Yamada Nagamitsu

The present head of the Sohen school is Yuyusai Yamada Sohen, 11th of his line. Since succeeding at the age of twenty-one, he has pursued a way of tea suited to the present age and built an original method for learning temae.

Alongside this, as Yamada Nagamitsu — 11th generation head of the Yamada family — he pursues collaborations between tea and art and the wider practice of tea among business people. Urban Cabin Institute is the undertaking that carries this latter work.

While the Sohen school systematises the practice of tea and transmits it widely, the Yamada-ke General Incorporated Association runs programmes for business leaders. The Urban Cabin Institute division is the body driving that work.

He arrived at the idea of the "urban cabin" in 2018, after learning that the cabin was quietly becoming a movement in architectural media and sensing its possibility.

Busy leaders are always in search of stillness. Imagining a mountain dwelling in the city where such a time and space could be experienced, the term "urban cabin" was born. The cabin also draws on the current of hippie culture — seeking harmony with nature and refusing to pander to the crowd. The coastline of Kamakura, the Yamada family's home, is not unlike California, and he felt a kinship with an American way of life.

The development of "Wabi-Suki-Do" traces back to 2021. Yamada was then a member of the executives' salon run by the business magazine Forbes JAPAN, and Hideki Sato, who managed the salon's programming at the time, consulted him about a course for its members. Sato later joined the Yamada family organisation and now drives the business as COO of the UCI division.

Wabi-Suki-Do is a course for business leaders aimed at making "wabi-suki" — a uniquely Japanese value and sensibility — one's own, held twenty-four times over two years. Unlike the study of tea, participants do not learn temae; instead they explore the philosophy of wabi-suki over two years, and at the close are conferred a "so" name corresponding to a tea name.

Asking continually "what kind of art does a leader immersed in daily management need?", he arrived at "Business Leaders meets Artist" as an art practice leaders can undertake without strain.

At the art dojo BLACK CUBE — the fire-damaged old farmhouse "Rikiiken" given new life — he holds exhibitions through which leaders refine the way they frame questions, their sensibility and their communication, drawing on the way of life and creativity of artists.