Variously called chanoyu, sadō, or chadō, the tea ceremony is a Japanese cultural activity involving the ritual preparation and presentation of powdered green tea. It developed as a “transformative practice” and thereafter began to evolve its own aesthetic, defined by wabi (quiet, sober refinement) and sabi (worn, tattered, or decayed). As it was originally conceived among the nobility, it embraced an understanding of absolute emptiness as the most effective means to spiritual awakening; for to accept imperfection is to cherish our unpolished selves, as well as the moment, the here and now, as the first step toward achieving satori, or spiritual enlightenment.
This symbolism is utilized by Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari with the understated eloquence of his postwar novel, Thousand Cranes (Senbazuru 1949–1952), blending the tea ceremony with the pangs of hopeless love. The performance provides a background upon which are shown the ugly human affairs of a man’s lust for the mistress of his dead father and, thereafter, for her daughter. The work, however, explores overarching concerns with the permanence of death and the frail and fleeting nature of relationships tenuously forged.
A similar theme can be found in Louis Chu’s novel Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961). Illuminating conflicts between Chinese ideals and traditions and contemporary American society, Eat a Bowl of Tea depicts a community of bachelors in New York’s Chinatown after World War II. Ben Loy suffers from a loss of manhood. But after visiting the local herbalist, he learns that he must “eat” the tea, in direct contradiction to the usual practice of drinking it. By doing so his vigor and potency, as well as his place within the community, is restored. Wayne Wang directed the film adaptation by the same name in 1989.
Since the 1980s the growing prestige of Japan in the world and the recognition from mainstream American society of its culture as a symbol of refinement has led to a resurgence of interest in chanoyu. Many now see the tea ceremony as the perfunctory point of entry into Japanese culture and Zen Buddhism, thus leading to its place among other so-called New Age holistic movements. In short, whereas Japanese immigrants might perceive the tea ceremony as a means toward an end, namely the preservation of traditional Japanese values and cultural identity, for non-Japanese it is likely seen as a way of learning a culture readily identified with exotic refinement, with the fashionably forward and trendy, mysterious and chic. In this sense, it is the quintessentially Japanese “urban myth.” Making matcha (powdered green tea) becomes no more than the premise for social gathering. A sense of this nuance can be glimpsed in Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea (1985), a provocative drama weaving the personal tales of five “war brides.” For these Japanese Americans, nationality as a declaration of residence and allegiance are almost never reducible to the visceral. Forever trapped between countries and cultures, they yearn less for assimilation than for day-to-day survival. And however much they might call America home, they remain, once and for all, Japanese.
Away from tea on-screen in the Western world, Karate Kid 2 (1986) has an eloquent scene of a Japanese tea ceremony, where Kumiko brews an authentic Japanese-style tea for Daniel LaRusso. A similar but far more elaborate scene finds its way into the martial-arts/action flick Fearless (2006), starring Jet Li, as a preface to Li’s final struggle against his Japanese opponent.
Further complicating matters has been the commercialization and mass consumption of tea—from Green Tea Mousse Pocky to iced decaffeinated matcha spiked with lemon grass and pomegranate essence, and chai lattes available for takeout. It ought to come as no surprise that the largest simultaneous tea ceremony consisted of some 15,000 people who gathered in Nishio, Japan, on October 8, 2006, ostensibly to partake of the greater matcha experience. Indicative of the rapid, radical modernization in Japanese geidō, or traditional arts, that emerged forcefully in the first decades of the postwar era, such performances represent little more than conventional traces of the form, typically materialized and performed in a corrupted form as an idealized view of the Japanese past. With frequent popular reiterations and subsequent devaluation, they are concomitantly inscribed by the perpetuation of racial and ethnic stereotypes.
James Allan Wren
See also Banana, Coconut, and Twinkie; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales; Yokai
Further Reading
Anderson, Jennifer L. 1991. An Introduction to Japanese Tea Ritual. New York: State University of New York Press.
Graham, Patricia Jane. 1998. Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin, and Amy Ling. 1992. Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Sen Sōshitsu XV. 1998. The Japanese Way of Tea: From Its Origins in China to Sen Rikyū. Translated by Dixon Morris. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Surak, Kristin. 2013. Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.