"Talk to the flowers, ladies, not to each other." We, the students of Ishikawa-san's Wednesday Ikebana class, always needed some noise control. With Ishikawa-san, ours was less a lesson than an event, and she was the star from the moment she stepped into the foyer, out of her doll-sized shoes and padded about dividing and distributing the flowers while her students were placing newspapers on the floor to soak up the splashes, filling their containers from buckets, littering the Tokyo apartment with the approved supplies. No cheap substitutes. Most important were the Approved Clippers, spikey metal holders called kenzan, the Sogetsu school textbook plus an assortment of ordinary rubber bands, tacks, spools of fine wire, diagram paper, hammers.

And talk. Catch-up chatter, gossip, all while we worked on our arrangements, and all punctuated by Ishigawa-san's affirmations: "Beautiful. Gorgeous." Her reactions to our arrangements were a marvel of praise and gentle corrections. The ultimate was: "Congratulations. I wouldn't change a thing."

Other than the flowers, what did Ishikawa-san bring to the class? What does she do to earn the respected title "sensei" given to teachers? Only three weeks later I, with an inscrutable instinct, was able to create with only a few blossoms and branches a diminutive flower bed in a black ceramic tray, a Sogetsu School standard. I had learned from Ishikawa-san the essential Japanese aesthetic: less is more.

And more. Never let nature interfere. Like the American-made automobile they once admired, the natural world could benefit from a bit of redesigning, and much of Ikebana lessons are devoted to that Japanese improvement of the original product. A tulip, just a tulip, is a cliché. With an aborting brutal force, the tulip bud can be pulled apart, opened, the petals fanned out to become more exotic than an orchid, more divine than a lotus.

Are branches too thick, too dense for placement on the kenzan? Take that hammer and crush the stems to a pliable pulp. Too much foliage? No problem. The first five minutes of each lesson are spent in a fast and furious clipping. Branches are denuded and flowers fall. One of the most admired formats in Japan is of the bent bough, a vision of wind-blown gardens, sloping toward the water. If the branches sensei provide don't bend, we do it for Mother Nature. In a killer grip we warm them and gradually force them to conform, and anyone who has experienced the we-must-be-cruel to-be-kind approach to Japanese massage will understand. When the branches are subdued, ready to lean, they are placed on the kenzan; flowers are clustered under and about and around the branches. The flat container of water becomes a pool, a stream.

But flowers must never, never, not even one petal touch the water. If ever they do: "Ladies! No swimming," Ishigawa-san will call out immediately. To her the flowers are people, boys and girls, mothers and children, lovers. The blossoms are faces and these must be held up to "the sun.faces to the sun!" And they must be, like all Japanese, in some relationship to each other. "Mother's arms reach out to her baby," and if she has too many arms, amputate, of course. "A hello from the boy to the girl," is a favorite Ishikawa-san lesson in the way to place two flowers. And another: "Let the lady sit under the tree." If the branch is too leafy: "Take off more leaves. Show off her leg." But, like the undemonstrative Japanese they never touch each other. "No touching!"

Ishikawa-san gives advice, does not demonstrate or do more than make a tiny adjustment to perhaps one flower, or one section. There are no fast rules or design, just guidelines. "Switch off your brain," she cautions, and for the final evaluation she asks us to "Stand back. Stand back."

But if Ikebana were all instinct and intuition, there would be only a limited body of knowledge for Ishikawa-san to convey. The first arrangement of each lesson must conform to the Sogetsu textbook, and each branch or flower is measured against the container and each other, cut to a proper scale and placed at a specific angle. To ensure precision, students must do drawings on graph paper to scale of the front elevation and from above. But that's the end of the schoolish part of the Sogetsu School, the discipline Ishikawa-san is licensed to teach. But without that understanding of scale, proportion, all arrangements would be a mess, like learning a language without grammar.

Sogetsu is more than a school or technique. It is, as with the other major Ikebana schools, Big Business. A breathtakingly beautiful modern stone building in the elegant Aoyama district of Tokyo is the Mecca for the Sogetsu School, and there Ishikawa-san and armies of teachers and students spend much of their time. The Art of the Flower is not easily mastered. In a rare moment of candor, Ishikawa-san confessed to the burdens of maintaining her status, the high costs of taking special courses, of entering in the exhibitions. But contributions must be made to support the Sogetsu establishment, pay for that building designed by Japan's patriarch of architecture, Kenzo Tange.

Sogetsu has moved in recent years to a freer approach and the change came abruptly when the founder and master of Sogetsu died and his son, Hiroshi Teshigahara, a renowned filmmaker with no formal connections with Ikebana, in Japanese tradition, was chosen as his successor. He immediately changed the rules. "Free Style" in the past a privilege granted only to advanced students, is now the second of the two arrangements required for each lesson, and even the beginner is encouraged to experiment, to break the rules. Exhibitions now reflect this freedom and use outrageously non-traditional materials. The Art of the Flower has become more sculptural, more a study in three-dimensional abstract arrangements.

I once asked Ishikawa-san what her hobby was, what she did for relaxation. "Tango," she replied. She and her husband study, practice, enter competitions. Yes, tango in Japan is also organized into a frantic program for perfection.

"Daughter of a samurai," she describes her status in Japan's classless society, a term from the ancient Confucian system which was abolished in the 19th century and, although today is meaningless and conveys no privilege, requires samurai daughters to cultivate the classic arts. "I chose Ikebana." No departure from convention for her despite the fact that her parents were very cosmopolitan, modern, spoke English. With a touching nostalgia she described them, their busy Western style social life and anyone who understands Japanese society would appreciate how singular they were. Her mother and father would go out evenings together to parties and dances. She cherishes the memories of watching her mother put on jewelry, Western party dresses, and she remembers her mother's descriptions of dancing, and so, today, Ishikawa-san tangos.

What she made of her classes of chattering, irreverent foreigners, I'll never know. I still have all my containers, the kenzan, The Clippers. Occasionally I go to a florist and startle her by asking for only three flowers and beg some barren branches. Later, at home, I hold the stems under water as instructed in my first lesson, cut the flowers to the correct height, get them to lean gracefully over the Sogetsu tray, and wish that I had Ishikawa-san to make that one little change so I could see her Japan reflected in the water.