As part of the tea-ceremony course, the students take a brief class in pottery. The idea is for them to fashion a tea bowl... with their own hands....
A tea bowl is a very plain object.... Another word for simple and unadorned might be "boring" .... The seminar students have great difficulty in making something boring. At all costs, they must inject some originality into their work, and they are not satisfied until they have made their bowls "interesting"... the results are anything but meditative....Among our students, however, there are occasionally some Japanese, and they obediently make their tea bowls as they are told to. Boring is fine with them, and their bowls turn out to be quite beautiful.
Being average and boring here [in Japan] is the very essence of society....It need hardly be said that this is one of the major drawbacks of Japanese life. However, in watching the pottery class at Oomoto, the weak points of the American educational system became evident as well. Americans are taught from childhood to show creativity.... I sometimes think the requirement to "be interesting" inculcated by American education might be a very cruel thing.
--Alex Kerr (1952) in Lost Japan (published 1994 in Japanese, 1996, 2009)
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