Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kristin Surak is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Japanese Politics at SOAS, University of London. Her work has been published in the European Journal of Sociology, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the New Left Review.

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Making Tea, Making Japan

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations...................................................................viiPreface.................................................................................ixA Note on Transliteration...............................................................xviiIntroduction: Nation-Work...............................................................11. Preparing Tea: Spaces, Objects, Performances.........................................172. Creating Tea: The National Transformation of a Cultural Practice.....................573. Selling Tea: An Anatomy of the Iemoto System.........................................914. Enacting Tea: Doing and Demonstrating Japaneseness...................................1195. Beyond the Tea Room: Toward a Praxeology of Cultural Nationalism.....................157Glossary................................................................................191Notes...................................................................................193Bibliography............................................................................227Index...................................................................................243

Chapter One

Spaces, Objects, Performances

To the foreign eye, the tea ceremony may seem unavoidably Japanese: a kimono-clad woman kneeling on tatami mats, gracefully preparing the beverage by means of a dense array of arcane procedures. But to outsiders, much in Japan is read as an expression of a foreign culture, from the politely crowded subways, to the exquisite yet simple aesthetics of prepared food, consumed with the eye before the mouth. For Japanese, most of these experiences are taken for granted as simply how things are done—people are more concerned with getting on the subway and getting fed than reading a cultural specificity into their activities. Yet even to many, accustomed to the quick preparation of simple green tea, consumed on tables and chairs while sporting Western clothes, the tea ceremony often connotes the traditional and evokes images of a fading cultural heritage. How is it that for the Japanese in Japan, where Japaneseness can be taken for granted, such an experience can be maintained?

Japaneseness within Japan

Delaying for a moment the question of origins—where these national inflections came from—which will be addressed in the next chapter, let us consider the positioning of the practice. The tea ceremony does not serve the work of signifying Japaneseness alone, but is situated within an assemblage of other practices and objects that also represent this diffuse concept—a cultural matrix, as Tim Edensor terms it, that "provides innumerable points of connection, nodal points where authorities try to fix meaning, and constellations around which cultural elements cohere." The complexity and reciprocity of these associations give rise to the "nebulous condensation," to use the words of Roland Barthes, that is Japaneseness. Some items of the matrix display qualities akin to those of chanoyu—such as the delight in asymmetry found in flower arrangement—while others offer contrasts, as in the military self-sacrifice of Nitobe's bushido. In this interconnected field, the tea ceremony occupies a privileged position, for it alone combines so many different practices and objects of the assemblage—clothing, cuisine, craft—into what its theorists describe as a "cultural synthesis."

A second axis of connection and contrast weds national meanings to the doing of tea. For the ceremony is at once an expression of the rhythms and aesthetics of ordinary existence, and detached from such unreflective lifeways as a consciously focused objectification of what is traditionally Japanese. It is through the alternation of parallels with and contrasts to common features of everyday life in Japan that tea condenses the nation. Barthes described a similar process when he remarked of houses in the Basque region of France that they do not strike the eye as particularly Basque in their local setting. But transposed to Paris, in a simplified, clarified form omitting many of the practical details (the barns, the external stairs) that made them functional dwellings in their homelands—such houses impose their Basqueness on the viewer. In modern urban Japan, women in kimonos kneeling on tatami-mat floors invite a similar gaze. The Japaneseness encoded in tea places, captured in tea objects, and patterned into tea movements can be interpreted and experienced as quintessentially Japanese by the Japanese themselves because it is different—but not completely removed—from mundane aspects of life unmarked with national significations. As we shall see, the apartness and deliberateness of the tea room and the objects and actions within it concentrate and purify aspects of the community diffusely lived elsewhere, but bent through the prism of tea. In Barthes's telling terms, the Japaneseness of chanoyu is "neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection."

How tea "just is Japanese" can be conveyed by taking a tour of an actual tea room. We will begin by examining how its architecture molds the body into recognizably Japanese forms and corresponding sensory experiences, and go on to look at the objects used in tea practice and their cultural significations. Finally, we will greet the practitioners in a chanoyu performance.

Tea Spaces

The tour begins at the tea complex Mushin'an, designed by a successful architect in the early 1990s for his daughter, a tea aficionado, who was delighted when her father converted her apartment into a compact but versatile tea complex as a marriage gift. Adhering to the numerous detailed standards of tea architecture, Mushin'an has not only appeared in magazines, but is also rented by high-ranking teachers for their classes. Many lessons do not take place in such authentic spaces—what practitioners emphatically label real tea rooms—and teachers hold classes in their homes or public tea rooms at community centers or schools. When "making do" in these cases, adjustments are often accompanied by apologies, measured against standards represented by places like Mushin'an. Thus even if not a typical example, this tea complex is a good example, for its seriousness—as well as that of the lessons that take place inside it—renders in sharper detail the ideal to which tea practice is held.

Mushin'an is tucked away in Roppongi, one of Tokyo's many hubs, known as a center for consulates and foreign businesses and as a popular nightlife district. Emerging from the subway, one is beset by ten-story high-rises lining the street and an elevated highway blocking the sun. The megalithic Mori Building—symbol of the decadent Tokyo architecture planned during the economic bubble of the 1980s that combines shopping, working, and entertainment—beckons in one direction, and Tokyo Tower, a red steel TV transmission station inspired by Eiffel's Parisian creation that serves as an architectural symbol of the city itself, guides the way to the tea room. Visiting a lesson on a Saturday morning may require dodging a few still-drunk revelers emerging from one of the numerous nightclubs and bars that dot the district. During the week, however, one is more...