in Jurakudai. He seemed to have forgotten all about Kisaburō.
As Riki listened to the vendors with Rikyū, she told him that she planned to cook his favorite dish, soft bamboo shoots, which she had gotten from the family of one of their employees—and also a special surprise. Riki was very good at cooking for tea ceremony, as good as a professional chef.
“What’s the surprise dish you’re going to make?”
“I’m not telling you. You’ll have to wait and see.”
“Well, I suppose I’ll have to, won’t I?”
“Yes, you will,” she retorted quickly, giving him a suggestive look with her limpid black eyes. The hint of shaved eyebrows on her forehead appeared faintly blue-green, and it was particularly charming set against her long, thick hair, as Rikyū admired her in profile. As a wife, only Riki could understand the ways that Rikyū found her beautiful, and because of his restraint in youth, his still-sturdy body didn’t know the weakening of old age.
In the early afternoon, a box containing fresh sea bream and a bottle of European wine arrived from Matsui Yūkan, the chief magistrate in Sakai. The news of Rikyū’s return home had spread quickly. Needless to say, Matsui Yūkan had sent the gift to show his respect for Rikyū as a political advisor, not as a tea teacher.
Rikyū greeted Matsui’s servant in a reception room next to the main entrance of the house, which was separate from the busi ness entrance. Matsui’s servant relayed his master’s message to Rikyū. “I assume you will be staying at your house for a while. I would like to visit you and hear about Kyōto,” he intoned.
Rikyū thanked him and told him that he would like to see Matsui, but his reply didn’t make it clear whether he would go to visit Matsui or invite Matsui to his home. Matsui was a tea practitioner. Despite his importance as a chief magistrate, Rikyū didn’t need to worry about being too polite because of their tea connection. He could let Matsui wait for a couple of days while he took care of business at home.
After their business was concluded, Rikyū returned to his room to do some bookkeeping. On a desk in fr
ont of a small, bright window covered with a rice-paper screen were various thick white account books and an abacus from China. Every time Rikyū came home, the first thing he did was check the books. His clerk, Mohei, who had been trained by Rikyū’s father and had grown up with Rikyū, had died a few years earlier. Since the loss of this important figure, Mohei’s nephew, Gisuke, had been taking care of the bookkeeping. Gisuke had been trained by Mohei, and so Rikyū wasn’t expecting any mistakes.
Mohei, a man of integrity, had always insisted that it was the shop owner’s duty to check the records whenever he was at home. Not only did Rikyū follow Mohei’s advice, his merchant spirit was not diminished by a lifetime of devotion to the discipline of tea. He checked his records as carefully and naturally as he made tea in a tearoom; he moved his fingers on the abacus as skillfully as he handled the tea scoop and silk wiping cloth. The records of his income from his business, rented properties, and other sources had to be kept precisely.
As the son of a strict merchant family, Rikyū was punctilious in his bookkeeping. Because of his social status, he could not eliminate some extra expenses, and his salary of three thousand koku could disappear quickly when he was living in Kyōto.
Two of Rikyū’s fellow tea practitioners in Sakai, Tsuda Sōgyū and Imai Sōkyū, were also merchants, but Rikyū’s financial standing was nothing like theirs. He envied them occasionally when he saw them spending three thousand koku like pocket change.
When Imai Sōkyū got drunk, he would brag about how he had helped Hideyoshi. “He may be at the height of his power, but when he was young he sent me a letter during the battle of Anegawa begging me to get him forty pounds of gunpowder. Without my help he would never have won so many victories,” he would say. Then he would wave a hand in front of a nose made red by alcohol and hiss, “It’s a secret!”
Sōkyū’s words were true. But it was also true that other merchants who practiced tea had made a great profit from those wars, not only at the battle of Anegawa but at every battle.
The influence of these merchants from Sakai had begun in the time of Hideyoshi’s predecessor, Oda Nobunaga. It wasn’t always an easy alliance. At first, Nobunaga had demanded that merchants pay a tax to support the war, popularly called “arrow money.” They were asked to pay twenty thousand kan, more than had been demanded from any other province. The merchants of Sakai did not obey willingly. Instead, Sakai’s citizens had built high turrets around the city and filled the moat with thorny plants. They wanted to keep Sakai a free city, even if it meant doing battle against Nobunaga’s troops.
But in the end the dispute was settled by mutual consent, and battle was avoided. Both sides realized that they could profit more by cooperating than by fighting. Eventually Tsuda Sōgyū, Imai Sōkyū, and Rikyū, who had advocated compromise with Nobunaga, became living symbols of the new authority in Sakai by serving him as tea masters.
When Hideyoshi came to power after Nobunaga, all the significant tea practitioners were summoned to serve him. Chanoyu was no longer regarded as a simple pastime or a sign of refinement: now, it was seen as a political enterprise. When Nobunaga was in power, the warriors who served him had wanted to receive rare and prestigious tea utensils that had been imported from China as a reward for their brilliant achievements in war. Such utensils were studied and revered by tea practitioners as the epitome of tea art, and were given poetic names to mark them as items of distinction. The warriors felt deep chagrin if Nobunaga gave them a castle instead.
Now, as the military ruler of Japan, Hideyoshi wanted to keep these Sakai merchants and well-known tea practitioners close to him by employing them as his advisors. Without them, it would be difficult to complete the task of conquering the entire country. It was a clever strategic move.
Hideyoshi had defeated Lord Shimazu in Kyūshū the previous May. Next, he planned to attack Lord Hōjō in Odawara and seize the Kantō area, which had been ruled by the Hōjō family for five generations. When Hideyoshi had attacked Lord Shimazu, the merchants in the Kyūshū city of Hakata had claimed the profits. Any tea gathering could be a place for business negotiations. If Hideyoshi attacked Odawara, the Sakai merchants would be the ones making the money, and so they were waiting to hear the war drums.
