Hideyoshi's Tea Ceremony During The Vietnam War

During the Sengoku period in Japan, there were many little countries and warlords, they fought against each other and had war every year. Thus, the main parts of the soldiers, samurais, were really tired of the everlasting wars. To keep their state and make them relax, the ruling class introduced and developed tea ceremony. Tea ceremony came up first in China and then went to Japan, after years of development and changing, it had its unique form. Tea ceremony is an important part of Zen, during the process of making and drinking tea, people meditate and got the peace of mind. Coming into the tea house, the peace and quietness comfort the exhaustion of samurais, making them forget the cruel grapples in the battlefield and the confusion of living
He taught Hideyoshi tea ceremony, and this film shows the story between them. We all know that as the governor of the whole country, Hideyoshi must be really proud of himself, or in other words, arrogant. Like many governors in history, Hideyoshi was born in a farmer’s family, but he got money and power, so it’s not difficult to imagine what would happen. When an uneducated man gets the incredible power and money, absolutely he will be arrogant and be controlled by his lust, because no one have taught him what he should do to deal with that situation, he doesn’t have that kind of value about self controlling. On the contrary, Rikyu was a tea ceremony master; he had profound understanding of Zen, which means he was wise. He had the peace of mind; he knew the beauty of simplicity, and the meaning of life. One is an uneducated but powerful farmer and the only thing he can do is to kill people, the other is a Zen master who knew the meaning of emptiness and had a peaceful mind. Of course, there must be difference between their values, not to mention the fact that they seen each other every day, finally the difference became
Would there be a turning point in the future? As for this suppose, I just want to say it was impossible. Let’s see the story as a whole. In the first half of the film, Rikyu could making tea and sharing ideas with friends naturally. Although Hideyoshi sometimes came and destroyed the phenomenon, it’s easy to see that Rikyu still had a lot of time belonging to him. Gradually, with the pace of the film speeding up, the times that he had meetings with Hideyoshi became more, and the relationship between then became worse. The chances to drink and talk about tea with friends were gone, his space and time was totally wedged in by Hideyoshi, his values were destroyed by Hideyoshi’s huge power, which means it was impossible to mediate the contradiction between arts and politics, which was exactly where Rikyu’s tragedy lied on. He became caught in a whirlpool of politics, trying to match the high pressure of politic power with the value of arts and personal friendship in exchange of a small living space; it could only be in