It is a few minutes before four in the afternoon as I write this paragraph, which means that in seven or eight minutes I will close the laptop, walk the four steps from my desk to the small alcove by the kitchen window, fill the iron kettle with cold water from the filter, and begin the part of the day that I have come, slowly and without quite meaning to, to think of as my ikigai. The tea will take about thirty-five minutes from the first pour to the last sip. Nothing about it is ceremony in the formal sense. I do not own a chashitsu, I have never trained in temae, and the tea I most often drink is a perfectly ordinary sencha from a shop in Yanaka. What it is, in the smaller and more honest Japanese sense of the word, is a daily practice I have decided to take seriously. That is enough.
This essay is about why a small daily practice — any small daily practice, mine happens to be tea — is, in my view, much closer to what Japanese people actually mean by ikigai than any of the career-planning frameworks that travel under the same word abroad. I have made the larger argument for this position elsewhere, in a piece on the everyday meaning of the term and in a review of Ken Mogi's book. This essay is the lived version of that argument. It is also, I should warn, the most personal of the six.
How the tea hour started
The tea hour did not start as a practice. It started, three years ago, as a coping mechanism. I had recently left my job at the publishing house — a transition I have written about in a separate essay — and was in the strange first months of working from a small flat with no colleagues and no externally imposed shape to the day. I needed something at four in the afternoon. The energy curve of solo work, I had quickly discovered, falls off a cliff around three thirty, and without a meeting to break the day or a colleague to walk to the coffee machine with, the late afternoon could become a long greyness that ate the rest of the working hours.
I started making tea. Not as a hobby and not as a ritual, just as a small structured break to mark the end of the working day. The first month was unremarkable. I used a teabag, drank the cup at my desk, and went back to work. The break did its job — it broke the slump — and that was all I had asked of it.
What changed it, slowly, was a small purchase. About six weeks in, I bought a cheap iron kettle from a homeware shop in Asakusa, mostly because I liked the way it looked. The kettle made the tea taste different. I noticed, idly, that I was paying more attention to the water than I had been. The next purchase was a proper kyusu — a small Japanese teapot — from a potter in Mashiko, picked up on a weekend trip. The kyusu changed the brew time. I started looking at the clock. Then the leaves: the loose-leaf sencha from the shop in Yanaka. Then a small ceramic cup. Each purchase was small and individually unremarkable. The cumulative effect, over about six months, was that the tea hour had become the part of my day I most reliably looked forward to.
What the practice actually consists of
I want to be plain about what the tea hour is and is not, because I am wary of romanticising it. It is not chanoyu, the formal Japanese tea ceremony, which is a serious art form that I have never properly studied. It is not a meditation practice in the strict sense, although it shares some texture with one. It is not, I should say, particularly impressive to watch. If you came over for the tea hour, you would see a woman in her late thirties standing at a small kitchen counter, paying close attention to a kettle, occasionally checking the time on a small wooden clock, and then sitting in a chair by the window for twenty-five minutes drinking tea slowly while looking at the cherry tree outside.
The sequence, in case it is useful, is roughly this. At four, I close the laptop. I fill the iron kettle with filtered cold water and put it on the stove on a medium-low flame. While it heats, I warm the kyusu and the cup with the first run of slightly-too-hot water from the kettle, then pour that water out. The leaves go in — about three grams for the cup-and-a-half I will drink — and the kettle, by now just below boiling, comes off the heat to cool to the proper temperature for sencha, which is around 70 to 75 Celsius. I do not measure with a thermometer. I have learned by feel; the kettle tells you. The first brew is short, perhaps forty-five seconds. I pour, drink slowly, and re-brew the same leaves twice more, each brew slightly longer and slightly hotter than the last. Three brews, three slightly different cups, all from the same leaves. The whole sequence runs about thirty-five minutes. I sit in the chair by the window for most of it. Some days I read. Some days I think. Some days I do nothing in particular.
Why this counts as ikigai
I am claiming, in this essay, that the tea hour is closer to the actual Japanese meaning of ikigai than any career framework I could draw up. I should probably defend the claim.
