Yawara — The First Harvest

YAWARA

喫茶去

COME, HAVE SOME TEA

One House · 一つの家

One house for the Japanese arts of attention — the cup, the classics, and the quiet.

茶

YAWARA TEA

Shizuoka sencha, with gyokuro forthcoming — grown in the old gardens, nothing added.

古今和

KOKINWA

Japanese cultural education — the classics, calligraphy, language, and the Way of Tea.

余白

YOHAKU

The art of the space between — 間, stillness, and what restraint restores.

Tea Fields Before Fuji: terraced tea fields at Ōbuchi Sasaba, Fuji City, Shizuoka, with Mount Fuji behind — Tea Fields Before Fuji · Ōbuchi Sasaba, Fuji City, Shizuoka · Photo: SHori, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped)

The Founding Circle · 創

The first harvest arrives in February.

Single-origin green tea from Shizuoka, carefully chosen by a Shihan of the steeped-tea way. Join the Founding Circle for first-shipment priority, a free digital print from our collection, and a chance at a connoisseur's gift.

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The Tea · 茶

Grown in the old gardens.

Single-origin Japanese green tea from Shizuoka: deep-steamed sencha first, with Shizuoka gyokuro forthcoming. One hundred percent green tea, nothing sweetened, nothing hurried. Tea chosen the way a scholar chooses a text: for what it is, not what it pretends to be.

The first harvest arrives in February 2027.

柔能制剛

The soft overcomes the hard.

It is the oldest idea in the martial arts and the oldest idea in Laozi, and it is the same idea: what yields endures. What bends does not break. Yawara — 柔 — is that principle poured into a cup. The name is the old word for the soft art itself, and it is a promise about how the whole thing is made: gently, by someone who has spent a life on the mat and over the tea.

柔能制剛

STITCHED TO THE BELT

余白

The space between.

Yohaku is the empty part of the painting — the margin the brush leaves untouched, where the whole composition breathes. It is a way of teaching stillness through the Japanese arts: calligraphy, incense, the golden joining of kintsugi. Not a cure for anything. A practice of attention, and of leaving room.

ENTER YOHAKU →

古今和

The old and the new, in harmony.

A small virtual school for the love of Japanese culture — the Tale of Genji and the classics, calligraphy, language, poetry, and the Way of Tea. Named from the Kokin Wakashū, the thousand-year-old anthology whose spirit it keeps: old and new (古今) held together (和).

A LECTURE AT THE TEMPLE · 2017

ENTER KOKINWA →

The Hand Behind It

James Baskind

Shihan (師範) — certified master — in Baisa-ryū sencha-dō, under the name 優仙窟, with nearly thirty years in matcha and chanoyu. A Yale-trained scholar of East Asian religion and twenty years lived in Japan. The heart of this whole house is simply that it is authentic: the tea, the teaching, the philosophy are not borrowed — they are alive.

The Pattern · 青海波

Seigaiha — the blue ocean wave.

The waves beneath this whole page are seigaiha — endless, overlapping, rolling in without end. The story often told is that the motif traveled the Silk Road from Persia, through Tang China, and became one of the most Japanese patterns there is. Its name comes from a court dance — the very dance Genji performs in the Tale of Genji — so the ground you are standing on is woven from the same classical world Kokinwa teaches. The waves carry an old, auspicious meaning — peace, good fortune, and no end — and they rhyme with the name above them: 柔, the soft that yields and so endures.

喫茶去

Kissako — “Go have some tea.”

When visitors came to the great Zen master Zhaozhou (Jōshū, 778–897), he answered newcomers and old friends alike with the same three words: “Go have some tea.” Twelve centuries later, we still think it is the best answer there is.

YAWARA

柔能制剛