Ronald Phillip Tanaka's "Scenes from a Country Tea Room" is an exploration of the Japanese tea ceremony as seen through the eyes of a Japanese-American high school student, Laura Toyoda. Her poems and drawings of various types of pottery often associated with the tea ceremony are an attempt to represent the basic principles of tea, e.g., sabi, wabi (which have no real English equivalents) and wa (harmony). However, in a manner typical of tea, they do so indirectly by allusion, parable and inference.
In viewing the tea ceremony through Toyoda's eyes, Tanaka is examining the interface...
Ronald Phillip Tanaka's "Scenes from a Country Tea Room" is an exploration of the Japanese tea ceremony as seen through the eyes of a Japanese-America...
