Review of Gathering for Tea in Modern Japan: Class, Culture and Consumption in the Meiji Period by Taka Oshikiri (original) (raw)
Related papers
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
Okakura's Way of Tea: Representing Chanoyu in Early Twentieth-Century America
Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 2012
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
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.
Lost in Translation: the journey of a Meiji-era teahouse
Andon 108, 2019
This paper traces the journey of a Hayami-ryū teahouse from Japan to Georgian Court, George Jay Gould estate in Lakewood, N.J. (now Georgian Court University), via the great Japan-British Exhibition at White City in 1910.
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
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.
The Meanings of Cookery: Everyday Life and Aesthetics in Meiji Japan
2013
The aim of the paper is to explore the emergence of new women's domestic narratives of cooking and modern family life which accompanied the growth of consumer culture in Japan. Japanese haute cuisine had been largely produced by professional chiefs who via the patriarchal apprentice system, but began to be democratized in the late nineteenth century. The first Japanese cooking school started in 1882 attracted the higher class women. Cooking began to be seen as a prestigious form of knowledge and status symbol. Around 1887, the influential Meiji reformers and other intellectuals presented the modern family as a sanctuary based on greater intimacy between the couple with the emphasis on the home (houmu or Katei) as opposed to the patriarchal conservative family system (ie). Women became seen as the domestic managers of modern family life with the key duty to produce and maintain healthy citizens, which fitted into the national project. In this sense, cooking become designated as scientific and rational, a part of women's domestic practice. With the growth of urbanization and industrialization in the 1900s, the new middle class modern family become presented as the ideal consumption unit. At the same time, the expanding commercial women's magazines started to provide, not only new recipes, but also new knowledge about aspects of food culture and lifestyle. Cooking became commercialised and popularized as systematised domestic knowledge as well as being seen as a form of home entertainment as part of a new consumer lifestyle. I will explore the relationship between wider social and cultural change and the configuration of cooking discourses in order to illustrate how cooking as a domestic banal practice and set of experiences was re-and de-contexualised in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, and the development of consumer culture and the emergence of domestic and vernacular aesthetic sensitivities late 19 th century Japan.