Japanese tea house lets visitors drink from $25,000 antique bowls

(CNN) — Participating in an ancient Japanese tradition, sipping from a $25,000 antique bowl and even finding a bit of a 1970s “Austin Powers” vibe.

All can be part of the experience at Gallery Okubo in Tokyo’s Yanaka district, where antiques dealer Mitsuru Okubo and his family offer the traditional Japanese tea ceremony experience with a twist — a choice of bowls ranging from new to more than 300 years old, with some of the older museum-quality pieces worth as much as $25,000.

The idea behind the gallery is that the visitor gets to feel the bowls and taste the drink as the Japanese masters of the tea ceremony would have wanted it — and at an affordable price. It’s art and history accessible to the masses.

Of course, if you break out in a cold sweat thinking about what would happen if you drop an 18th century, $25,000 bowl, there are some modern alternatives available.

Entering the gallery on a quiet side street, visitors are greeted with displays of various cups, bowls and plates on a tiny first floor. Okubo’s daughter, Atsuko, then emerges from an adjoining room to greet visitors and escort them up a tight flight of stairs to a second-floor tatami room, the traditional setting for the tea ceremony.

Accommodation has been made for Western visitors in that there are regular chairs set up in a sunken floor, so visitors need not sit with legs crossed on the floor as is Japanese tradition — and which can be extremely painful if you’re not used to it.

In a small room off to the side, tea bowls are set on a four-shelf stand. These are your choices, Atsuko explains in English, then highlights some interesting details about each bowl, such as age, origin and the tea master who endorsed them.

Making these antique bowls accessible to the public was Atsuko’s idea.

As an antiques dealer, her father had collected many, but sales were slow at the gallery and most of the bowls sat hidden away, their boxes gathering dust and providing no joy to anyone. Atsuko thought employing them in the tea ceremony would make the family business stand out from the dozens of other tea ceremonies available to visitors to Japan.

But her father curated the bowls, and he’s excited to add details about them. There’s a dark, wide one from Belgium that was designed for other purposes, but a tea master has deemed it suitable for the ceremony.

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