Distances in a tea room are measured from where the host kneels, so every distance here is given from that point and moves with it. The plan is drawn true to the millimetre, with each utensil at its own footprint and free to be picked up and set down. It reports a placing rather than prescribing one.

temaeza · the four-and-a-half mat room with the hearth at yojohangiri, drawn true to the millimetre. Distances are centimetres from the host's knees.

if you practise

The placing shown is ours and not a school's: it is where we set the utensils down for one moment of one procedure, in one room. A temae moves, and a plan holds one instant of it. What this page offers a practitioner is the surface rather than the arrangement. Lay out what you were taught, read the distances in centimetres from the knees, keep it in a bookmark, send it as a link, print it as a sheet.

how it is drawn

A Kyoto mat is 1910 by 955 millimetres. Four of them turning about a half mat come to a square of exactly three mat widths, 2865 each way, which is why four and a half is the number and why the half mat is at the centre rather than tucked in a corner. The hearth is a 420 millimetre square, a little under one and two fifths shaku.

Every utensil is at its measured footprint and not at the size of a symbol: the water jar 175 across, the kettle 250, the lid rest 46, the tea scoop 185 long. If two of them overlap on this plan they would touch in the room. The drawing and the room in three dimensions read one table, so the two cannot drift apart, and a correction is a number in one place.

the mats, and which names are the school's

Three of the names on this plan are Urasenke's, out of the glossary of their own guidebook: the temaedatami, which the host works from and which is tinted here; the kyakudatami, the guests'; the fumikomidatami, stepped in from the crawl-in door, the nijiriguchi, which is the gap drawn in the lower wall. The two remaining labels, tokonoma-mae and the half mat, are descriptions of ours rather than terms of the school, and are marked as such because a beginner cannot tell our words from theirs by looking.

what the hearth decides

A room is classified by where the hearth is cut, and this one is the position Urasenke calls yojohangiri. The hearth then decides the host: their glossary gives the rule at uchizumi, that the corners of the hearth frame nearest the utensil mat serve as aiming points for the host's prescribed sitting position. So his facing is not a matter of taste, and the small vermillion dot on the frame is that corner.

One distance on the plan comes from the book and is drawn faint, in grey, so it can be used or ignored: the water jar is set down 24 centimetres in front of the knees. It follows the host when he is moved, because it is a relation and not a place.

Urasenke Tea Procedure Guidebook 2, Usucha Tea Procedure, Urasenke Foundation 2018: the glossary and the plate of the four hearth positions. Nothing of the procedure itself is reproduced here.

what this plan cannot say

Where the hearth belongs in a four-and-a-half is a question we have open with a teacher. Our reading of the school's diagrams puts it at the corner of the half mat against the host's own, which is where it is drawn; the book stages its procedures in an eight-mat room whose mats do not carry the same names, and a position does not transpose between the two by analogy. The host was placed by hand and not derived.

Only this one room can be placed on. The other seven arrangements are drawn flat in the chashitsu chapter and standing in the room.