A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea (original) (raw)
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Land of the Rising Tea - An Introduction to Global and Japanese Tea History (1st edition)
2016
"Land of the Rising Tea" gives a very brief overview of the most important events in tea history. It draws upon various sources and synthesizes the information into one coherent whole. The aim is to enable the reader to view the bigger picture of tea history, and build a solid foundation upon which they can later deepen their knowledge with more detailed histories. It reads as an academic history, but the language is meant to be accessible to scholars and laymen alike. The book is divided into two parts. The first part outlines tea in global history from the very inception of the Camellia plant to modern day consumption. The second looks more closely at the Japanese history of tea, providing a richer context for all the major tea-related events. Best enjoyed together with your favorite drink.
Tea in the Historical Context of East Asia: Cultural Interactions across Borders
This paper treats the principal regions of East Asia, such as Japan, the Ryūkyū Islands, Korea, China, and Vietnam, as individual entities to which the custom of tea was transmitted from China to become an integral part of each local culture. These cultures entail not only tea drinking, but cultivation of the tea plant, and historical and cultural backgrounds related to tea and tea drinking. The similarities involved in tea cultures have often overshadowed important regional historical and cultural adaptations. It is our intention to correct this oversight.
2017
The thesis of this paper is that despite the differences in traditional Chinese and Japanese tea cultures, both cultures had members of their elite society using their tea culture to enhance their own prestige. This paper will focus on the time from the mid-8th century to the early 17th century. Three aspects of tea culture will be discussed in this paper: government, religious, and material culture. The government aspect will deal with tea as used by the Chinese emperors, specifically Emperor Huizong (1100-26) who wrote a treatise on tea. For Japan, the government aspect will focus mostly on the shoguns, the military dictators of feudal Japan who used tea culture to increase their prestige through peaceful means. The religious aspect will focus completely on Buddhism, which featured prominently in East Asian tea culture. For China, the major figure that will be discussed is Ennin, a Japanese Buddhist monk who travelled through China in the 9th century and commented often on tea. Zen Buddhism played a huge role in Japanese tea culture, particularly in the person of Sen no Rikyu (1522-91) who was a devout follower of Zen and a revolutionary figure in the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu). Rikyu was a merchant, who would traditionally ranked very low in society, but tea culture increased his otherwise low prestige. The third aspect is material culture, particularly tea bowls, which were viewed as prestigious works of art well worth acquiring in both China and Japan to show off one’s wealth and taste. Overall, the purpose of this paper is to compare the tea cultures of China and Japan, as most scholarly research focuses on one or the other instead of noting the similarities- in this case, the elite societies’ use of their tea cultures to increase their reputation amongst their peers.
National Treasure Tea Bowls as Cultural Icons in Modern Japan
The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons, edited by Erica van Boven and Marieke Winkler, 2021
Tea bowls hold profound significance in Japan today as loci of tea ceremony aesthetics and ideology. While tea bowls have come to be understood as embodiments of particular Japanese national aesthetics and value systems, their status as the most significant objects within tea rituals is a modern phenomenon. This essay explores the cultural iconicity of the eight tea bowls that were designated Japanese National Treasures in the 1950s and that continue to draw much attention. Each signifies something beyond the ordinary and encapsulates a particular aspect of Japanese national identity. As a group, they manifest idealized aesthetics of the Japanese tea ceremony, reinforce power structures, and inspire contemporary potters to reproduce them. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789048550838-008/pdf
The Journal of Asian Arts & Aesthetics, 2020
The Momoyama period was one of the most international and innovative times in Japanese art and culture and the use of imported Korean tea bowls (kōrai chawan) in the tea ceremony chanoyu, the most valued social as well as ritual appreciation of art during that time, was well established. Against this background of internationalism and crave for things overseas, Korean tea bowls triggered a change in the appreciation of tea utensils in the tea ceremony on the one hand, and on the other they were agents of transcultural manifestations themselves and highly valued by those in military, political, or economic power. This article deals with Goshomaru tea bowls that were ordered in Japan and made in Korea during the turn of the centuries-during a time, when official connections between the two countries had been cut off. The scarce sources on these bowls leave them a mystery that will be approached by looking at the development of the chanoyu during the 16th and 17th century and its historical narrative that emphasizes the genealogy of tea masters and the categorizing of utensils. Their design is closely connected to one of the leading figures in the chanoyu of the time, Furuta Oribe (1544-1615), whose name today is used for a whole category of pottery, Oribe yaki, that was later mass-produced in Mino kilns, Aichi Prefecture. The possible connection between the Goshomaru bowls and this innovative tea practitioner show that the aesthetics of these bowls are a product of the Momoyama zeitgeist.
PhD thesis, 2021
Museum collections of Japanese ceramics in Britain include numerous utensils for whipped tea (matcha) and steeped tea (sencha) gatherings along with diverse vessels for daily and special occasions collected from Meiji Japan. Who collected them and why, and how did these objects obtain value in Britain around the turn of the twentieth century and through the process of collecting? Tracing the international network of collecting this material through the Sir Augustus W. Franks (1826–1897) collection at the British Museum, London and the Hon. Henry Marsham (1845–1908) collection at the Maidstone Museum, Kent, this thesis explores the value making process for objects used for two types of tea in the 1860s–80s and the 1880s–1900s, respectively. Based on archival and collection surveys in Britain, Japan, and Europe, the values assigned to these teawares are identified as a collaborative product of negotiations of multiple contributors—objects, collectors, learned societies, mediators, institutions and audiences. Adopting Actor-Network theory, this research gives voice to objects and mediators who have been subordinated and ignored in the history of collecting. At the intersection of the development of museums in the U.K., and academic disciplines of the nineteenth century, modern tourism in Japan, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the objects for tea collected by Franks and Marsham can now be recognized as the products of (inter)national, local, and personal heritage.