Japan's most celebrated Shogun stoops low to enter his tea house. Tokugawa Ieyasu is dressed not in his usual finery, but in a simple unlined kimono. His silk-decorated sandals or zōri are left outside. Shuffling forward on the slippery smooth tatami matting, he reaches the mizuya, almost silently for such a large man. The mizuya is where the tea master keeps his chadōgu, or equipment, including the natsume or tea caddy. Ieyasu's tea caddy bears the Tokugawa family crest of three hollyhock leaves etched in gold. Otherwise, the equipment is very simple, in tune with the tea ceremony's themes of humility, simplicity and naturalism.

Soon, Ieyasu has his fire lit and as the wood scent fills the small room, a voice calls from outside the guest entrance. It is clearly not a Japanese voice. The Shogun bids his guest enter and the door slides back to reveal a blue-eyed Englishman dressed in kimono and bowing low. Tall and usually bamboo-straight, he too stoops to enter and, as he removes his sandals, Ieyesu notices with silent approval that his guest has remembered to wear the clean white socks or tabi for purity.

The Englishman kneels and sits back on his lower legs in the seiza style. Ieyasu motions him to the first guest position opposite the tea-master. There is to be no second guest, nor indeed a third. For the first and probably last time a Japanese Shogun has invited his foreign ‘prisoner’ to the most intimateof his country’ s ceremonies.

Still kneeling, the Englishman eases himself to the appointed position, his fists clenched so that the knuckles, not the open palm, touch the floor. Through the rising steam from the cooking pot he saw not the all-powerful, ruthless ruler but a short, chubby man comfortable in his own imperfections and intent on a perfect otemae or performance of this centuries-old custom. Even to this English mariner, used to the rough life of the sea, the ceremony’s guiding principles of harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity are already apparent in that simple room. As he accepts the traditional sweet rice cake, he sees the powdered tea scooped into a bowl and how, before he ladles in the hot water, the Shogun taps the scoop on the bowl's rim twice.