“What do you drink when having a meal?” A Japanese friend asked me, who was surprised to find that we don’t really drink alcohol during dinner.

I instantly thought about a friend from Hong Kong who believes in naturopathy. That friend once told me, while frowning at me, not to drink anything during dinner because it can help keep the stomach in normal shape. When I was little, there would always be a big bowl of soup on the table during dinner. Everyone would have a spoon for drinking the soup. The whole family was basically sharing love and saliva when drinking the soup. It is actually hard to change a habit that was formed since childhood. So I would still always drink some stuff when having a meal. I couldn’t really ease the worried look of my Hong Kong friend.

“We drink warm water…” I know that Japanese people are used to drinking iced water or tea so my answer might sound a bit pretentious. I wasn’t quite sure about whether my answer would be satisfying.

“Ah… warm water? Warm water tastes nice indeed,” my friend said, looking stunned by my answer while drinking down the rest of beer in the glass. “I also love drinking warm water. I drink it in the morning after I get up from the bed. But I can’t drink over two glasses.”

In recent years, drinking warm water has been increasingly considered as a beauty diet that is good for people’s health. I believe my friend was genuine about warm water being tasty. In Japanese, there is a saying “Karada ni oishi”, which means that our body feels the delicious taste as our organs are relaxed by it instead of our tastebuds. When our body is feeling comfortable, our spirit is also refreshed.

Japanese people call warm water as sayu. “Yu” means boiling water. That’s why we refer to bathing as yu. The hot water we pour into teapots and cup noodle is also yu. But when hot water becomes some sort of beverage, we call it sayu. The white colour of sayu symbolises purity and clarity. There is no flavour, colour, spice, dirt, or harmful substance in a cup of sayu. When you pronounce sayu in Japanese, you might think of warm soup that radiates heat and gives you warmth in cold winter.

In most occasions, we would treat guests with cold drinks or hot tea. Only when there is a Japanese tea ceremony that involves the Way of Tea will we serve our guests with sayu. Japanese aesthetics is concentrated in the Way of Tea. The teaware we use for making tea, the flowers and plants between beds, the Japanese painting on the wall, the cracking sound from the burning charcoals, the sound of moving fabrics, the tea flavour in the air, the buzzing of some insects outside the window and the anticipated breaths in the room… all these are moments of beauty, about seasons, about people. The quiet room with a simplistic design is full of beauty and sensation that require the guests to appreciate with an open heart. A cup of sayu is offered before the tea ceremony to wash away the noises the guests are hearing from their mundane life. Some tea ceremony hosts will offer a cup of sayu after the guests have tasted usucha (thin tea). Sayu tastes soft and sweet after it has been boiling for quite some time in the pot. The tea ceremony host will then pour sayu into the teacup spoon by spoon in front of the guests. The tea will have the flavour of matcha, as well as sayu. The bitterness we taste from the tea will make sayu even sweeter. “Sayu is tasty,” this is the message that our body, our soul and tongue send to us.

I heard that there is more to offer the guests with sayu in a tea ceremony. The caffeine in matcha can affect our body’s ability to absorb iron. Sayu boiled by an iron pot can help supplement the iron we lose because of drinking tea. But I guess people no longer really consider this factor when offering guests with sayu because nutrition is very accessible nowadays.

The tea bowl that serves matcha is called chawan. After finishing a meal in an izakaya Japanese bar, hōjicha (a type of Japanese green tea) will be served with yunomi, a kind of narrow teacups. As for the teaware that is used for serving sayu and sencha (another form of Japanese green tea), we call it kumidashi chawan. Kumidashi chawan are mostly made of white porcelain with a wide cup mouth, which is best for showcasing the clarity of the tea. But why the chawan for serving hot water is named as kumidashi (water-drawing)? I have done quite a lot of research to look for a clear answer but I failed to find a satisfying one. Perhaps in a tea ceremony, getting water from the iron pot is considered as “drawing water”. Teawares were named according to their function in a tea ceremony because of tradition. Nowadays we don’t really pay that much attention to it anymore. Many young families don’t even make tea anymore and only drink bottled tea at home.

Kumidashi chawan is mostly used for treating guests. But our own kumidashi chawan, which is a ceramic clayware made by artist Naoto Ishii from Kyotamba, is used for drinking sayu. Our kumidashi chawan is a short teacup with a wide cup mouth. The boiling sayu can cool down very fast to a mild temperature adequate for drinking in our kumidashi chawan. Perhaps it is true that cold tea doesn’t taste nice. But I believe our kumidashi chawan provides us with just the right sayu drinking experience. We just need to drink the tea as soon as possible then it will be all fine. Since our chawan is quite wide, we don’t feel safe to hold it with one hand. When we are drinking with it, we would end up holding it with two hands, as if we are saying “Itadakimasu” (“I humbly receive” in English). A cup of warm water doesn’t come to us easily. Snows fall from the sky into lakes. The water from lakes is drawn to us by technologies and infrastructure that were built with the efforts of countless engineers and waterway workers. That’s how we can have access to water that soothes our throat. We are not only receiving gifts from nature, but also from hardworking workers. It makes it even more important for us to not take things for granted during a hard time when the world is undergoing a variety of challenges.