What you are about to experience is an experiment in culture. It is a form of social research and development, if you will. A laboratory test. Please begin by imagining a world, perhaps California in the 21st century, where it is not unusual for even average Americans to have some formal training in the 'traditional' Asian arts, such as, Chinese brush painting, Korean dance or Japanese flower arrangement. What would be the results of this training? Would such people become Buddhists and start eating rice every day? Would they turn their backs on their own cultural customs and traditions? We think not.

In fact, we predict that very little of their ordinary lives would change. They will go about their everyday existence much like everyone else.

The differences, we believe, will be inner and spiritual, qualities that can best be represented through art -- in poetry, music, design and dance.

To better explore this new spirit, we created a fictional character, a highly individualized but still hypothetical model. We made her a woman and gave her intelligence, style, passion and beauty. We also gave her a history. As a very young girl, she was sent off to spend her summers with her grandmother in an old country village in the Burgundy region of France.

But she also had three years of training in the Japanese tea ceremony from a family friend -- a Japanese-American woman named Helen Matsui -- who lived on a horse ranch just down the road from her house.

Now that she is an adult, we are sad to discover that she seldom talks about the tea ceremony or things Japanese. But if one looks very closely, perhaps one can see that the spirit of tea is always there with her -- as a dear friend and constant companion. On the other hand, perhaps there is nothing.

So in the end, we do have to admit that our hypothetical character, our theoretical prototype, our little experiment in cultural change, could be regarded as a complete waste of effort, that the future we are modeling here is nothing more than a pale and rather lifeless modulation of what we already have.

Of course, we do hope that our next world is considerably bigger and brighter. That the new culture of the Pacific Rim will be something a little more thrilling to write home to Mother about.

But in the meantime, we still find ourselves committed to the belief that even the slightest shifts in human consciousness, in our spiritual and aesthetic vision, have the power to redefine the entire course of history.

Perhaps a few comments about the multi-cultural aesthetics of Scenes From a Country Tea Room are in order. I have tried to combine elements of both the European and the Japanese literary and aesthetic traditions to form one harmonious whole. Our basic literary forms are variations on multi-disciplinary models developed by Lady Murasaki, Sir Philip Sydney, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bashó, Jane Austen and Johann Sebastian Bach.

The visual and spiritual aesthetics are borrowed from the Japanese tea ceremony and martial arts, particularly kendó (Japanese fencing). The most important aesthetic concepts are wabi, sabi, and the principle of wa, harmony.

The noted Zen scholar, Dr. D.T. Suzuki writes in Zen and Japanese Culture that wabi connotes 'poverty,' or 'not to be in the fashionable society of the time.' He goes on to say that wabi means 'to be satisfied with a little hut, a room of two or three tatami (mats)...and perhaps to listen to the pattering of the gentle spring rainfall.' From the spirit of wabi comes the ability to see beauty in imperfection, asymmetry or even ugliness.

If a work of art exhibits wabi along with a certain feeling of antiquity and a hint of aesthetic 'loneliness,' it can be said to embody the second basic principle of tea, sabi. Sabi places a work in historical time and space and yet simultaneously renders it timeless. Sabi suggest simplicity and the subtle but still awesome elegance of mundane life.

In the tea room or chashitsu, there is an aesthetic blending of food, fashion, pottery, humans spirits, history and Nature. From this small, highly constrained space, one can catch a glimpse into the infinite Universe. To achieve this end, the host of the ceremony must become 'one' with the mind of his or her guests just as I as the male author of the poems attempt to become 'one' with the mind of our female narrator through whose lips I have tried to speak.

Some of the other concepts I've borrowed from the tea ceremony are: kei ('respect'), sei ('purity'), juku ('serenity'), and yumei ('vision'). The aesthetic challenge for me as an artist living in the 1990's is how to translate these concepts into words and images that make sense in a world of shopping malls, MTV, drive-by shootings and modern information technology.

But enough talk. We hope that your visit will be a pleasant one. Thank you.

Ronald Phillip Tanaka