Lost in Translation: the journey of a Meiji-era teahouse (original) (raw)
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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.
A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea
2019
for help in various aspects of my work. In 2014, the History Department and the College of Humanities at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and the Northeast Asia Committee of the Association for Asian Studies funded me for a two-month research period at the Research Center for the Study of Japanese Culture (Nichibunken) outside of Kyoto. Thanks also go to Kiki Leinch for arranging a visit to the Uji tea company Marukyū Koyamaen during that summer of 2014. Harald Fuess, then of Heidelberg University, gave me some helpful pointers on commodity history. I would like to admit the great debts I owe to Eric Rath of the University of Kansas and Rebecca Corbett, then a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, for the advice and references that they gave me for this study of tea during the Edo and modern periods of Japanese history. I would
Review of Japanese culture and society, 2002
not know if Okakura ever saw this painting, or if DeCamp read The Book of Tea, but if they knew of each other's work, they might have been mutually amused. Okakura's juxtaposition of the male Japanese tea master and the Dutch/American housewife illustrates how a contrasting imagery based on gender is drawn to heighten the sense of cultural contrast. This paper examines the relationship between cultural and sexual differences in Okakura's representation of chanoyu (literally "hot water for tea," but usually translated as "the Japanese tea ceremony") in early twentieth-century America. Originally written in English and first published in New York, The Book of Tea projected an image of Japan that was at once artistic and masculine. I italicize the "and" in order to call attention to the tenuous link between the two terms since Japanese art was frequently characterized as feminine in the United States at the time. Whether it was the cult of Kannon (the bodhisattva of compassion) as the eternal feminine or the allure of the Yoshiwara courtesan as femme fatale, the nineteenth-century American imagination of Japan time and again replayed the fantasy of the Orient as the modern West's exotic feminine other. 4 The common perception of Japan as an artistic nation was also consistent with the prevailing worldview that bifurcated the realm of human achievement into "masculine" science and "feminine" art and culture. 5 By the end of the nineteenth century, the vision of a synthesis of the masculine and scientific West and the feminine and aesthetic East to create a higher universal civilization had become popular among American Japanophiles such as Ernest Fenollosa, who was Okakura's mentor in Japan during the 1880s. 6 Okakura's proposed encounter between East and West over tea introduced an element of tension to this prevalent gender assignment. On the one hand, it is true that The Book of Tea reinforced the feminine image of the East due to tea's association with genteel sociality and aestheticism in turn-of-the-century Anglo-America. Okakura moreover anticipated affluent New England women, whom he entertained by performing chanoyu and ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement), to be among 6.1
Rethinking the Early Atlantic World @* 2014 EARG Colloquium * Reflections on the Mirror: "Victorian" Japan With Modern Cultivators, Missing Links, and Toy People As Oscar Wilde argued, Japan was "a pure invention" (Wilde 53). Wilde's remarks targeted at his contemporaries whose love for Japanese object d'art prevented them from distinguishing the Japanese themselves from figures etched in Japanese cultural commodities explicitly criticize the Victorian tendency to reify the Orient by reducing it to commodity kitsch that obscures the societal realities in which such beloved objects were produced and imported. And Wilde was indeed, right. Borrowing Wilde's extraordinary term, I argue that this invented Japan we find in Victorian literature reveal more about the Victorian episteme and their world picture (weltbild) than the material realities of Japan. Even those who recognized the forceful hand of Japanese modernization enterprises and witnessed the brutal violence such modern apparatuses resorted to in due course of achieving their goals of modernizing Japan, such as Isabella Bird, were reluctant to look beyond the surface of Japan. Nor were they willing to delve into the complex political realities of Japan that involved not only Japanese and Europeans, but also indigenous peoples who suffered the consequences of Japan's 'progressive' transformation into a junior Empire. By stressing the savagery of the Ainu (indigenous peoples inhabiting Hokkaido, which was colonized by Japan, whom Bird argues must be the "missing link") in comparison with the Japanese, Bird reveals that her definition of a modern man hinges on his ability to tame nature for his own uses, while erasing the political, social, and economical reality of Japan. Despite the very modern qualities of Japan Bird features in her travelogue, however, the much beloved image of Japan as a timeless country is repeatedly invoked by writers like Rudyard Kipling who portrayed Japan in his journalistic letters during his travels in 1889 as a country still inhabited by toy-like people, a land whose virtue lies precisely in its pre-modern nature. As seen in the two different portrayals of Japan indicates, Japan in the Victorian mind oscillated between the junior Empire whose drastic overhauling of their once despotic social structures both threatened as well as fascinated the Western audiences and the Elysian toy-shop full of souvenirs. However, both images are inventions designed, as this paper will explicate, ultimately to justify imperial violence, and/or to educate subjects of British Empire of their own superiority, rather than to give us, as Isabella Bird noted in her other "Oriental" travelogue, a "truthful impression of the country" (Yangtze Valley and Beyond viii).
1997
The overseas investigations undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge by early Japanese travellers during the 1860s and 1870s have left a unique record of life in the West as seen by visitors whose understanding of developments in the world outside had been limited by centuries of cultural isolation. Fascinated by the extent of British political and commercial influence they observed during their travels, they paid particularly close attention to the Victorian world, and London became the base of the largest group of Japanese students to emerge overseas. This thesis examines the nature of these travellers' experiences and their perceptions of Victorian Britain. The period addressed covers the unprecedented boom in overseas travel from its inception during the last years of bakufu rule, and through the first years of the Meiji regime until 1876, when new government regulations were already beginning to curb the numbers of Japanese students abroad. The study presents an analysis of t...
The Journey to the Far East: Tea Ceremony as a Phenomenon of Japanese Culture
National Academy of Managerial Staff of Culture and Arts Herald, 2019
This paper aims at exploring the Japanese tea ceremony as a phenomenon of Japanese culture. The authors have used integrative anthropological approach, multidisciplinary analysis, comparative, cultural historical , and descriptive methods. Practical methods of research, including personal participation in the tea ceremony of the Urasenke Tradition of cha no yu, were used. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the exploration of the Japanese tea ceremony as a component of Japanese culture, as well as in the analysis of its philosophical and aesthetic aspects. Nurturing simplicity and naturalness and being an institutionalized form of spiritual activity, cha no yu opens a window into the spiritual realm of our being and brings true peace into our souls. Tea is philosophy, which is a part of the Japanese spirit. Due to the Way of Tea, the meditative component and element of joyful rest came into life. The Way of Tea teaches people to be sincere and responsive. Thus, it is more than just a ceremony-it is the way of life.
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
2017
Introduction This paper explores the possible design sources for the japanner in late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century London and colonial Boston. It is an outgrowth of a larger research project focused on the japanned furniture produced in Boston during this period. Beginning in 2012, Christine Thomson and I embarked on a project to revisit the japanned furniture from Boston, focusing primarily on the decorated surfaces. This topic has long been of interest to scholars of American decorative arts and while many articles have been written on the subject, a clear picture of the topic still seemed a bit elusive.