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THE IDEOLOGIES of JAPANESE TEA 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page Ii 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page i THE IDEOLOGIES OF JAPANESE TEA 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page ii Tea bowl called ‘Hashihime’. Late sixteenth century. Painted Shino stoneware Courtesy: Tokyo National Museum 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page iii The Ideologies of Japanese Tea SUBJECTIVITY,TRANSIENCE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Tim Cross FUKUOKA UNIVERSITY GLOBAL ORIENTAL 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page iv THE IDEOLOGIES OF JAPANESE TEA SUBJECTIVITY, TRANSIENCE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY by Tim Cross First published 2009 by GLOBAL ORIENTAL LTD P.O. Box 219 Folkestone Kent CT20 2WP UK www.globaloriental.co.uk © Tim Cross 2009 ISBN 978-1-905246-75-5 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library Set in Garamond 11 on 12.5 pt by Mark Heslington, Scarborough, North Yorkshire Printed and bound in England by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wilts. 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page v For Ron and Mitsue and Hisao Commemorating Joyce, Tomoko and Kazuko With heartfelt gratitude for the patient encouragement of O¯ mori Soetsu# (Urasenke), Tokushige Soki# and Tokushige Soho (Nambo# Ryu)# ̄̄ and Ishiguro Mito (Hosho# # Ryu).# 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page vi 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page vii CONTENTS Preface xi Acknowledgements xv Introduction: Tea, Aesthetics and Power 1 by Andrew Cobbing 1 What is Twenty-first Century Tea? 7 The Pleasures of Hakata Tea 7 Tea Pleasures as Power 15 2 Inventing the Nation: Japanese Culture Politicizes Nature 20 The lethal aesthetic of ‘Japan the beautiful’ 22 Nation-building demands a politicized culture 23 Lethal transience in Meiji literature: beauty and death as citizenship 25 Sho#wa era painting: foreign beats native 34 Meji era tea: the aesthetic seduction of an ideological tool of state 38 3 Lethal Transience 42 Tea as transcience: divine flowers and sacred Japaneseness 43 Wartime sakura: patriotic transience 49 Persistent sakura 50 vii 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page viii Contents 4 Japanese Harmony as Nationalism: Grand Master Tea for War and Peace 64 Kokutai no hongi: tea as cultural nationalism 66 Marketing militant harmony: tourism and tea 73 Tea-room harmony: war and peace 79 Rikyu# in 1940: tea as state nationalism 85 Tea spirit and state nationalism 88 Tea as state nationalism: Grand Master lectures 91 Tea for peace 93 5 Wartime Tea Literature: Rikyu,# Hideyoshi, and Zen 97 Rikyu# as representative: tea as national pride 97 Rikyu# in wartime tea literature 101 ‘Zen is Tea’ as imperialism: Zen is the sword, Zen is Bushido# 108 Wartime tea literature 115 The Way of Tea in citizen education 116 Debates about the values of the Way of Tea 123 6 Grand Master: Iemoto 131 Historical background of the Grand Master system 131 Sensational location: iemoto in popular culture and literature 133 Thousand Cranes by Kawabata Yasunari 138 7 Tea Teachings as Power: Questioning Legitimate Authority 154 One context: teaching and research connected 157 Read the text so closely it alarms its protectors 159 How discourse shapes experience in institutional contexts 166 Reading against Anderson from outside: Kramer versus Anderson 169 The hard reflexivity of future tea 176 8 Teshigahara’s Rikyu# as Historical Critique: Representations, Identities and Relations 181 The film Rikyu as a considered historical intervention 182 Written history:̄ qualifying the legendary status of Sen no Rikyu# 182 viii 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page ix Contents Anecdotal accounts as national myth: tea is cultural 191 History into film: consuming the nation 195 Positioning the audience: genres in national cinema 199 Tea film, tea practice: the critical power of voice-over 210 No final position: othering the Self 216 9 Lethal Transience as Nationalist Fable: Kumai Kei’s Sen no Rikyu:# Honkakubo# Ibun 219 Critique of everyday myths: locating Kumai’s work 220 Counter-Orientalism deconstructed: lethal politics of ‘Japan the beautiful’ 223 Cinema’s resistant and reactionary framing of the nation: jidai geki 225 Film as history: tea’s aesthetic of seppuku and sakura 229 History into film: emphasizing transmission and ‘authenticity’ 236 Cinema as meta-history and the politics of Sen cooperation 239 Structural outline: anecdotes as quotation marks 240 Qualifying the narrative 245 Protect me from what I want 248 10 National Identity and Tea Subjectivities 250 Desire: shopping for