When I was in Japan, I had several brief encounters with the Japanese tea ceremony – sitting with my friends as they practiced before their lesson, attending the new year’s tea ceremony at Tenjin’s chikagai, and a one-off tea ceremony lesson during my finishing course. So when I changed upon Making Tea, Making Japan, I thought it would be a good introduction to this ceremony that I’ve interacted with but never really got to know.
Written by a practitioner of the Japanese tea ceremony, this book explores the links between the Japanese tea ceremony and Japanese Identity through the following five chapters:
1. Preparing tea: explaining how the tea ceremony references and amplified everyday Japanese Identity, thus becoming a symbol of Japanese-ness
2. Creating tea: the history of the tea ceremony, showing how it evolved from a symbol of the court to a symbol of being a good Japanese citizen, and at the same time moved from the male to the female domain.
3. Selling tea: going into the iemoto system of the tea ceremony to see why these tea schools are so influential.
4. Enacting tea: a closer look at how the tea ceremony became the embodiment of good Japanese behaviour, in part because it reference and distills so much of Japanese etiquette and culture. There are case studies of a tea ceremony class and a more introductory class to students in this chapter that are really fascinating.
5. Beyond the tea room: the final chapter in the book, this chapter looks at how the tea ceremony represents itself in the modern day, as well as some of the reactions and criticisms of it (such as it being too rule bound instead of embodying the original spirit of the tea ceremony).
Although this book was highly academic in nature, I found it to be fascinating, and it made me regret never trying the tea ceremony. While I’m not sure if I can fit within the strict rules of the tea ceremony, I think attending the lessons would have been a useful distillation of Japanese manners, far more than immersion or finishing school was.
If you’re interested in the Japanese tea ceremony and it’s meaning, and are able to read such an academic work, I think this would be a good read.