Chashitsu Experience

茶cha室shitsuへeよyoうuこkoそso！

Welcome to the teahouse! Feel free to explore at your leisure, and enjoy a relaxing time as you learn a little about the long-practiced noble art of Japanese 茶sa道dou, the way of tea.

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Hello there! I’m currently an exchange student in Japan. I am very grateful for the opportunity to share a little of my knowledge about Japanese tea ceremonies, by which I have long been fascinated, through a medium that I love (video games!...)

I’ve been very lucky to experience such things such as Japanese flower arrangement, calligraphy, and matcha drinking several times now, however on a student budget attending an all-out, bona-fide tea ceremony is certainly a little difficult. In creating the Chashitsu Experience, I hope to provide an alternative method of ‘visiting’ a Japanese tearoom, and maybe impart a little bit of knowledge about 茶sa道dou along the way.

Please let me know if you learnt anything new, or if you have information of your own to share, I’d love to hear it! For now, I hope you enjoy the experience.

 

How To Play

Chashitsu Experience is a point-and-click, educational game. Explore your environment using the cursor and interact with objects to learn more about them. It can be played on both your computer’s browser, and on a Game Boy.

Controls

	Keyboard	Gameboy
Move Cursor	Arrow Keys	D-Pad
Interact/Confirm Choice	Z	A
Return to Title	Shift	Select
Start	Enter	Start

For an extra relaxing experience, listen to your favourite calming music, or perhaps a nature soundscape, while playing .

Extra Notes

Chashitsu Experience is not meant to be a strict, historically accurate architectural representation of a teahouse, but rather focuses on aesthetics and imparting information in a fun way. Please excuse any historical inaccuracies, mish-mash of time-periods, etc.

One of my favourite teahouses of all time is Kodaiji’s beautiful Iho-an, situated in Kyoto. This is the teahouse seen at the beginning of the game. I have yet to visit it in person, but would certainly love to one day.

The tea bowl seen throughout the game is inspired directly by a Rakuware tea bowl with a plum blossom design, created by 10th generation Raku Tannyu.

The haikus in the game (randomly receive 1 of 6 when interacting with a special object!) are all written by haiku master Kobayashi Issa (whose name, 一i茶ssa, aptly translates to Cup-of-Tea). I included a few about tea specifically, but also one of my absolute favourites of Issa’s adorable haikus about a romantic cat in love – 猫nekoのno恋koi. I translated these myself, armed only with a language dictionary and intermediate Japanese proficiency, and hardly any knowledge of literary Japanese, so there may be some mistakes. Additionally, an attempt was made to preserve the 17-syllable haiku structure (aside from our favourite lover-cat; the translation I came up with conjured such cute imagery in my mind I couldn’t bear to change it), but they are definitely not perfect. Any suggestions or improvements on this aspect would be greatly appreciated! Japanese versions of these haikus were collected froma database of Issa’s works.

Most dialogue throughout the experience was written with the help of this site, and descriptions I collected at the Tokyo National Museum, which displays many tea objects as well as physical teahouses on the museum grounds. (TNM also offers free access to university students who attend a number of Japanese universities – if you are on an exchange or otherwise affiliated with these, I highly recommend a visit! 

I drew all art for this game myself, except for the full detail views of the teahouse and Hashimoto Gaho’s painting ‘Cat in Bamboo Grove’. These were created using the Game Boy Graphics Toy.

Created using GB Studio as part of a university course.