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On Wednesday September 27, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., CU hosted Masataka Hata, the twelfth generation head of the Shoyeido Incense Company, as he delivered a lecture on the aesthetics of traditional Japanese incense and performed a live interactive workshop on “listening” to incense. Mr. Hata was joined by incense specialist and author of the highly acclaimed The Book of Incense: Enjoying the Traditional Art of Japanese Scents, Dr. Kiyoko Morita, and Kosukue Masuda of US Shoyeido in Boulder! The talk drew a large crowd of nearly eighty students, faculty, students, and community members and the venue for the event was fully booked.

Mr. Hata’s talk began with an overview of the materials used to produce incense and their historical origins, demonstrating how the importation of incense and its materials from China to Japan played an important role in forming the foundations for Japanese aesthetics, the roots of which are still plainly visible today. Mr. Hata then traced the use of incense in Japan from the medieval Heian period, where it served an important role in court practices, through the late Edo period when it became widely popularized for its many functions and as a method of communal sharing. In tracing this history, Mr. Hata demonstrated the ways in which incense took on additional valences of meaning as it became intertwined in developing Japanese seasonal aesthetics and popularized in visual art and literature such as The Tale of Genji. Mr. Hata concluded that traditional incense provides a way to evoke and enhance the beauty of the natural world and to share this beauty and to commune with friends.

Mr. Hata then demonstrated the proper way to prepare and share incense with friends, performing a live demonstration of the proper tools and methods to prepare a traditional white ash incense holder. Mr. Hata and his aides from Shoyeido then distributed two types of incense throughout the audience, allowing participants the opportunity to savor the unique and subtle scents of the incense themselves.

The demonstration was followed by a short Q&A session during which Mr. Hata clarified some of the particularities of the incense provided, and spoke to some length on the practices of the storied Shoyeido Company today. The event provided an amazing opportunity for all attendees, both those familiar with Japan and those not, to immerse themselves in the culture of incense for an evening. We would like to thank Shoyeido and AATJ for their generous time and effort, without which this event would not have been possible!