The Japanese sense of ikigai I have been working with throughout this series — drawn from Mieko Kamiya's 1966 book, from Ken Mogi's 2017 one, and from how the word is actually used in everyday Tokyo conversation — does not require that ikigai be grand. It does not require that it produce income. It does not require that it be a vocation. It only requires that it be a thing, however small, that gives the day a felt sense of being worth its weight. By that test, the tea hour qualifies easily. The half-hour of careful attention to leaves and water and temperature, repeated daily for years, has become one of the things in my life that I would most miss if it were taken away.
It also qualifies on Mogi's slightly stricter standard, which I described in my review of his book. Mogi argues that ikigai grows in soil prepared by kodawari — a personal commitment to standards that the world neither requires nor rewards. The tea hour is, in a small way, a kodawari practice. No client requires me to drink loose-leaf sencha at the proper temperature from a Mashiko kyusu. No follower count rewards me for it. The standards are mine and the practice is for no one. Which is, in Mogi's view, exactly what makes it work.
What it has done over time
I want to be honest about what the practice has and has not changed. It has not made me more productive in any measurable sense. The afternoons after the tea hour are not noticeably more efficient than the afternoons before, in the months I tracked it. It has not made me happier in any cinematic way. I am, broadly, the same person I was three years ago.
What it has done, more modestly and more durably, is give me an immovable thirty-five minutes a day that belong only to me. In a freelance life, where the boundary between work and not-work is famously porous, this is more valuable than any productivity gain. The tea hour is the one part of the day that no client can touch and no deadline can move. It is not negotiable. I have, over three years, taken phone calls during it exactly twice, both genuine emergencies. The fact that the boundary holds is, I think, half of the practice's value.
The other half is harder to describe. The tea hour has become a kind of weekly punctuation mark; the days that contain it feel different from the days that do not. I sometimes track this loosely in my evening notes — I keep a small page in the Notion template I use for daily notes, and the days where the tea hour happened are visibly more populated with question-one entries (the small worth-it moments I described in the freelancer essay) than the days where it was skipped. The correlation is not subtle. The tea hour is, somehow, generating more of the small noticings throughout the rest of the day. I do not have a clean explanation for this. The pattern is robust enough that I no longer doubt it.
What I would recommend, if anything
I am cautious about recommending the tea hour as a practice for other readers, because the specific shape of the practice is mine, and the value is in the specificity rather than in any generalisable feature. The wrong reading of this essay would be: everyone should drink loose-leaf sencha at four in the afternoon. The right reading is closer to: find one small daily thing that you will defend, take it seriously over months, and let it accumulate.
The thing itself is, almost, beside the point. I have a friend in Setagaya whose equivalent practice is a forty-minute walk along the Tama river at first light. A friend in Kyoto whose equivalent is the half-hour she spends each evening sketching whatever is on the kitchen table. A friend in London whose equivalent is twenty minutes of piano before breakfast. None of these is more authentically ikigai than another. The shared structure is what matters: a small daily commitment to something the world neither requires nor rewards, defended against the constant pull of more useful things, sustained long enough that it becomes load-bearing.
If you want a starting question — and this is the only practical instruction I will offer in this essay — it is this. What is the small thing that, when you have done it on a given day, makes the day feel different from the days you skipped it. The answer is your candidate practice. Most people have one or two of these already and have never named them. Naming them is half of taking them seriously. Defending the time for them is the other half.
The kettle is on
I noticed, while writing the previous paragraph, that it is now seven minutes past four. The kettle has been on for longer than I usually let it run. I am going to stop writing in a moment, take the kettle off the heat, warm the kyusu, and begin. By the time you read this paragraph, the tea hour will have happened, the cup by the window will have been drunk, and the cherry tree outside will have been looked at carefully for some minutes. None of this will have been visible to anyone but me. All of it will have been, in the actual Japanese sense, ikigai.
Subscribers to the Mindful Yen Substack get longer essays of this kind weekly, often with notes from the four o'clock chair and from the small practices of other readers who have written in. This concludes the six-essay thread on ikigai that has been running on the blog since late April. The next thread will move on to other Japanese concepts that have, in my view, been similarly mishandled in English, beginning with wabi-sabi in early summer. There is no rush. There never is.