Okakura's Way of Tea: Representing Chanoyu in Early Twentieth-Century America (original) (raw)

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