In our Japanese tea stuff feature from December, we waxed lyrical over a bunch of Japanese stuff we got for our birthday.

The only thing missing? This most glorious teapot! It took three months to arrive and was shipped in from Japan. An extravagance we don’t normally indulge in, but we wanted the real deal.

Was it worth the wait? Look at it. Look at it! Yes! Yes, it was.

The Glory of the Japanese Teapot

As we’re very big on Teaism and a cut back way of life (see The Beauty of Everyday Things), we’ve been yearning for a proper teapot for ages.

For years we used a £4 ceramic teapot thing from the Co-Op we got from Bury, Lancashire. It was rubbish. Functional, but rubbish!

Finally, we snapped in late 2021 and started looking around for the real deal.

The one we decided upon is teapot nishinotori (we believe that means “west bird”). It’s a cast iron teapot, which ramps the price up a bit.

But this thing should last us the next decade at least. And it features a woven string handle to take the edge off the heat it generates.

“Why?” You may wonder. As it adds beauty to the tea drinking experience!

And traditional teapots like this ramp up your professional as a tea drinker, which is the status we wanted to achieve.

As we had a look at traditional teapots a while ago. They have an enduring popularity for any tea drinker as they are the holder of our beloved brew.

The cast iron variety keep the water extra warm for longer. And tipping it into your favourite mug of choice has a certain therapeutic quality.

Anyway, the point of this post isn’t to gloat. “Oh, look! Our toy is bigger than yours! Aren’t we superior!?”

No, it’s to encourage you to head out and buy one of these things.

See how mindless and empty your existence is right now!? Well, easily solved. All you need is tea. And a teapot. Go forth and Teaism it up a notch.

About the Japanese Tea Ceremony

The Japanese tea ceremony (茶道—The Way of Tea) is quite an extravagant affair, in a simplistic way.

It’s all quietude and taking a moment to just sit and enjoy the calm around you.

For westerners it may seem a bit absurd, in fact, as they down Starbucks coffee on the go whilst flooring it in and out of traffic. That’s something Kakuzō Okakura noted in his excellent The Book of Tea:

“The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.”

We don’t take it to quite such extremes here, although we do drink the tea in peace and quiet of our flat. From our favourite mug(s).

As we mentioned in our 10th anniversary podcast last weekend, tea is a big part of our creative influence. It seems to add the extra oomph we need for some of our ideas.

And that’s always a most welcome thing.

But in general, it’s just been such a part of our lives since mid-2008. That’s when we became official tea drinkers, having sat on the bench about it until then.

Now we’re decked out with a real deal cast iron teapot.

Yes, maybe we feel a little smug. That’s why we’re here to lecture you about all of this. Again. Evil laugh? Yes, evil laugh.