LOS ANGELES – She stands several inches under 5 feet tall, a diminutive, delicate looking woman of 88.

But place her on a chair in her traditional Japanese tea room and Hawaii-born Sosei Matsumoto becomes a larger-than-life figure. This tiny woman is a tea master, skilled in what the Japanese call chado or “the art of tea.”

To her students, she is much more.

“She’s not teaching you a certain skill but teaching you a way of life,” says Jon Lin, a 49-year-old businessman who has been studying with Matsumoto for three years, arriving almost every Monday night to sit in an uncomfortable looking posture, legs tucked under torso, on the floor of her tea room.

As green tea and its purported health benefits have captured Americans’ fancy in recent years, it has become hip to swig various concoctions of it out of plastic bottles or down it out of paper cups.

Those who venture into Matsumoto’s home learn quickly that, under a ceremony developed over the centuries, that’s hardly the way it’s done.

Utensils are often intricate, like the whisk that is used to stir the beverage. An object more closely resembling a work of art, it has been meticulously fashioned into 100 or more tiny tentacles from a single piece of bamboo. Cups, bowls and other items, some hundreds of years old, also vary from season to season.

“Because it’s summer they’re using a leaf-covered crystal bowl to represent a spirit of coolness,” Dr. Bruce Chernof whispers as another student prepares a cup of tea under Matsumoto’s watchful eye. “In the winter we would never do that.”

The modest, soft-spoken Matsumoto watches with an eagle eye to make sure her students know exactly where to place a bowl, what scroll to have on display when a guest arrives and literally hundreds of other ceremonial flourishes.

“A tea master never finishes, you always study. There is always something to learn,” she says with a smile as she takes her place in her tea room and awaits the arrival of a handful of students for one of her classes.

She lives on the edge of Los Angeles’ downtown, in a neighborhood that has seen better days. For a time in the 1990s, the area was notorious for a group of rogue police officers who enforced anti-gang edicts by framing, robbing and beating innocent people they thought might be gang members.

“When I bought the house in 1953 it was a beautiful district,” she recalls. “The mayor, the governor, they all had residences here.”

The towering palms that line her street still reflect some of that, but these days the neighborhood is a mix of gritty apartment buildings and, at the end of the block, a string of auto repair shops broken up by a greasy spoon, a paycheck-cashing place and a massage parlor.

Matsumoto’s charming house, one of the last single-family homes on the block, remains an island of tranquility, however, with its Japanese garden, its tea room and its front door where guests remove their shoes before going inside to learn the art of preparing and serving Matcha green tea.

“No! No black tea!” Matsumoto says, shuddering slightly at the suggestion that it could perhaps be substituted.

“Black tea! That’s not tea!” she adds, waving her hand dismissively as her students laugh.

On the way toward the tea room that her late husband built for her, visitors pass a living room filled with honors, including a framed certificate from the National Endowment for the Arts, which has declared Matsumoto “the most influential teacher and accomplished master of chado” in the United States.

Born in Hawaii in 1920, Matsumoto arrived in Los Angeles with stars in her eyes, planning to become a Hollywood fashion designer. A visit with relatives in Japan ended that dream when the country went to war with the United States.

Unable to return home, she threw herself into studying the art of tea at Japan’s fabled Urasenke School of Chado, whose roots date to the 16th century. There, she was trained by chado’s 14th grand master himself, who urged her to spread her knowledge to the United States when she returned home.

She did just that, presiding over the tea ceremony at a U.S.-Japanese peace treaty signing in San Francisco in 1951 and, in the years that followed, countless other events around the United States.

Operating her own school out of her home in Los Angeles for 55 years, she estimates she has trained more than 3,000 students.

“Everybody has a different idea for coming,” Matsumoto says as she sits surrounded by students, including many in traditional Japanese garb. “Some people are interested in the tea, how to make it. Some, how to wear a kimono. And some people, they are interested in just watching the culture.”

Some 300 of her students have gone on to become teachers themselves, which is no easy accomplishment.

“I like to tell people I’ve been studying tea much longer than it took me to become a doctor,” laughs Dr. Chernof, former director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

Chernof, 45, has been studying with Matsumoto for seven years and hopes in a few more he might acquire his tea name, the first stop on the road to becoming a teacher. The physician, who lived in Japan for several years as a child, finds pursuing chado “a way of reconnecting with the Japanese cultural aspects I knew as a kid.”

Matsumoto watches each movement carefully but never criticizes in front of the group. She’ll save that for later when she hands out the grades.

“I got a 50 (out of a possible 100),” Lin chuckles later.

But that isn’t really the point, he quickly explains.

“This is like meditation to me,” he says, echoing the sentiments of others who say they have learned to communicate better with people, to focus more clearly and to relax, simply by preparing a cup of tea.