Tea Becomes a Beverage for a Wider Market, 1300–1600
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CHAPTER TWO Tea Becomes a Beverage for a Wider Market, 1300–1600 Between 1300 and 1600, Japanese society underwent a thoroughgoing transformation. The population of the archipelago nearly trebled to seven- teen million or more. To support greater numbers, agriculture stabilized and intensified, farmers became much more productive, and rural life took place in compact villages where peasants made their own rules about water and commons rights and the policing of crime. As cultivation of rice and other crops became more productive, many people dwelling in large cities chose other occupations as merchants or artisans. In a word, the economy became much more specialized and Japanese society more complex. In politics, warriors battled their way to become the dominant elite, overwhelming civil aristocrats and religious institutions. Samurai took control of the polity during two prolonged but sporadic periods of con- flict: the Wars of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, lasting from 1333 to 1392; and the Warring States Era, covering over a century of bloodshed from 1467 to 1590. From 1560 to 1600, three powerful leaders—Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu—helped to bring a greater degree of peace and unity to the archipelago than it had ever known. The Iberians with their muskets and Catholicism arrived from Europe and remained for about a century, from 1543 to 1639. Naturally, they became involved in politics and the wars, but their most lasting impact may have been as commentators on Japanese culture and society. The Dutch came and were allowed to stay, serving as a window on European and world affairs. In matters of culture, the appeal of China waned after a while. Buddhist worship and artistic representation began to adopt more 34 Tea Becomes a Beverage for a Wider Market, 1300–1600 35 native forms, expressed in oral war tales, Noh drama, the tea ceremony, and gigantic castles. Tea played its own role in and was profoundly affected by this three- hundred-year transformation. Cultivation of the plant not only continued its geographical diffusion but was increasingly practiced by peasants seeking to pay their taxes or trade for a profit. Once commoners began to deal with tea in these ways, they also became ready customers for a swig of the caffeinated beverage. As tea spread downward through the social pyramid and outward geographically, changes in cultivation and process- ing methods inevitably ensued. As those innovations took place, aesthetes from old and new elites found the improved beverage to be the proper object of new literary and art forms, symbolized most readily by the tea ceremony (chanoyu). By 1600, Japan could be described as having a true tea industry, and the islands were well on their way to becoming a major center of tea production and consumption in East Asia and the world. THE TRANSITION FROM A BITTER MEDICINE TO A HABIT-FORMING BEVERAGE DURING THE 1300s In 1219, the shogunal Minamoto line that had done so much to support Yōsai in his advocacy of tea died out. The Kyoto court under Retired Emperor GoToba challenged the right of Kamakura to govern and attempted to destroy the shogunate during the Jōkyū War of 1221. Under the able leadership of Yoritomo’s widow’s family, however, the armies of Kamakura vanquished GoToba’s motley force and emerged from the conflict even stronger. The new leadership of the shogunate (the Hōjō) managed to secure an imperial prince to serve as its titular head while they held the real power as regents in Kamakura. The Hōjō replaced recalcitrant samu- rai on the land with their own men, simultaneously increasing warriors’ incomes and security of tenure as on-site landlords. Most important for the story of tea, the Hōjō also opened a new office at Rokuhara in Kyoto to keep an eye on the wily courtiers. For most of the thirteenth century, Kyoto and Kamakura ruled the archipelago jointly as a dyarchy, with the court dominant in western Japan and the shogunate ruling over eastern and northern Honshu. Beginning with the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281, however, political power shifted dramatically to the warriors. Kyoto remained a cultural, economic, and social center, but Kamakura also grew to be a large metropolis of seventy thousand or so. Its warriors, now guaranteed a job and an income that they constantly fought to raise, began to covet the finer things in life, including tea. The story of Son’ei and his shipments of tea from Nara to 36 Chapter Two Kamakura, described in chapter 1, is a good example of the growing pop- ularity of tea in the warrior capital by the 1250s. Like many warrior families of the Kamakura age, the Hōjō split into contending branches, one of which was later