Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice

Surak, Kristin

Abstract

Few practices are simultaneously as exotic and representative, esoteric and quotidian, instrumental and sensual, political and cultural as the Japanese tea ceremony. Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice uncovers how the practice became such a potent symbol of the nation while undergoing a radical transformation of its carriers, as what was once an aesthetic pastime of elite men has survived into the twenty-first century as a hobby of middle-class women. Simultaneously, the book offers an analytical bridge between the largely separate literatures on macro-political nationalism and micro-cultural enactments of everyday nationhood by examining their shared repertoire of action. This “nation-work” is visible not only during the foundational phases of nation-building, but also in the more mundane routines of nation-maintenance thereafter. Each chapter applies a different interpretive lens – phenomenological, historical, institutional, and ethnographic – to capture the ways Japaneseness crystallizes in the tea ceremony both during the fervour of nation formation, and in the moment-to-moment interactions within the tea room. The conclusion sets the practice in comparative perspective, drawing on other classic venues of nation-work – gymnastics and music – in Europe and Asia, and returning the different dimensions of the tea ceremony to the overall framework under which they are viewed: as an exceptionally vivid illustration of one of the fundamental processes of modernity, the work of making nations.

Citation

Surak, K. (2013). Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice. Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804784795

• Book Type: Authored Book
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2013
• Deposit Date: Feb 11, 2014
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• ISBN: 9780804778664
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804784795
• Keywords: nationalism, ethnicity, culture, tea ceremony, Japan