03/10 Second Sunday in March

Second Sunday Open Days

Japanese gardens are designed primarily for quiet contemplation and introspection. Our Second Sundays offer visitors the serenity that has characterized Japanese gardens for centuries, and a respite from a hectic world. Consistent with the spirit of the day, every Second Sunday is a day to explore the quiet pleasures of tea. Either we will have tea ceremonies where you can have the traditional tea and sweets in the Niko-an Teahouse, interesting talks about tea or workshops like the recent macha-making workshop.

Book Talk by Rebecca Corbett about Women's Role in the Tea Ceremony

Although women make up around ninety percent of tea ceremony practitioners in contemporary Japan, histories of the practice typically ignore women’s presence until the late 19th century. In her recent book, Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan, Rebecca Corbett writes women back into the history of chanoyu (Japanese tea ceremony) in the Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. 

In her talk, Dr. Corbett will introduce some of the main trends we can identify for women’s tea practice in these periods, including connections between learning tea and entering into service in an elite household, how studying tea was presented as a way for lower class women to become graceful, and how some groups of women, such as nuns, practiced tea as an art form that included the production and connoisseurship of utensils such as ceramic tea bowls and bamboo tea scoops.  

Rebecca Corbett gained a Phd in Japanese Studies from the University of Sydney in 2009, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University before taking up her current role as Japanese Studies Librarian at the University of Southern California in 2016. Her research interests include the history and practice of Japanese tea culture (chanoyu), and early modern Japanese women’s history.

Her current project is a biographical study of the Buddhist nun and artist Tagami Kikusha (1753-1826). This work will examine both her life in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, and the transmission of her work in modern Japan. Other interests include the role of traditional culture in modern Japan, and in shaping ideas about Japan internationally.

Parking on surrounding residential streets is prohibited. Please see our parking instructions HERE.

• Reservations close the day before at 5pm
• Children 12 and under are free, no reservation required.
• The garden is open to the public 10am to 4pm on the second and last Sundays of each month.
• Picnics welcome! 
• Sorry, no pets allowed.
• The garden is wheelchair accessible
• OPEN RAIN OR SHINE. We are not able to issue refunds for garden admission

(Back to Events at a Glance)