Tokyo Tower Tea Gathering 2018

This year has been, for me, a relentless succession of major events—perhaps the most extraordinary series of events of my life. And today, at last, the event that I would call the culmination of it all took place at Tokyo Tower.

The tea gathering ended after midnight, and by then the date had already changed. I had slept only 30 minutes the night before last and just one hour last night in order to prepare for this event. Even as I kept thinking, “I still want to do this, and I want to do that,” time simply continued to slip away. Never have I resented the clock quite as much as I did this time.

This was the second Tokyo Tower Tea Gathering. But unlike the first one, held ten years ago, this event was on an entirely different scale and welcomed a very different group of distinguished guests.

Ten years ago, the Tokyo Tower Tea Gathering was held on the Great Observatory, 150 meters above the ground, as part of a project commemorating 150 years of friendship between Japan and France. This year, I was given the extraordinary opportunity to take the tea gathering even higher—to the Special Observatory, the Top Deck.

The event was conceived as an atomi-cha, a tea gathering recreating and reflecting upon a previous tea event—in this case, the tea gathering held at the Eiffel Tower on September 14.

Since returning from Barcelona last month, I have quite literally been living through days and nights of almost continuous preparation. And yet, somehow, I still arrived at the day of the event without having finished everything I had wanted to do.

The Top Deck is an extremely limited space, and because the number of guests had to be restricted, it was unfortunately impossible to welcome as many people as I would have liked. Nevertheless, it became a commemorative event marking Tokyo Tower’s 60th anniversary of its opening.

Five artists connected with the Association Franco-Japonaise pour la Cérémonie du Thé were represented: Hideaki Kimura (Bizen ware), Takao Tahara (Hagi ware), Shinryū Sugita (Kyoto ware), and Hōsai Matsubayashi XVI (Asahi ware), together with Hisaaki Kamei (Takatori ware), who will be joining us as an artist next year.

Their works were exhibited as part of the tea gathering, which also served as an atomi of the tea gathering held at the Eiffel Tower in September.

We were also deeply honored by the distinguished guests who came to join us.

At my residence, our principal guest, Mr. Eishi Kuroda, 14th head of the Kuroda family, former lords of Kururi Domain, arrived in a formal onari, accompanied by members of the Tamaru family, a former senior retainer family of the domain. At the 250-meter observation deck, I had the honor of offering him a bowl of tea.

We were also honored by the presence of Yasutoshi Nishimura, former Chief Cabinet Secretary; Mr. Goto, Chairman of MX TV, and Mr. Date, its President; Mr. Takenaka, Senior Managing Director of Shochiku Co., Ltd.; Lily Franky, who has a particularly close connection with Tokyo Tower; Mr. Kumasaka, Chairman of Sankei Shimbun; and Mr. Taguchi, Chairman of Seino Holdings.

From the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we were honored by Ambassador Seiya Fujiwara, whom I had the privilege of working with in Algeria, as well as Ambassador and Mrs. Okamura, with whom I had only recently had the pleasure of working in Cameroon.

Above all, I was especially grateful to welcome Mrs. Yuko Hayashi, wife of former Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Hayashi, who was the person who supported me more than anyone else during my work in London and Lyon this year. In the afternoon, we were also honored by the visit of Mrs. Aso, wife of former Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso.

Many other distinguished guests also took the trouble to come, with the furthest traveling all the way from Ehime Prefecture.

We were also deeply honored by the presence of many members of the Urasenke Tankōkai Young Members’ Association. I would like once again to express my sincere gratitude to the young members from both Tokyo and Chiba for coming to support us despite it being a weekday.

The event was held both as part of the commemorative program marking the 160th anniversary of Japan-France relations and as a special event celebrating the 60th anniversary of Tokyo Tower, which will mark 60 years since its opening on December 23 of this year.

At the public tea sessions in the afternoon, approximately 200 guests attended. At the exhibition venue, the participating artists introduced their works, and I was delighted to see that the visitors greatly enjoyed both the exhibition and the tea gathering.

This event would not have been possible without the tremendous support of Mr. Hisakichi Maeda, President of Nippon Television City Corporation (Nippon Denpato Co., Ltd.), and Mr. Yamamoto, President of Yamamoto Co., Ltd., who generously provided the exhibition cases as a sponsorship.

For me personally, this was the largest event of my life after the one at the Eiffel Tower, and in terms of the number of guests, it was the largest tea gathering I have ever hosted.

The fact that we were able to welcome such a large number of guests and offer them proper hospitality was largely thanks to the extraordinary cooperation of the staff of Nippon Denpato Co., Ltd.

The success of this event was made possible not only by those involved in tea and ceramics, but also by the support of so many people from completely different fields.

This year, I traveled between Japan and France four times and entered France nine times. When I declared, “I’m not going to France again this year!” everyone laughed at me.

Yet this commemorative year marking 160 years of friendship between Japan and France has become an especially memorable chapter of my life. To have had the opportunity to hold tea gatherings at the two great landmarks of these two world capitals—the Eiffel Tower and Tokyo Tower—is something I can hardly imagine ever being able to repeat.

Tokyo Tower places hospitality at the very heart of what it does. For this tea gathering, a large number of employees from departments ranging from sales and tourism to general affairs and accounting came together and held numerous full-team meetings.

It takes at least 15 minutes to travel one way from the meeting rooms to the observation deck, yet they repeatedly went up to conduct inspections. In the meeting rooms, they even built a model of the venue and used it to examine every detail.

I honestly know of no other example in which such meticulous planning has been carried out for a tea gathering lasting only a single day.

There was so much for me to learn. As someone who also regards hospitality as the essence of what I do, I was repeatedly humbled—and, at times, frankly embarrassed—by Tokyo Tower’s commitment to hospitality and its refusal to compromise when it came to preparation.

Thanks to the many rounds of refinement made possible through the full-team meetings, the event was completed without injury or damage to any of the tea utensils or works of art.

I hope to put everything I learned from this experience to good use somewhere in the future.