ENTERPRISE — Serenity.

That’s the primary commodity being offered by Zen House Kominka, a guest house and tea room that opened in the spring of 2024 just north of Enterprise.

The business is owned and operated by Kiyomi Koike, a certified life coach and founder of Sei Mee Tea, and her husband, Bill Oliver.

“The people who were here last weekend said it was the serenity (they appreciated most),” Bill said. “The voices of serenity in a world that’s a little bit crazy right now.”

The word “kominka” describes a traditional, timber-framed Japanese country house. While prized for their craftsmanship, many of these homes have been torn down in recent years to make way for new construction in rapidly urbanizing parts of Japan. 

A movement is underway, however, to save these beautiful structures. Bill and Kiyomi found the kominka that was to become Zen House not far from where Kiyomi grew up in Seto, Japan, on Honshu, the country’s largest island.

Although guests can rent time at the Kominka through Airbnb — for a little extra fee — Kiyomi said she also wants to cater to locals for a portion of the year.

“I am not going to use this Kominka as just an Airbnb, but for the serenity and (life) coaching sessions,” she said.

“The first shipping container from Japan arrived at our site on Oct. 19, 2022,” Kiyomi said. “To commemorate this, we’ve decided to dedicate the last two weeks of October each year to local residents by blocking (Zen House) Kominka’s booking calendar for local use.”

Tea ceremony

Kiyomi’s Sei Mee Tea, in which she’s the purveyor of green Japanese tea, is central to another major feature of the kominka.

The first portion of the building set up on site was a separate tea room in which Kiyomi conducts a traditional, ritual tea ceremony for guests.

She first sets out lemon-flavored sweets on rice paper to go with the slightly bitter tea. But you have to wait until she directs that it’s time before eating the sweets.

“I’m going to tell you when it’s ready and, until then, you just stare at the sweets,” she said as she prepared the tea. “You are not supposed to eat the sweets until I say.”

It’s best to use a seasonal bowl with a color that reflects the season, Kiyomi said. This time it was yellow to go with summer.

“You want to get it nice and frothy,” Bill said as he watched his wife.

Then it’s time to drink.

“You turn the bowl twice to avoid drinking tea from the front,” and presumably from where another person has drunk, Kiyomi said. “It’s just a ritual.”

Matcha has been used in the ceremony since the 1600s. It’s a dark green tea ground into a fine powder. 

Though American, Bill has learned a bit about Japanese tea.

“There are all kinds of grades of matcha, and in the tea ceremony, you only use the ceremonial grade,” he said. “Even in the ceremonial grade, there are lots of different variations.”

Most tea is brewed from loose leaves, but matcha has been ground with a stone mortar and pestle.

“It’s almost like instant tea,” Kiyomi said. “It’s dried and ground.”

The tea leaves get green because of the sunlight increasing the amount of chlorophyl.

It doesn’t replace coffee, “but it does have caffeine,” she said.

The ceremony has its roots in a conflict between samurai warriors and Buddhist monks.

“In the 1600s, both the samurai warriors and the Buddhist monks used matcha to enable them to continue in martial exercises and meditations. … There is a substance in green tea that is a natural relaxant, L-theanine. It’s used in medications for people with ADHD and insomnia who need to chill, and it works.”

The couple said the tea ceremony brought peace between the samurai and the monks.

“Samurai warriors would do a gambling game where they would try to identify where the tea came from, and they’d bet money on it,” Bill said. “And people complained to the emperor about that, so probably their wives got after the emperor about that and decided, ‘We’ve got to stop this.’”

“The monks, they don’t like the samurais’ behavior, so the monks started to make this a ritual that led to the tea ceremony,” Kiyomi said.

In the ceremony they also use a silk cloth called a fukusa to “purify” utensils like a chashaku (a bamboo scoop) and a natsume (a tea caddy).

Even the entrance to the tea room is reflective of how the ceremony was intended to bring peace between the samurai and the monks. The doorway is only about half the height of a normal door, although it’s bigger than the entry to an authentic Japanese teahouse.

“When you come into a real teahouse in Japan, the doorway’s about 2 feet square and you have to go down on your hands and knees to get in,” Bill said. “If you have your samurai swords on, you have to take those off. … So you come in and meditate and think about things that aren’t so bad after all.”

