Who Was Takeno Joo? The Tea Master Before Sen no Rikyu

Takeno Jōō was a wealthy Sakai merchant and tea master who helped shape wabi tea before Sen no Rikyū. He was one of Rikyū’s main teachers. His story brings together trade, poetry and a simpler kind of tea room.

Sources disagree on his birth year. Sakai City gives 1502–1555, while Urasenke’s English history gives 1504–1555. Both agree that he died in 1555.

A merchant in Sakai

Sakai City describes Jōō (武野紹鴎) as a wealthy merchant from Yamato, now Nara Prefecture, who later moved to Sakai.

Sakai’s trade gave its merchants money and access to imported Chinese art and tea utensils. Many also collected objects, studied poetry and joined tea gatherings. Jōō’s tea developed within this merchant culture, not apart from it.

What poetry brought to his tea

According to Urasenke, Jōō went to Kyoto in his twenties and studied poetry with the courtier and poet Sanjōnishi Sanetaka.

Urasenke’s 2024 exhibition on tea and poetry describes his interest in renga, linked verse. It also credits him as the first person to use a hanging scroll with a Japanese poem in chanoyu.

The exhibition connects wabi and the poetic idea of “chill and wither” with tea: a quieter, barer kind of beauty. Jōō’s choices were therefore shaped by poetry as well as by the utensils themselves.

From Shukō to Jōō to Rikyū

Urasenke places Murata Shukō, Jōō and Rikyū in an important line of development. Shukō had already argued for valuing Japanese objects alongside prized Chinese ones.

Jōō developed that approach further, especially through poetry and the tea room. Rikyū later took it in new directions. It is more accurate to call Jōō a major developer of wabi tea than its sole inventor.

How did he change the tea room?

Urasenke describes changes to the four-and-a-half-mat room associated with Shukō. Jōō used exposed earthen walls instead of walls covered in white paper. He chose bamboo lattice instead of fine wood, narrowed the tokonoma display alcove and framed it with natural wood.

These were choices a guest could see: earth, bamboo, natural wood and less ornament. Wabi was not just an idea. It changed the room in which tea was shared.

Was this simplicity a sign of poverty?

No. Urasenke stresses that Jōō was wealthy. A plain setting was a deliberate choice, not simply what he could afford.

Nor did he reject every fine Chinese object. He belonged to a culture that valued imported karamono. The change gave humble Japanese objects and ordinary materials a greater place alongside prestigious things; it did not make all prestige objects unacceptable.

Teaching Sen no Rikyū

Urasenke says Sen no Rikyū became Jōō’s student at about nineteen. Sakai City also names Tsuda Sōgyū and Imai Sōkyū among the important tea figures he trained.

That teaching helps explain Jōō’s place between the earlier work of Shukō and the later tea of Rikyū. The development was gradual, with more than one person shaping it.

Why does a brazier carry his name?

The Jōō furo is a named brazier form in the tea-utensil tradition. That name does not mean Jōō personally made every example.

A named tea utensil may reflect someone’s taste, preference or a later attribution, rather than direct authorship. The connection is worth understanding without turning it into a claim about who made an individual object.

Jōō’s importance is visible in the room as well as the bowl. Poetry, plain walls, bamboo and natural wood helped give his tea its character. His teaching carried those choices into the next generation.

Sources and further reading

• Urasenke Konnichian — An Introduction to Chado
• Sakai City — Takeno Jōō
• Urasenke Chado Research Center — Tea and Poetry exhibition

Header image: Portrait of Takeno Jōō from the pre-1868 Shōzōshū portrait collection, National Diet Library; public-domain reproduction via Wikimedia Commons.