authenticity 250 Tea worlds 253 Post-war tea as anime: ‘One bowl, one final bow’ 255 Endnotes 258 Bibliography 296 Index 313 ix 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page x 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page xi PREFACE n the late 1980s, after two years of being in Kitakyu#shu# tea-rooms, Itwo tenets of tea commonsense became obvious: tea is purely cul- tural; and the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyu# (1522–91) was merely an aesthete, innocent of political and commercial activities. The tension between tea-room talk and what I was reading in histories and cultural studies accounts of Japan helped shape the overall concerns of this project. The starting point is the 1906 definition to be found in The Way of Tea by Okakura Tenshin: ‘Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It incul- cates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanti- cism of the social order.’1 Over time, these sorts of values were internalized to become part of my tea-room experience but these feel- ings were also mediated by the gap between what I was hearing and what I was reading. This dialogue between experience and the compe- tition between oral and written registers and their various forms of authority was the context for framing my participation in the riches of tea traditions as encompassing both pleasure and power. This book maps how the pleasures of tea were useful in the inven- tion of a particular form of Japaneseness. Tea precepts such as purity, harmony and a respectful appreciation of social stability will be shown to be coercive forces that became keywords in the official definition of wartime Japanese identity, a sacrament that demanded the ultimate sac- rifice. The legacy of Sen no Rikyu# includes being affiliated with the xi 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page xii The Ideologies of Japanese Tea patriotic Yasukuni Shrine because of a pronouncement made by a grand master descendant on 23 April 1940. In dealing with the post-war relationship between culture and nation, tea pleasures are examined in terms of the forms of authority that shape teacher-student relationships in the tea-room. This feeling of gratitude for the honour of being initiated into deeper layers of tea knowledge has influenced the manner in which the grand master tradi- tion of tea pedagogy has been treated in English language tea scholar- ship of the late twentieth century. Films belonging to the category of Japanese national cinema that feature the life and death of sixteenth- century tea master Sen no Rikyu# make important comments on the tea model of cultural transmission, the relationship between art and poli- tics, and the tensions between those who govern and those who are governed. The first chapter includes an account of the range of tea pleasures that might be experienced in a Hakata tea-room. This introduction for general readers to the moment-by-moment joys of tea is an example of how purity and harmony sustain the host-guest interaction. By repeat- edly referring to our host as ‘Sensei’, rather than using her individual name, I hope to emphasize that respectful deference is an important component of tea etiquette. My foregrounding of the generally immutable teacher-student distinction inside the tea-room is an impor- tant counter-balance to the later criticism of the grand master system: the display of polite distance in Chapter 1 implicates me in what I later criticize. The following chapters survey the history of how Japanese culture was presented as a timeless unchanging tradition. It is important to note that the definition of what constitutes authentic Japanese culture was being politicized to support the formation of the modern Japanese nation-state. Transience as a principle that governs nature was applied to the social world, linking short-lived beauty with service to the government of the day.2 A government propaganda campaign that featured tea was part of a systematic attempt to minimize international criticism of Japan for aggressive acts against China. Japanese sources document that tea was one nationally distinctive cultural practice that was building support for the war effort. The experience of calm tea-rooms is contrasted with the centrality of harmony in the Japanese mythology of Japaneseness. The grand xii 00 Prelims:Master Testpages Enigma 4/8/09 09:16 Page xiii Preface master representation of Sen no Rikyu# in 1940 constructs tea as more than a sacramental celebration of social and natural transience. Tea operates as state nationalism when tradition embraces technology: on 21 April 1940, a portion of the Sen no Rikyu# memorial service was fea- tured on a national radio broadcast.
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