Our company started the web-service named “KYOTO-SHIPPING”, which is to send the Kyoto culture to overseas.

With the concept, we suppose to provide plans for foreign people visiting Japan to understand Japan and to be impressed.
Broadly speaking, the plans are to feel Japanese heart through the Japanese original total culture, the tea ceremony.
They are also to deepen the understanding of Japan, and to make people interested in Japanese culture through experience and visitation of traditional industrial arts.

Besides, we suppose university students in Kyoto as a new generation to understand Japanese culture more with providing particular explanations and leadings mainly by themselves in this service, and finally, we hope this service would be a trigger of fostering international talent with making opportunities to get on with foreign people.

The progenitor who popularized the tea ceremony to overseas is TENSHIN Okakura.

TENSHIN was the thinker who exerted himself to introduce Japanese culture with publishing “The Ideals of the East-with special reference to the art of Japan” (toyo no riso), “The Awakening of Japan” (nihon no mezame), and “THE BOOK OF TEA” (cha no hon).

“THE BOOK OF TEA” was published in New York in 1906, and it was translated into German and French immediately.
This book is not the one that explains the manner of tea but it is to introduce its historical background easily.
TENSHIN knew that it was especially important to introduce the concept of tea to Westerner because they did not understand Japanese culture well.
He thought it was necessary to learn a tea ceremony in order to know Japanese culture since Japanese “residences, customs, clothes, china, Japan ware, pictures, and even literature” are influenced by tea ceremonies.

TENSHIN saw various elements in tea.
He said that tea includes ethic, religion, hygiene, economics, and “psychological geometry”, and he also said it expresses “the essence of East-Asian democracy.”
He saw the essence of tea ceremonies as a synthetic object including them.

Konosuke Matsushitastated about a tea ceremony as “Japanese original total culture.”
He also understood that “the master of tea is at once the master of a human.”
He read the totality that TENSHIN stated into tea as well as him.

In the EX.KYOTO-SHIPPING service, we will provide opportunities for foreign people to experience a tea ceremony and to discover a fascination of traditional industry with regarding these words from the heroes so as to make them feel Japan.