I have started tea ceremony classes and I am a grade 1 germaphobe. I was always taught to never share cups and I am paranoid about it to a huge extent.
The tea bowl is shared in Tea ceremony. They used to use separate ones but since Covid rules ceased it is back to using one bowl. I know they are not washed using detergent in the traditional kitchen.
Does anyone know if people have caught things like cold sores from these cups? I want to use a sanitisation wipe so badly but I am worried it is extremely rude.
9 comments
What makes you think they don’t use dish soap in the traditional kitchen? Of cause they do. It’s just like a ordinal cafe.
Not at all, that’s why all the ladies who do it get sick and die before they get old
Yes
Talk to your teacher. I’m sure they can accommodate you so you don’t have to use the same bowl. My teacher would. Oh! You could ask to always be shokyaku 😄
I’ve never been to a tea ceremony where everyone used the same bowl and I’ve been in Japan for 13 years. Is this just one particular place you’re going to or are you running into this issue at multiple locations?
Is hygiene defined by some objective standard, such an “likely to cause disease”? Or is it a subjective mental state in your brain?
If you’re asking the objective question, yes of course it’s fine. No one in your tea group is going up spit cholera-juice into your tea cup.
If you’re asking about a subjective mental state in your own brain, then I can’t speak to your own cognitive processes, but I can guarantee you’ll live a shallower, less-engaged, less-fulfilling life if you let that kind of concern stop you from living in the moment with the people around you.
But if you want to moderate your concern, maybe think probabilistically. What’s…
P(someone in the group is carrying a pathogen but still comes and participates)
times
P(they are contagious)
times
P(they use the shared vessel before you)
times
P(they deposit a sufficient pathogenic load in the shared vessel)
times
P(you ingest a sufficient pathogen load to potentially cause illness)
times
P(the pathogen gonna a foothold in your body and starts reproducing)
times
P(your immune system doesn’t handle the pathogen before you experience symptoms)
.. it’s a pretty small compound probability. And the pathogens you’re worried about if everything goes wrong, assuming you’ve had the standard vaccinations, are basically the common cold and strep throat. Inconvenient, but hardly serious risks.
Keep face mask on while you drink tea very safe
Yeah, at this moment, you are probably teeming with Obaachan Amoebachans
You are full of trillions of bacteria. Not millions, not billions – trillions. Every square inch of our skin has millions of bacteria on it at every single moment of our lives. We live alongside bacteria. It’s a friendly shared experience.
Because of this, our body is insanely good at resisting infection. Our skin is practically infection-proof when it’s undamaged. It takes a significant event to contract an infection or disease.
Exactly how many old tea ceremony women do you think have active herpes? When’s the last time you saw a woman with open mouth sores? And how many people do you imagine are getting herpes from sipping a cup?
The answer is zero. It’s incredibly difficult to contract anything from hard surfaces, that’s just not how pathogens have evolved to work. If you felt like it, you could lick the floor, eat off the floor, eat without washing your hands, drink toilet water, touch handrails, shake hands with strangers who fart and burp, and nothing will happen.
The vast majority of our hygiene rituals are just that, rituals. Unless you’re willing to declare, ‘I’m swabbing this bowl with a gross-tasting alcohol towel because I’m worried you will give me herpes’, just use the damn bowl. The bowl isn’t making you dirtier, the bowl is more sterile than you.
Oh, by the way, dish soap isn’t antiseptic. It doesn’t kill bacteria. It just makes removing food easier. Washed dishes aren’t sterile, they just have no food on them. Hard, dry surfaces just can’t harbor bacteria, so it’s totally okay anyway though.