Why Japanese Tea Ceremony Is Badass: KIMONO

The secrets of living Buddhism, as told by the 1,400-year-old kimono and those who wear it today

Although I'm sitting thousands of miles away in Honolulu, I can see that it's a beautiful Fall day in Madison, Wisconsin. As we talk over Zoom, my dear friend and Zen training buddy, Anita Emiko Taylor, is showing off the bold fall colors outside her window. There's a maple tree directly outside her house and the sunshine is filtering through its bright orange and red leaves, giving everything onscreen a beautiful, warm hue.

The light compliments Anita's orange kimono, which she decided to wear today as the multi-layered, traditional Japanese garment is the topic of our conversation. I had asked Anita if we could talk about her experience wearing kimono—both as her cultural inheritance and now as a part of our shared Zen training—which originally, in Japanese, wasn't the term for any specific garment but simply translated as 'clothing'. Today, kimono refers generally to traditional garb and is worn by Japanese people for special events like weddings, funerals, and coming of age ceremonies.

"I call it my ThunderShirt," Anita says of kimono, with a beaming smile. A veterinarian, she explains how the ThunderShirt works for pets, applying soft, gentle pressure on their bodies to relieve anxiety and fear. In a way, kimono does the same thing for her.

"I'm very, very comfortable in kimono," she says. "A lot of people would say, 'Oh, kimono sounds too restrictive and uncomfortable.' But for me, it's not restrictive.… There's this pressure on my torso and it actually feels really good and it matches the breathing that we do, as well, breathing from the low belly from the hara."

As we talk, Anita refers often to how kimono changes the shape of her body and how she breathes. The Hara Breathing she mentions is a method that is central to our shared training in the Chozen-ji line of Rinzai Zen. Chozen-ji was established by Omori Sogen Rotaishi and Tanouye Tenshin Rotaishi in Hawaii in 1972 and places foremost emphasis on the physical experience of Zen, beginning with posture and breath. Hara Breathing moves the breath and one's center from high in the head or the chest to a place of more stability and strength in the trunk, below the navel in a spot called the hara in Japanese. 

"Zen without the accompanying physical experience," Omori Rotaishi wrote in Chozen-ji's founding Canon, "is nothing but empty discussion." For this reason, we not only do zazen (seated meditation) like other schools of Zen and Buddhism, but we also employ martial arts, fine arts, and manual labor as core methods of our training. Students in the Chozen-ji tradition do, of course, read Zen books and sutras, and learn Zen concepts. But this is considered most valuable after achieving some other understanding, more as a means to validate their actual physical experience after extensive, in-person training with a qualified teacher.

It was because of our Zen training that Anita and I both started wearing kimono regularly around the same time. We had been getting serious about Chado, The Way of Tea, which our sensei, Yumiko Sayama, always insists is much more than just 'Japanese Tea Ceremony'. Rather, Chado is a whole melding of Japanese culture, philosophy, morals, arts, and etiquette. It is a Way, the English translation for Do in Japanese or Tao in Chinese. In other words, it is a method of spiritual discipline or training to find one's True Self, to become Enlightened. 

Anita Emiko Taylor

In Chado, we learn to arrange the Tea Room, select the Tea utensils, and prepare tea in a way that puts guests at ease, feeling a oneness with the host and their environment. Wearing the same traditional clothing—like kimono, or kimono and hakama—that the founders of Chado wore as they created Chado is another means of physically experiencing and absorbing the depth and meaning they built into it. It makes it so that training in Tea not only changes one's intellectual understanding of the world and oneself, but changes fundamentally who she is and how she walks through the world.

Although some of my ancestors were Japanese, most likely colonizing Japanese soldiers, I have always identified as Korean or Korean American. So Anita and I had very different experiences learning to put on kimono. For me, getting into it was an interesting puzzle, something foreign and, at first, superficial. For her, putting the kimono on as an adult, trying to figure out its incomprehensible mechanics—the garment holding itself up through a few precisely tied knots, no zippers, no buttons—was deeply frustrating and called up difficult memories. 

"[My mother] never wore kimono after we moved to the US. So maybe the last time she wore kimono around me, maybe I was like 3…. Growing up in the 80s in rural upstate New York, that definitely wasn't something we wanted to do, wear kimono and be different. There was a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment at that time."

Not only is the kimono sometimes a trigger for this experience of 'Otherness' that Anita perceived growing up, it is also, when mischaracterized as a robe or sexualized in mainstream Western culture, a symbol of American racism, imperialist military aggression, and the subsequent exploitation of Japanese women. According to Sheridan Prasso, author of the 2005 book The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient, the US government sought to feminise Japan after World War II, in part to make it seem less threatening as it was reintegrated into the global system. This was in addition to outlawing certain martial arts, like Kendo (Japanese fencing), as much of Japan's military and political strength came from martial arts Dojos and their connections to Japan's historical warrior class, or samurai.