Main building

The bulk of the main building is about 90 years old, dating to the early days of Emperor Showa (Hirohito). Japanese emperors have the name they use in life and a posthumous name to designate their era. Emperor Emeritus Akihito, who retired in 2019, will be known as Heisei after he dies.

The kominka was part of a farm that mostly grew rice or vegetables. There’s little livestock there, Bill said, and there’s no tea growing in the area of Obu, where the kominka was.

“When we first were talking about this, they kept referring to this as the ‘Obu house,’” Bill said. “I thought that was the family name, but it turned out to be the city name.”

Obu is about as far from Kiyomi’s hometown of Seto as Wallowa is from Enterprise, but takes twice the time to drive because it’s so much more populated. Bill said there are about 7 million people in an area the size of Wallowa County, with its 7,500 residents.

The kominka they have is actually only the top portion of the building that was in Japan. The lower portion was demolished and the upper portion dismantled and stored for someone who might want it, like Bill and Kiyomi.

Bill said the upper floor that they bought was in “pretty rough shape,” but it was salvaged and restored. The traditional roof of a kominka is thatched, but that allows insects in. The one Bill and Kiyomi bought had a metal roof designed to look like tiles, thus they don’t have to worry about the insects here.

In addition to a master bedroom, there is furniture in the tea room that provides several more beds, as well as a loft.

The main building also includes a bathing room with a feature not seen in Western bathrooms. There’s a shower head one uses before getting in the deep tub that seats two. The floor is slightly sloped toward an inconspicuous drain. Once seated in the tub, a large window gives a grand view down the bluffs below the house.

A separate room is set aside for the toilet, something the Japanese prefer.

Kiyomi said she “felt uneasy” using a toilet in the same room as the tub.

Off the master bedroom is a deck from which guests also get a view of the hills below. The morning sun comes in the window, but blinds allow one to close it off when desired.

A compact kitchen with small, modern appliances is not unlike what’s found in Japan.

Local craftsmen helped with some of the work, Bill said. Dick Stangel helped with the railing on the deck outside the master bedroom, and Jim Zacharias provided the wood for the deck, which is made with western larch.

As it turned out, the local help outstripped any out-of-towners when it came to quality.

“A crew from Portland came to do the plastering work on the inside and they were going to send a second crew to finish it up, but they decided it was too far to come so they bailed,” Bill said.

So he got the idea of putting his wife to work.

“I said to Kiyomi, ‘You’re pretty artistic, so why don’t you try?’ So we got a guy from Lostine to teach her.”

She started in the bedroom closet, where if any mistakes were made, they wouldn’t show much.

“By the time she got into the bathing room, she was a pro.”

“You don’t have to be artistic,” Kiyomi said. “You just have to be strong.”

The building is constructed of rough-hewn logs of Japanese cyprus with mortise and tenon joints. They are crafted so precisely they can be reused numerous times — and likely have been.

“This (post) has been repurposed here, though it may not be the first time it has been,” Bill said. “It could be the second or third time. … We don’t know how many times it has been used.”

“The beams were used when they built the new house,” Kiyomi added. “So the beams themselves were about 200 years old.”

Going forward

Bill and Kiyomi have a business plan for their kominka that largely involves offering it as a place to stay and soak up some Oriental culture in Wallowa County. With views of the Wallowa Mountains and agricultural fields — but no rice or tea growing — it fits right in.

Kiyomi does her life coaching for anyone interested. She even offers to help people find their ikigai, a Japanese concept that means “reason for being” or “purpose in life.” It represents the intersection of four elements:

• What you love (passion)

• What you are good at (profession)

• What the world needs (mission)

• What you can be paid for (vocation)

When these elements align, you find your ikigai — a fulfilling and meaningful life where your passions, talents and contributions to the world come together harmoniously.

Guests can book a stay for about $300 a night, breakfast — Japanese or American — included. They can book it directly on the Kominka website or through Airbnb.

What: Zen House Kominka, a Japanese-style guesthouse and tea room

Who: Owned by Kiyomi Koike, founder of Sei Mee Tea, and husband Bill Oliver

Where: Off Dunham Road, 6 miles north of Enterprise

Phone: 541-398-1104 

Cost for one night: Typically $300, but other rates available; includes Japanese- or American-style breakfast

Mail: P.O. Box 276, Enterprise, OR 97828

Email: kominkalifecoaching@gmail.com or zenhousekominka@gmail.com

Online: KominkaLifeCoaching.com