Kensui, Hishaku & Futaoki: The Overlooked Three

The kensui, hishaku and futaoki come into the tea room in one hand: the waste-water vessel held at the host’s left, the lid rest sitting inside it, the bamboo ladle hooked across its mouth. They are the last things carried in and the first carried out. The kensui is the lowest-ranked utensil in chanoyu, written at the tail of a gathering’s record on a line set below the others.

Every tea gathering leaves a paper record of what was used, the kaiki (会記). The bowl is on it. The scroll, the kettle, the caddy, the scoop, the flowers and the container they stood in are all on it, in an order that reflects what each one is worth. At the bottom, on a line set a step below the rest, is the kensui. ⁸ The vessel that catches the rinse water is written down, and it is written down last, and the indent is part of the notation.

The utensil glossary names these three in a single paragraph and moves on, which is the correct proportion for a glossary and the reason they have no article. Individually they are thin. Together they are the crew that serves the other utensils, and they have something in common that no list makes obvious: they arrive as one object.

The three arrive in one hand

Watch the host come in. Everything else has been set already: the mizusashi standing in place, the kama in the fire, the bowl and caddy carried in. The last entrance is the kensui, held by its mouth in the left hand, the futaoki inside it, the hishaku hooked over its rim. ⁶ The host sits, takes the ladle into the left hand, reaches into the waste-water vessel with the right, lifts out the lid rest, and sets it in its place. ⁶ When the utensils go out, the kensui goes first, in the same hand it came in. ⁶

So the three of them make one trip in and one trip out, and the other nine or ten objects on the mat get carried like guests.

An old gloss explains why. On the daisu (台子), the formal display stand, the matched set called kaigu (皆具) runs to four pieces: the water jar, the shakutate (杓立) that the ladle stands upright in, the kensui, and the futaoki. ²³ Yamashina Dōan, the physician who wrote down the tea of the regent Konoe Iehiro between 1724 and 1735, noticed the gap in that arrangement: the ladle has its stand and the whisk has its own rest, and the futaoki alone has nowhere to be displayed. ¹¹ With everything else already set out, the only object left for the host to carry is the koboshi. So the lid rest rides in inside the waste-water vessel, out of sight, and the word for that is kakurega (隠架), the hidden dwelling. ^{11 25}

The most formal arrangement in chanoyu produced a name for a utensil hiding in a bucket.

Kensui: the vessel at the bottom of the list

Also called koboshi (零し), “the spill.” ¹ It catches the water that has warmed the bowl and rinsed the chasen, and it does nothing else.

The references are blunt about its position and offer no philosophy with it. Lowest in rank of all the utensils; used at the kattetsuke (勝手付), the side of the host’s mat away from the guests, where it can barely be seen; entered last in the kaiki, one step down. ^{8 21} JAANUS supplies the working half of that: emptying waste water is an unclean job, a clean kensui is used for every gathering, and reusing one in front of guests is a discourtesy. ¹ Everything else in the room is presented, turned, and looked at. This one is worked around.

It is small. The Met’s Takatori-ware kensui, iron-glazed stoneware from the middle of the nineteenth century, stands 9.5 cm high and 14.6 cm across — a cereal bowl. ⁴ Metal, ceramic and bent wood are all standard, and the bowl shape is the commonest. ¹

The seven forms, and where their names come from

There is a classical set of seven, and reading them as a list tells you who was in the room when they were named.

Swords, a spear scabbard, a palanquin fitting, a hawking bag. The utensil at the bottom of the record takes its names from the kit of men who came to tea with two blades in their belts, and nobody along the way appears to have thought this needed remarking on. (The sources disagree on the seventh: some write 箪瓢, some 瓢箪. ^{8 17})

The plainest form has the best story. A mentsū (面桶) is a bentwood tub. Takeno Jōō (1502–1555) used one, and the Edo anecdote collection Chanoyu Kojidan says he took the idea from the rice container a pilgrim carries at the waist. ⁹ It stayed in the preparation room until Rikyū brought it onto the mat, and bare, unlacquered wood is still its formal version. ⁸ So at the most rigorous end of chanoyu, the rinse water goes into a beggar’s lunch box.