called the Kanezawa Hōjō.1 In 1285, the leader of the Kanezawa Hōjō (Akitoki) was implicated in a struggle for power within the shogunate, and because his faction was destroyed, Akitoki took the tonsure and retired from politics to the safety of lands the Kanezawa Hōjō held in Shimōsa Province near Kamakura. Eight years later, in 1293, Akitoki was reinstated and served in various important posts in the samurai government until his death in 1301. His family also returned to prominence, with one son receiving ordination at Onjōji in Kyoto and the others learning the Confucian classics at the fam- ily school located near modern Yokohama and named, appropriately enough, the Kanezawa Library (Kanezawa bunko). The family temple, called Shōmyōji, was also on the library grounds, having been founded in 1267 as a Ritsu center. The Ritsu sect dated back to the 700s, and Shōmyōji’s affiliation immediately gave it strong connections to the old capital at Nara and, in particular, a temple there (Saidaiji). The heir to the Kanezawa lands and status was named Sadaaki, born in 1278. As his father returned to politics, Sadaaki acceded to largely cere- monial posts at the Kyoto court, as befitted his bloodline. In 1296, he reached the coveted Fifth Court Rank, symbolic of aristocratic standing, and continued to occupy court positions such as Captain of the Right and then Left Imperial Guards. In 1302, just a year after his father’s death and his own assumption of family leadership, Sadaaki took up residence in Kyoto while serving as a high official in the Rokuhara Office. His tenure there was to last until 1308 and he was reappointed during 1310–1314. Sadaaki was a capable administrator and also produced several offspring, one of whom, Sadayuki, served in the Rokuhara Office from 1324 to 1330 while his father was still alive and active in politics. In 1333, Sadaaki and the rest of the Hōjō were annihilated during the collapse of the Kamakura shogunate. Not simply literate but also highly learned, Sadaaki brushed numerous letters and other documents during his lifetime. His missives, along with those of many other warriors and clerics, were then preserved after his death in the family library at Kanezawa. Fortunately for historians of tea, Sadaaki was a habitual consumer of the beverage and frequently wrote about his experiences with the drink in his 642 extant letters. The entire collection of about seven thousand documents comprises one of the most fascinating and illuminating sources on tea for any era.2 Most important, these letters and other records chronicle the history of tea just as it was Tea Becomes a Beverage for a Wider Market, 1300–1600 37 undergoing the critical transformation from a bitter medicine utilized in political and religious ceremonies to a more palatable beverage, an object of business and pleasure to be enjoyed by many more individuals. The Kanezawa compilation tells historians about numerous aspects of tea production, processing, exchange, and consumption during the first third of the fourteenth century.3 Essentially, the Kanezawa collection mentions three types of tea: leaf tea (hacha), brick tea (kokeicha), and tea ground from leaves or bricks (matcha). A letter from the monk Tan’ei notes the loan of three small bags (tsutsumi) of leaf tea; another letter from another cleric states that he “wishes to send one bag of ground tea (suricha)” to each of two samurai officials.4 Brick tea appears less frequently, but in another letter a monk describes what could only have been brick tea being transported by a warrior.5 Although most of the correspondents were consumers, the Kanezawa collection adds much to the sketchy picture of tea cultivation heretofore available. At least on the tea fields within the precincts of Shōmyōji, the Kanezawa family temple, monks seem to have done both their own plant- ing and picking.6 Harvests varied considerably from year to year; the best tea was new or “early tea,” picked in the third month (early April). The weather did not always cooperate during the cold thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, however, leading one monk to comment on the tardiness of the tea harvest in one particular year.7 A Shōmyōji monk warns that in one year “new tea was plentiful here and there” and that the temple should “investigate its profits” before selling.8 Naturally, new tea also fetched the highest price.9 In the best years, tea lasted until the winter. The collection records a present of tea given during the tenth month.10 In especially plentiful seasons, cultivators were able to “pluck all the way up to the fifth picking” (gobancha).11 One record states that yields were four kin (2,400 grams) for the first picking ichibancha( ), two kin (1,200 grams) for the second (nibancha), one kin (600 grams) for the third (sanbancha), and one kin for the lowest grade