Action Repair in the Temae Movements of the Japanese Tea Ceremony

Abstract

This study examines action repair in the context of temae movements in the Japanese tea ceremony, analyzing how practitioners return to normative procedures following disfluencies or errors in movement. Although temae follows highly formalized protocols, interruptions and mistakes can occur during actual practice, and a sequence of behaviors aimed at correcting these disruptions is often observed.In this study, such corrective processes are defined as action repair, and concrete examples were extracted from video data recorded by the 1st author. In this study, such corrective processes are defined as action repair, and concrete examples were extracted from video data recorded by the 1st author. Drawing on the concept of repair from conversation analysis (Schegloff et al., 1977) and the Repair Interval Model (Nakatani & Hirschberg, 1993), we analyzed the tendencies and characteristics of repair behaviors based on Hirose's research on microslips. As a result, we identified repair forms unique to the tea ceremony, as well as cases where normative actions and repair processes co-occur, providing insights into the nature of natural, embodied repair.