The Japanese art of kodo is usually translated as the way of incense, and its central verb is not to smell but to listen. A chip of agarwood is placed on a piece of mica over a bed of prepared ash in a small cup, heated so that it releases scent without burning, and passed around. Participants hold it, listen, and pass it on.
What is being done is a game as much as a meditation. In the kumiko form, several scents are heated in sequence and the participants must identify which are repeats, recording their answers in writing. Many of the games are keyed to literature: a set of figures drawn from the chapters of the Tale of Genji is the standard notation, and getting the answer right is partly a matter of knowing the text.
The classification system is old and strange. Agarwood is sorted into six countries and five tastes, rikkoku gomi, the countries being trade origins and the tastes being sweet, sour, hot, salty and bitter. A named piece of agarwood can be an object of state. Ranjatai, a fragment held at the Shosoin repository in Nara since the eighth century, has been cut by Ashikaga Yoshimasa, by Oda Nobunaga and by the Meiji emperor, and the cuts are labelled.
Kodo sits with tea and flower arranging as one of the three classical Japanese arts, and it is by some distance the least practised of the three.