Kobori Enshū

Kobori Enshū (小堀 遠州, 1579 – March 12, 1647) was a Japanese aristocrat, garden designer, painter, poet, and tea master during the reign of Tokugawa Ieyasu.
His personal name was Masakazu (政一). In 1604, he received as inheritance a 12,000-koku fief in Ōmi Province at Komuro, present Nagahama, Shiga.
He excelled in the arts of painting, poetry, Ikebana flower arrangement, and Japanese garden design. His accomplishments include garden designs for the Sentō Imperial Palace and Katsura Imperial Villa (Kyoto), Kōdai-ji, Sunpu Castle, the Nagoya Castle keep, Bitchū Matsuyama Castle, and the central enceintes of Fushimi Castle, Nijō-jō (Kyoto), and Osaka Castle.
He was though known best as a master of the tea ceremony. His style soon on became known as "Enshū-ryū". In light of his ability, he was tasked with teaching the 3rd Tokugawa shōgun, Tokugawa Iemitsu the ways of tea ceremony. In this role, he designed many tea houses including the Bōsen-seki in the subtemple of Kohō-an at the Daitoku-ji, and the Mittan-seki at the Ryūkō-in of the same temple as well as the Hassō-an.
Kobori Enshu (1579-1647) was a feudal lord active in culture and administration as a senior vassal of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the early years of the Edo period. He was involved in the construction of buildings, tea rooms, and gardens for the Tokugawa Shogunate and the court. Lord Enshu served as a tea ceremony instructor under three Tokugawa shoguns. In his teachings, he added his own samurai sensibility to the wabi-sabi of previous tea masters. To this he added a focus on aristocratic elegance. In addition to tea ceremony, Enshu’s aesthetics continue to influence Japanese art, calligraphy, and architecture today.
The larger Iemoto schools surviving today mostly descend from Sen-no-Rikyu, early founder of the tea ceremony. Rikyu came from the merchant class and was not a samurai. However, there are a few Iemoto with old lineages that were founded by feudal lords, and incorporate samurai values. The Kobori Enshu School is one of these “samurai tea” traditions.
After Enshu’s death in 1647, the family split into two lines, one headed by Enshu’s son, the other by Masayuki Kobori, Enshu’s younger brother. Kobori Masayuki served as a senior official to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the shogun responsible for unifying Japan.
A scandal in the 1780s disrupted the Enshu family lineage, which cut the senior line of the family off from their lordly status and the warrior class. Only the Masayuki branch of the family continued to serve the shogunate as a direct vassal until the end of the Edo period.
During the Edo period, the samurai tea ceremony was restricted to samurai and was not accessible to the general public, but after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the 12th Iemoto, Soshu, opened the practice to reach broader audiences. Two generations later, the 14th Iemoto, Sochu, expanded the scope of the family’s influence, including an appointment as the tea ceremony instructor to Her Imperial Highness Princess Kikuko of Takamatsu.
Today, there are Kobori Enshu branches all over Japan, from Iwate Prefecture in the north, to Fukuoka in the south. In addition to regular lessons and tea ceremonies, tea masters associated with the School hold workshops throughout the country to improve their practice.
Tea gatherings are an important part of international outreach as well; tea masters use their practice to share Japanese culture in settings such as the United States and Europe. The Kobori Enshu School of Tea Ceremony continues to play a role in generating appreciation for traditional Japanese culture at home and abroad.
Tea Ceremony, codified in its present form in the late 16 century, is a “path”, both spiritual and aesthetic. It has been passed down the centuries via hereditary Iemoto, a system unique to Japanese arts. Iemoto, which means “House at the Source,” are families, headed by a Grand Master, who preserve and teach arts such as Noh Drama and Tea Ceremony. In English an Iemoto is usually called a “School,” although the word means more a “school” in terms of style and tradition, than a physical place. “Iemoto” can be used to refer to the School in general, and also in particular to the Grand Master.
The tea ceremony tools that Kobori made famous in this way were later called Chuko's specialty. In the tea room, there is a tea room "Yosuitei" with 13 windows that are brighter with more windows than those in Oribe. This was designed at the request of the daimyo Toshitsune Maeda. It is said that Enshu held about 400 tea ceremonies in his lifetime and invited 2,000 guests. His patrons include the zen monks Shokado Shojo and Takuan Soho.
There are presently about 200 schools of Tea Ceremony in Japan, but only a handful that trace back to the founding years in the late 1500s and early 1600s. One of these is the Kobori Enshu School.
Fuyuko Kobori was born to Yuko and Soen Kobori, the 16 Iemoto, in Tokyo in 1985. From the age of six, she learned the art of tea ceremony from her father. Fuyuko earned her bachelor’s degree from the Department of Economics, School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University. She then dedicated herself to the Kobori Enshu school office as an assistant to the Iemoto and a lecturer at the Shorai-kai study group. In May 2019, the Kobori family gave Fuyuko the title Iemoto-shi (“Successor to the Iemoto”), announcing her future succession as the next Iemoto.
Fuyuko is active in a wide range of traditional and contemporary tea-related events. She often collaborates with artists, musicians and butoh dancers, organizing tea ceremonies at contemporary art exhibitions and performances abroad.
As the first female Iemoto of the Kobori Enshu School and the first Iemoto with a foreign spouse, she leads a group of nearly 1,000 students nationwide, as a figurehead for women’s leadership in Japanese culture. Fuyuko is not only responsible for passing on her family’s culture to the next generation, but she is also breaking into a role that has been served only by men as heads of their Iemoto households. She plans to pursue research on women and traditional culture as her life's work and is the proud mother of two sons, Masanobu and Masanao.
The aesthetic sense brought by Enbori Kobori was also reflected in the world of flower arrangement, which was established as a style, and flourished especially in the late Edo period. Shunju Ichiyo, who draws on the flow of tea in Enshu, has established the “Tenchijin's Three-year-old” flowering and has developed from tea flowers to its own flower shape.
The style was established by the three major schools of Masakaze, Nihonbashi, and Asakusa. In the early days of the Showa era, many independent families and sects were born from the established school, and the number of schools bearing the name of Enshu increased dramatically at the end of the Meiji era.
These schools generally have the common feature of bold and exaggerated tunes on flower branches. In the flower arrangement, this kind of composition is known as a technique that is difficult to master technically.
Media related to Kobori Enshū at Wikimedia Commons