As a fish wholesaler, Rikyū didn’t profit directly from wars. But if he wanted to take advantage of his relationship with Hideyoshi, there were many ways he could do so without waiting for bloodshed. He rarely did. But recently, it had been more and more on his mind that he could make a great profit given the right circumstances.
After he finished checking the books, Rikyū clapped his hands. Riki poked her head into the room, and Rikyū asked her to call Gisuke, who was waiting as usual for Rikyū to complete his check before leaving.
“We still haven’t received payment from Konoyamachi and Zaimokuchō.”
Gisuke, a forty-year-old man, was just like his uncle. Even his hunched back was the same. Worried that Rikyū had found a mistake in his bookkeeping, he stood humbly near the entrance and began to offer an explanation, looking anxious. But Rikyū only moved his chin and changed the subject. “I know that the vessel Kinryūmaru has already entered the harbor.”
“Yes.”
The Kinryūmaru was one of the ships owned by Shimai Sōshitsu, a wealthy merchant from Hakata. He was a tea practitioner, and although Rikyū was not his teacher, Rikyū treated him as if he were a disciple.
“Do you know when they are likely to leave?”
“They have left already. Yesterday morning.”
“Is that so?” Rikyū could not hide his disappointment at having missed a chance to do business.
Gisuke looked even more upset now, as if the situation was his own fault. He asked Rikyū whether he wanted to send a message to Shimai Sōshitsu. Rikyū said that he did, but there was no hurry. “What did the Kinryūmaru bring?” he asked.
“It looks like Tennōjiya got a full cargo of gunpowder.”
Tennōjiya was the name of Tsuda Sōgyū’s business. Not to be defeated by Tennōjiya, Tsuda’s rival, Imai Sōkyū, a highly competitive businessman, was frantically stockpiling weapons in anticipation of Hideyoshi’s rumored forthcoming attack on Odawara. All the merchants knew this. In their race to make a profit from the coming battle, the tea practitioners of Sakai showed their true merchant spirit. In the southern region of Hakata, controlled by the Christian lords, the ports were more profitable than Sakai. Sometimes the merchants from these two rival cities competed, and sometimes they worked together. But behind the scenes, it may have been that Shimai Sōshitsu’s family was making the greatest profit because of Shimai’s connections with Rikyū.
After Gisuke had left with the accounting records, Rikyū took an inkstick and began to prepare ink for a letter that would be carried by express messenger to Shimai Sōshitsu. Hideyoshi wanted one of Sōshitsu’s most treasured possessions, a scroll with a mountain landscape painted by a famous Chinese artist, Ma Yuan. The wide scroll had been one of the Higashiyama treasures, a collection of rare Chinese art that had been the property of the Ashikaga shogunate a century ago. Hideyoshi had ordered Rikyū to offer Sōshitsu a very famous eggplant-shaped tea container with the poetic name of Kitano Nasu in exchange for the scroll, plus fifty pieces of gold. However, Sōshitsu already had an eggplant-shaped tea container. So instead, Hideyoshi decided to offer him an equally famous tea storage jar with the poetic name Hannya. In the letter, Rikyū explained the circumstances, and added the following:
Originally I bought the tea jar with thirty pieces of gold and gave it to Hideyoshi. If you do not want the jar, I will buy it from Hideyoshi for you for the same amount of money. In today’s market, a piece of gold is equal to five hundred momme, which adds up to two thousand kan. You might be a little bit dissatisfied with this arrangement, but since you are dealing with Hideyoshi, whose title is chief advisor to the emperor, I suggest you follow my advice. Regarding the scroll, it would be best if you bring it here yourself, but I know it’s a long way to co
me. Please have a responsible person bring it on your behalf.
Rikyū stopped writing at that point. The tone of the letter put more emphasis on selling the tea jar than on the scroll, but he didn’t care. He was so used to dealing with this type of situation that he wasn’t conscious of his own attitude.
After all, who really owned the jar? Rikyū had given it to Hideyoshi, so it no longer belonged to him. But he didn’t tell Sōshitsu that he hadn’t sold it to Hideyoshi for the same price that he’d paid for it.
Like Imai Sōkyū, Rikyū had the mind of a merchant, and he figured that since Sōshitsu was making a great profit in Hakata, he wouldn’t miss the money. In that way, Rikyū was more impudent than his fellow tea practitioners.
The same attitude lurked beneath all his dealings with Hideyoshi. From the beginning, Rikyū had known he couldn’t imitate Hideyoshi’s brilliance, boldness, and charm in the way he handled people. The way Rikyū expressed his creativity through tea—the building of Taian, which was designed to condense the universe into a minimum space, the pair of Yamazato tearooms in Ōsaka Castle, and even the golden tearoom, which was a totally different concept—was possible because of Hideyoshi. All of those tearooms were more than lines, spaces, colors, and quantities in the imagination. Without Hideyoshi’s wealth, power, and support, they would never have come into being. Without Hideyoshi, Rikyū’s creativity would have lain stagnant, and at the end of his life he would have been just another tea practitioner without position or value.
Rikyū was very aware of his reliance on Hideyoshi. But appreciation and rejection, respect and hatred, are two sides of the same coin. Whenever Rikyū could profit from a situation, he would bow down to Hideyoshi. But since he had grown up in a city with a long tradition of freedom, where people did not bend easily to power, his character was like a hidden tusk—it could be used for a secret attack.