Reincarnated as the Mastermind of the Story - Chapter 34

Have you guys ever wondered about what’s the deal with the Japanese and their tea ceremonies and also with the English. The English tea drinking practice is most likely something they imitated from the Far East culture and not of their own origin. As a result, they do not practice the complicated rituals like in the East with a full tea-sets.

The Chinese prefer these dinky cups for their tea drinking practices but the Japanese customs is to regular or big cups like shown here though they don’t typically come with handles as you are supposed cuddle the cup with both hands and give thanks to the divine, not to any particular God, but to the divine. For some, it is an extremely serious business, both literally and figuratively. For the Chinese, being a culture that is more about practically over spirituality, it is about how to optimize the strength of the tea. It’s like what the West do with their Expresso, the principle is the same, just less high-tech.

Since I want to focus on the manga, I will have to skip how Expresso works. Suffice to say, there is a lot of science that goes into making an Expresso Machine and a descent one, the one that actually wroks and very hard to maintain, goes for over $15k each easily. And they don’t even last for more than a few year because their parts (these high-end machines) are all made by this one company in Italy and they basically make it impractical to fix these guys. It used to be you are able to get real expressos in the US around the time when StarBuck first opened. Expresso was the reason why Star Buck was so popular, they offered something that ordinarily costs a lot for a cheap price. But, these days, they are all fake. My advisor told me the reason why she has caffeine hypersensitivity is because she once had like 10 shots of expressos in Italy because it was so good in one afternoon. She ended up in the hospital and she can’t have caffeine ever since. It is that dangerous kids. Real expresso is “addictive.”

As you may know, practices like Tea, Archery, Karate, Sushi making, Sword Drawing (with real sword), even sitting (literally) all somehow can become an ART for the Japanese. Don’t you guy ever find that weird but also somehow very “honorable?” Probably no all obviously. I certainly did not when I was younger. I thought, being a practically minded Taiwanese with Chinese blood, it was just people making money. It wasn’t until much later in life that I have been engaging in the same thing for most of my life, in practically all aspects of my life. What the Japanese call “DAO” as in Ken-Dao (the way of the swords) or Bushi-Do (or Bushi-Dao, the way of the warriors) is what the Westerners called “Mindfulness.” It is about constantly being aware of what is it happening around you, noticing all the finer detail, to pose inquiry about the nature of what you saw, and make adjustment to improve or deter it from happening again.

This is the process of learning and feedback, observation and prediction, improvement and adjustment. It is a continuing process. Anyone who wishes to improve must practice the “DAOs” and it can be many. And it could be as trivial as figuring out the best position to “hug” the one you love.