Hishaku: one node of bamboo, cut for the season

The kama has no spout. Water leaves it a ladleful at a time, which makes the hishaku the only means of moving hot water in the room, and the ladle is a stick of bamboo.

Its parts are named down to the last millimetre. JAANUS lists eight, among them the ridge on the cup’s lip (shinogi 鎬), the joint where handle meets cup (kerakubi 螻首), the profile of the handle above and below the node (kijimata 雉子股), and the cut at the handle’s end (kiridome 切止). ² A ladle for the sunken hearth runs about 40 cm long. ²

Making one is slower than the object suggests. Mihara Keiji, who cuts hishaku for a living, takes green bamboo, stands it a month or two to lose its water, boils the oil out, dries it in the sun, then lets it sleep for one to three years before he touches it. ¹⁵ The cup is joined to the handle without adhesive, and he cuts to order, for each gathering. ¹⁵ Over a hundred variants are said to have existed, made to individual tea masters’ preferences and to the mouths of particular kettles. ²²

Telling a ro ladle from a furo ladle

The same ladle is not used all year. Two are, and three things separate them.

The kiridome is the one students learn by rhyme: mi ga sogete iru no ga natsu — the shaved flesh means summer. ¹⁶ A ladle cut square across the end, with no bevel either way, is made to serve both seasons. ²

A third build exists and it is the oldest. The sashitōshi (差通し) runs its handle all the way through the cup and out the far side, and it is what stands in the shakutate on the daisu or the long board, which is why it is also called kazari-bishaku (飾柄杓), the display ladle. ²²

Why the tea year runs two hearths at all, and what changes in November, is furo versus ro. Down here, that whole argument comes to a bevel on the end of a stick.

Futaoki: the hidden dwelling

Five centimetres tall, and it holds the two things in the room that are too hot to set on a mat: the kama’s lid, and the cup end of the ladle. ³ The fukusa comes off the host’s waist to lift that lid, because bronze at 90°C carries no insulation. The lid still has to go somewhere afterwards.

The Met’s iron example, from the eighteenth century, stands 5.1 cm high and 7 cm wide. ⁵

The seven futaoki

Bronze, ceramic, and porcelain, and they are the ones people collect. Urasenke’s own account traces them back to the bronze futaoki of the daisu kaigu, which broke free of the set and multiplied. ¹⁴ Students learn them by a mnemonic line: kani, gotoku, hoya, ikkanjin, mitsu-ningyō, mitsuba, sazae — call these seven the seven. ²⁴

Two of them are better than their pictures. The gotoku copies the iron trivet that holds the kettle in the hearth, and you use it in exactly the months when the hearth has no trivet in it: with a kettle hung from a chain, or a brazier cast in one piece with its kettle. ¹¹ The missing trivet is answered by a five-centimetre bronze trivet with a lid on it. The kani started as stationery — bronze crabs of this kind were paperweights and brush rests, borrowed onto the mat. ¹³ The sources send it further back, to a bronze crab from Ashikaga Yoshimasa’s garden at the Jishō-ji picked up by Jōō, and they mark that as handed-down story with no record behind it. ¹³

Then there is the question of whether Rikyū chose the seven, since everyone asserts he did and the careful references say said to have been chosen. ^{7 10} The oldest list anyone quotes, from the Chanoyu Kojidan, opens “what they call in recent times the seven lid rests” and then names mitsuba, kani, sazae, hoya incense burner, three monks, gotoku — and wa, a ring, where the modern list has the ikkanjin. ¹⁰ Six stable, one swapped, and an attribution that arrives already hedged.