The feminised salaryman, in comparison to the hypermasculine samurai, and the servile geisha were tools of this strategy of emasculating Japan. At the same time, the economic realities of post-War Japan corrupted the revered image of the geisha with prostitution and put kimonos into the hands of American GIs as souvenirs as starving Japanese traded their family heirlooms for food. Stateside, the recipients of these kimono wore them as they had seen depicted in 19th century European paintings, mostly of white women lounging seductively in loosely tied kimono, the beginning of kimono's reinvention as merely a robe. As recently as 2019, Kim Kardashian tried to trademark the word kimono with the US Patent Office for her line of shapewear—as in, underwear. It wasn't until she received a heartfelt letter from the Mayor of Kyoto, the city in which the kimono originally came into use in the 700s AD, that she seemed to understand just how insensitive, appropriative, and exploitative it was to use the word kimono to describe anything other than actual Japanese dress, worn as it had been intended for literally over a thousand years.

As cringey as it is to look at van Gogh, Klimt, and Whistler's paintings of basically naked women only loosely covered by silk kimono, I also laugh, knowing that their models probably ended up styled that way because they couldn't figure out how to put the damn things on. That's why, tied loosely by a sash at the waist, a full foot of the bottom of the kimono can still be seen dragging on the floor in these paintings, no doubt tripping the models up and pulling the whole things down as the fabric got caught underfoot.

That was one thing that really surprised me when I first learned to put the kimono on: the many layers of fabric and the number of accoutrement needed to get them all to stay in place. Three utility straps are needed, two of which are later removed after the obi, which pulls it all together, is secured in place with the obijime. In addition to that and the undergarments under the kimono and obi, I also wear two velcro belts and an elastic band with clips on either end to hold the tops of the undergarment and kimono in place. All in all, it took me several months of putting on the kimono multiple times a week to learn how to put it on correctly. Even still, I sometimes end up with an unraveling obi in the middle of Chado class. 

Unlike Anita, this is only a source of annoyance for me. I never felt like I should innately know how to put on kimono, since I wasn't raised Japanese. I never felt like I had failed to tap the collective ancestral memory of how to wear it properly that was my birthright. Such is the preciousness and the weight of responsibility for preserving kimono for Japanese people and why so many received Kim Kardashian's branding efforts as a dagger to their hearts. 

But I can at least relate to Anita's experience of kimono as not just a physical, but also a kind of cultural ThunderShirt. I've seen how excited people of Japanese descent get when they see a woman in kimono or a man in hakama. When our sensei, Yumiko, wears kimono to an event or function, I have to admit that her presence alone seems to elevate a space. Anita has remarked more than once that just seeing someone else wearing kimono properly fills her with happiness that the garment is getting its due respect, and that that feels like a gift to her.

But even more than this sort of intangible cultural value of wearing kimono properly, I identify the kimono most of all with the role it plays in our physical approach to Zen training, which, since I live at a monastery, is basically my whole life. Like the uniforms for other physical arts, the kimono is, for me, training clothes. This can be hard for Westerners to understand. Even American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, who came to many realizations reminiscent of Zen, said, "beware all enterprises that require new clothes, and not the wearer of new clothes." He did not note the vital connection that there could be between the two.

"It's almost like a non issue for Japanese people," Anita reflects. "If you're going to do Kyudo [Japanese Archery], you [wear] Kyudo gi and hakama. You wear the appropriate one and what's appropriate for a woman. If you're doing Judo, you wear a Judo gi. If you're a construction worker, you wear a certain kind of clothes or uniform, certain shoes. I don't think Japanese people would have an issue with just fitting in and wearing what's appropriate for the activity you're doing."

More than just an issue of appropriateness, there's a true issue of function in the clothes we wear. Or at least that's the case with kimono. When training in Chado, everything about kimono—from the robe and obi to the tabi or formal split-toe socks—changes the way my body sits, stands, and moves. My posture can't help but be erect and its straightness calls attention to other body parts, like my arms, which now yearn to be held with my spine's same loft and grace. 

Wearing a kimono encourages small, patient steps and forward movement propelled not by the head or the legs, but by the hara. My center of gravity lowers and, even if I'm moving quickly, I never have the feeling of rushing blindly. When I get up from kneeling on the tatami floor of the Tea Room, the kimono encourages me to sit first on my heels and then rise with my entire thighs and core activated, like I'm floating straight up. The movement is filled with power and grace at the same time.

And as Anita describes, the obi maintains a soft and gentle pressure on my body that helps me feel more connected to both the people and the environment around me. Wearing kimono, I find it easier to not just conceptually understand, but actually experience the four principles of Tea: harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility. There's something about that gentle hug that helps me relate to others in a way that promotes more connection and care. Not from my head, connected through ideas and words, but from my heart and from my hara. 

How awesome would it be if kimono could be seen by more people as not a robe, a symbol of female subservience, a souvenir, or even as prized Japanese cultural dress, but also as I see it: as a vehicle for Enlightenment? As much as a Burmese monk's saffron robes, the kimono holds within it the secrets of living Buddhism. By this, I don't mean just how to be a good Buddhist, but how to be a Buddha. 

And the best thing is that you don't have to read any Buddhist sutras or memorize any esoteric Buddhist philosophies to begin to have it work on you. You just have to put it on.