While people watching in the small town of Yakage in southern Japan I met this woman, a sensei, or teacher, of the Japanese tea ceremony of Chanoyu. With a history of over four hundred years, it is a choreographic ritual of preparing and serving Japanese green tea. It is a synthesis of the traditional Japanese lifestyle, and its philosophy and aesthetics embody such representative ideals as simplicity, reticence, suggestion, and subtlety: preparing a bowl of tea from one's heart.