Is the tea party over?
An in-depth look at why the Japanese Tea Ceremony House was gutted and if it will be back

By Shannon Curley
Collegian Staff
September 19, 2007

Twenty years ago, in 1987, La Salle opened the East Coast’s very first university-based Japanese Tea Ceremony House in one of the cottages on Belfield Farm. It was an affiliate of the Urasenke School of Tea, an internationally renowned program. This August, the University removed all of the architecture and utensils essential to making the tea house operational, thus dismantling it.

Erin Brodbeck - The former Tea Ceremony room used to have authentic
Japanese decor before being dismantled.

Referring to the gutting of the Tea House as part of a “much larger set of space issues,” Provost Richard Nigro explained that the University has been assessing its space needs for quite some time. He also said that the possibility of using the Tea House for other purposes arose sometime last spring.

La Salle recently purchased the Germantown Hospital property, the area now called West Campus. The hospital is now in the process of being converted into office space and space usable for nursing and health sciences classes. Although there are some offices now in operation on West Campus, the building will not be available for classes until next semester.

“Although the Germantown property was acquired, the property is heavily occupied with medical related businesses that have leases,” he said, “The real estate action took place, but some of the property won’t be available for three, four, five years, because we need to honor those leases.”

In attempt to fulfill “swing space needs” to accommodate the University during this period of expansion, the administration inquired about the Tea House’s level of use and discovered that it was utilized, but not often.

According to Brother Joseph Dougherty, a longtime affiliate of the Tea House, tea is ideally taught one-on-one, which may account for the low levels of student usage the administration received. A tea ceremony only usually includes up to five people.

The Urasenke Chaynoyu Center in New York, the branch of the Urasenke School of Tea La Salle primarily dealt with, is disappointed that La Salle has closed its Tea House. In particular, representatives from the Tea House were upset because they donated $50,000, as well as authentic utensils from its collection.

“We haven’t received any notice from the University,” said Mariko Kurashima, a manager at the Urasenke Center in New York. “We are very concerned. We don’t have any information and we want to find out what is going on down there.”

According to Kurashima, the school has received complaints from students of the Urasenke School who were studying in Philadelphia and using the facilities at La Salle. Urasenke intends to send the University a letter to find out what its future plans are, Kurashima said.

On the University’s end, Nigro acknowledged that he wanted to have contact with the Urasenke School. The administration is trying to identify people who are knowledgeable about the particular relationship between the Urasenke School and the University.

“Any decision to do anything with the Tea House is tabled,” said Nigro. “[For the time being], nothing will happen to that building.”

The University offered representatives of the Tea House another farmhouse on the Peale House property, but the space was deemed insufficient for the needs of the tea ceremony, Nigro said.

According to several University officials, it is entirely possible that the Tea House will be completely restored, even if in another location on campus, because all of the artifacts were carefully removed by professionals and put into storage.

The Tea House itself was brought to fruition mainly through the collaboration of La Salle’s former president, Brother Patrick Ellis, F.S.C., Ph. D. and former religion professor Brother Joseph Keenan F.S.C., Ph. D. After returning from a trip to Japan in the early ‘80s, Ellis recognized that the future of U.S. trade was with Asian countries.

“We wanted to prepare all of our students, but especially our business students, for the Far East. I told Brother Patrick [Ellis], ‘If you want to capture the heart of the Japanese culture, you go to the tea ceremony’,” Keenan told the Daily News in the late 1980s.

In addition to teaching the tea ceremony, Keenan served as the coordinator of the Tea House until his death in 1999. Concerning his expectations for the Tea House, in 1986 Keenan told the Collegian, “It will bring the heart of the Japanese culture to the La Salle campus. In addition, it will bring persons to La Salle University who otherwise would never have come.”

Over the years, student use of the tea house has varied. Some have experienced the ceremony in conjunction with various classes and the FYO program, and a percentage of those students feel strongly about the Tea House and its cultural significance.

“I took an LGU class that went to Japan two summers ago and [the Tea House] was a great way to get a taste of what we’d be experiencing in Japan,” senior communication major Jeff Quigley said. “It truly was a major loss to La Salle. It’s a shame to [remove] something like that. It was a cultural relic.”

Despite this view, there are others on campus who either do not know about the Tea House, or do not care.

When asked about it, sophomore business major John DiPompeo said, “Actually, what is the Tea House?”

Still, there are some students who have never been to the Tea House because their classes never took them there, but would liked to have gone.

“I personally haven’t been there,” said Wilfred Caberto, senior accounting major and vice president of the American/Asian Students Intercultural Assoc-iation. “I don’t want to see it go because I haven’t had a chance to see it yet.”

curleys1@lasalle.edu

Additional reporting by Olivia Biagi, Sam Fran Scavuzzo and Frank Visco