Tea in Japan

Far more than a social ceremony, chanoyu has had a profound influence on the traditional culture of Japan. Although it has its basis in the everyday act of drinking tea, chanoyu embraces a wide range of artistic pursuits, including architecture and gardens, ceramics and lacquerware, painting and calligraphy, and interior room design and decoration. It has also been influenced by Buddhism (especially Zen), Shinto, Confucianism, and perhaps even Christianity. Tea masters of the past, moreover, were famous as great teachers and performers of the art as well as arbiters of taste and confidants of rulers. Indicative of the complexity of its development is the fact that this gentle, humane art reached its highest expression in a period of unparalleled strife and under the patronage of men notable as instigators of violence and manipulators of power. As this volume makes clear, the history of chanoyu reveals much about the arts and culture of Japan over many centuries and provides insights into the relationship between culture and rule in the premodern period.

Tea in Japan is the first major history of chanoyu written in English. It traces that history from the introduction of tea to Japan from China in the early ninth century to Japan's entry into the modern age in the late nineteenth century. Among the essays by leading Japanese, American, and British scholars are two devoted to the career of Sen no Rikyū, the greatest of the tea masters who flourished in the late sixteenth century. Other essays discuss the way in which Rikyū and his formulation of chanoyu were reinterpreted by later generations and how the Rikyū legend has influenced the course of chanoyu to modern times. Also included in the collection is an essay on chanoyu as observed by European visitors to Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. An essay on wabi discusses the central aesthetic form of chanoyu that evolved from a variety of artistic tastes and philosophic and religious values.