The bamboo one

A bamboo futaoki is called hikikiri (引切), meaning cut with a saw and left at that. ¹⁴ Rikyū’s size is 1 sun 8 bu, about 5.5 cm tall, for both seasons. The ro piece is taken from nearer the root and the furo piece from the next node up, so the wall thickness comes out about the same. ²⁰ The ro one is roughly 5.5 cm across and the furo one 4.8. ²⁰ It is cut upside down, root end up, and a small vent hole is bored through the node. ^{7 9}

The season rule is the same one the ladle runs, in a different alphabet:

That rule has a story attached, and the story is late. The Chadō Sentei, an Omotesenke-line compendium put together by Inagaki Kyūsō (1770–1819) and printed in 1847 ¹⁹, says the bamboo lid rest began with Jōō at 1 sun 3 bu, a preparation-room object. Rikyū enlarged it to 1 sun 8 bu, cut one with the node in the middle and one with the node at the top, and sent them to his two sons — the top-node one to Shōan, the middle-node one taken by Dōan. From that, the text says, it came into the room, and from that the seasons were fixed. ⁹ The Chadō Sentei is two and a half centuries downstream of Rikyū. Take the sons as tradition and the measurements as practice.

The finish is prescribed to the stroke. The Chafu (茶譜) instructs: saw it with a fine-toothed blade so the skin does not tear, leave the saw marks, bore the hole in the node — and a hole that comes out roundly beautiful is rejected as nurui, tepid. ⁹ A rule against tidying the cut, and a term of abuse for a hole that turned out too nice. Anyone looking for what wabi-sabi means in a physical object could stop here and be finished.

What they are worth

Buy the bowl and the whisk. None of these three works in a kitchen: they all exist to serve a kettle that cannot pour, and your kettle pours.

If you buy one thing, buy a pair of bamboo futaoki, tenbushi and nakabushi, for the price of a coffee. Here is the position I will defend. Do not buy the crab. The seven are shelf utensils, used in tana temae, with a place laid for them on the stand. ^{24 7} In a koma, the small room — the room wabi-cha was invented in and the room the whole argument leads to — the lid rest is bamboo and nothing else. ²⁰ A bronze crab is a lovely object that the tradition’s central room will not admit, and the honest way to want one is to want it as what it was before it was a lid rest, which is a paperweight. ¹³

Care is short, because two of the three are meant to perish. Green bamboo takes first-year cane and is cut for one gathering. White bamboo takes cane of two or three years, cut in winter, with the oil boiled out. ²⁰ A bentwood mentsū lasts a few soakings, which is what it was built for. The metal and ceramic pieces follow the ordinary rules in how to care for your teaware, and where each of the three falls in the sequence is the temae’s business.

The bucket that was never used twice

The Yamanoue Sōjiki was written in 1588 by Yamanoue Sōji, Rikyū’s leading disciple. Since scholars came to accept that the Nanpōroku is a later forgery, the Sōjiki has become the reliable document from Rikyū’s own decade. ¹⁸ The line the utensil references quote from it is this: the well bucket, the mentsū, and the bamboo lid rest — these three, brought out to Jōō’s taste. ⁸

Three objects. The tsurube water bucket, which the mizusashi claims. And two of mine.

Now the practice those two came with. Genryū Chawa, written by Yabunouchi Chikushin (1678–1745) arguing for a return to Rikyū’s manner, explains the mentsū: the old waste-water vessels were hard to come by, so Jōō favoured the bentwood tub as an aid to wabi, used for the hospitality of one gathering and then let go. The bamboo ring went inside it, the ladle on the rim. At the end of the tea the ring was dropped into the tub — done that way, the text says, to show it would not serve a second time, and that is the manner of feasting a guest. ⁸

The green bamboo is still cut for the gathering and still thrown away. ⁹ The saw marks are still left on. The word ichigo-ichie (一期一会) was not available to Jōō or to Rikyū. Ii Naosuke coined it between 1815 and 1860, working from ichigo ni ichido (一期に一度), “once in a lifetime” — a phrase that sits in the back half of the Sōjiki, in the pages where a book about ranking tea utensils turns to the tea person’s frame of mind. ¹⁸ The phrase and its history came late. The thing it names was already in the bucket, cut with a saw, with a hole bored in it, waiting to be thrown out.