Drinking the Mountain
Featured in the acclaimed print magazine Eighty Degrees.
[Excerpt]
It’s not immediately clear what Masahito Tame is doing alone in the forest of central Japan. Often called “Japan’s last tea hermit” by those who know him well, Tame (pronounced TAH-may) has been living a life of seclusion for more than three decades, His humble woodland clearing contains the essentials for his rough existence; a makeshift cooking hearth, buckets to gather rainwater, and a sparse collection of ragged clothing hanging under a sagging awning. A ramshackle two-story structure tottering on the back of a small flatbed truck is his only permanent shelter from the elements. Thought the camp as a few small saplings that will one day grow into tea bushes, lovingly cared for and full of live. This isn’t your typical homeless encampment.
At the height of Japan’s bubble economy in the 1980s, Tame was a businessman in Osaka. When the bubble burst, his company went belly-up. He dabbled in a variety of trades, never able to fully settle down. “This was all in my previous life,” he jokes with a toothy smile. He admits that his sudden shift to a life along in the wilderness was hard to rationalize at the time, but a solitary life fits him just fine now. “Now I am free to focus on tea,” he whispers like a magician introducing his first trick.
This hermit tea master is on an earnest journey to explore the esoteric elements of tea. He performs “experiments” with it, bringing him tantalizingly close to unravelling the mystery of why we drink tea. Other masters find meaning in highly formal settings or through reliance on centuries of ritual precedence. Tame pushes all of this aside. His ceremony is only loosely based on what others perform. It’s his “freestyle tea ceremony” that has solidified his reputation as an iconoclast shunned by many in Kyoto, the center of Japan’s traditional tea culture. He doesn’t seem to mind. “I’m not hiding anything,” he professes with a smile. “This is “This is my way of tea, my way of life.”
Read the full article in the Spring 2021 issue of Eighty Degrees.
