The Book of Tea

By Okakura Kakuzō and Everett Bleiler

Kakuzo Okakura, who was known in America as a scholar, art critic, and Curator of Chinese and Japanese Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, directed almost his entire adult life toward the preservation and reawakening of the Japanese national heritage — in art, ethics, social customs, and other areas of life — in the face of the Westernizing influences that were revolutionizing Japan around the turn of the century.
This modern classic is essentially an apology for Eastern traditions and feelings to the Western world — not in passionate, oversentimental terms, but with a charm and underlying toughness which clearly indicate some of the enduring differences between the Eastern and Western mind. Okakura exhibits the distinctive "personality" of the East through the philosophy of Teaism and the ancient Japanese tea ceremony. This ceremony is particularly revelatory of a conservative strain in Japanese culture; its ideals of aesthetic tranquility and submission to the ways of the past find no parallel in the major cultural motifs of the West.
Not only does he discuss the tea ceremony and its rigid formalities, and the cult and patterns of belief surrounding tea and tea-drinking, but Okakura also considers religious influences, origins, and history, and goes into the importance of flowers and floral arrangements in Japanese life — their proper appreciation and cultivation, great tea-masters of the past, the tea-room with its air of serenity and purity, and the aesthetic and quasi-religious values pervading all these activities and attitudes.
Okakura's English style was graceful, yet exceptionally clear and precise, and this book is one of the most delightful essay-volumes to the English language. It has introduced hundreds of thousands of American readers to Japanese thinking and traditions. This new, corrected edition, complete with an illuminating preliminary essay on Okakura's life and work, will provide an engrossing account for anyone interested in the current and central themes of Oriental life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Jun 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9780486139968

Okakura Kakuzō

Okakura Kakuzō (1863-1913) was a Japanese scholar. Born in Tokyo, Okakura was the son of a silk merchant. At fifteen, having learned English at the school of Christian missionary Dr. Curtis Hepburn, he enrolled at Tokyo Imperial University, where he studied under esteemed art historian Ernest Fenollosa. In 1887, Okakura cofounded the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but was ousted from his role several years later. He spent his career as one of Japan’s leading cultural ambassadors, travelling throughout Europe, the United States, and Asia in his capacity as a lecturer. In 1910, he became the first head of the Asian art division of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His major literary works, most of which were written in English, include The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904), and The Book of Tea (1906).

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Afterword

Introduction

During the second half of the nineteenth century, in the reign of the Emperor Meiji, Japan set out on her remarkable program of modernization. Her rulers saw clearly that if Japan was to survive as a nation, she must be able to match in power the White Disaster which had entered with Commodore Perry. The government invited scholars of all sorts, including military experts, from the chief nations of the West, and founded new universities at which they could teach. The most promising young Japanese graduates of these universities were then sent to Europe and America to study the new sciences at first hand. The program sounded easy at first, for the young men learned quickly. But difficulties arose: modernization, it became apparent, meant much more than just discarding the old Chinese mystical physics and studying Baron Helmholtz or Lord Kelvin, or permitting foreign embassies to open in Tokyo, or driving a railroad bed through ancient cedar groves. It gradually became clear that modernization meant the destruction of an entire way of life.

Most Japanese accepted the new ideas loyally. Ancient feudal families donned trousers, learned to sit upon chairs, and turned to mercantile enterprise, which had hitherto been considered degrading. They tried to think like Westerners, and even tried to eat beef (forbidden by Buddhism)—though they often gagged as they ate.

Not all Japanese, however, were willing to accept the government’s program. Many thought that the price was too high, and that too much of value was being lost; others resisted change for selfish reasons. The first opposition was direct and violent, in the 1860’s, when military feudalists as medieval as the knights in Froissart rebelled and were finally crushed by military force. A generation later, however, in the same era which produced Vivekananda and Tagore in India, there emerged a new, more subtle generation of protest against Westernization. It is probably significant that while the reaction in India was religious and political, in Japan it was moral and aesthetic.

Among the most important of these late nineteenth century aestheticians who tried to shelter the morning-glory during the transplant by keeping some of the ancient mould around its roots was Kakuzo Okakura, the author of that minor English classic The Book of Tea.

The Okakura family had been samurai in Fukui Province until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Kakuzo Okakura’s father set himself up as a silk-merchant and moved to Yokohama, where Kakuzo was born in 1862. The family prospered, and Okakura was sent to the new Tokyo Imperial University, then an English-language institution, where he took a Master of Arts in 1880, with honors in philosophy and English literature. He already had a good grounding in Chinese.

One of the cardinal concepts of Oriental thought, from even before the time of Confucius, has been the belief that alternating, diametrically opposed forces govern the universe, like day and night. They are called the yang and the yin in Chinese. One is dark and female; the other is bright and male. Each prevails for a time, but within it, like a seed or germ, rests the other force, which will eventually emerge and rule. Such was the case with young Okakura, for in the very heart of Westernization, at the Tokyo Imperial University, he learned to value his own culture by studying under the remarkable Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa, a Harvard-educated New Englander, had come to Japan to teach philosophy and political science, but had surrendered with delight to the traditional arts and culture of Japan. More than any other man Fenollosa halted the trend toward Westernization in the arts and awakened new understanding for the native heritage of Japan.

It is now difficult for us to realize how much of old Japan had been cast aside in the desire for new ways. The public schools were obsessed with teaching European perspective and chiaroscuro, and the older Japanese techniques were either derided or ignored. This had gone so far that even the native ink brush, which had been perfected over centuries for painting and writing, had been banned from the schools, and its place taken by the clumsy Western oil brush. And the treasures of ancient Japanese art were not only no longer understood; they were often viewed with some embarrassment. Old families, in need of cash for the new monetary economy, were selling heirlooms for a pittance, and there are even stories of monasteries and temples where out-of-style wooden Buddhas were converted into firewood. So much Japanese art, indeed, was bought at fantastically low prices by understanding Americans like Fenollosa and Edward Morse and W. S. Bigelow that it is still necessary for Japanese to come to America to see much of their national heritage.

Fenollosa’s enthusiasm and dynamism converted Okakura, as it had others, and the two worked closely together, Okakura serving as Fenollosa’s interpreter in lectures and on trips. They began to receive encouragement, and with a government directive in hand authorizing them to make an inventory of religious art, they explored the repositories of ancient relics, gathering and preserving such treasures as were still in existence. Van Wyck Brooks, in his recent Fenollosa and His Circle, conveys very well the enthusiastic delight with which Okakura and Fenollosa uncovered masterpiece after unsuspected masterpiece in the lumberrooms, storage chambers, and abandoned sections of the temples. Their work was not unappreciated, and when the government took a sudden swing away from the West, Fenollosa, besides being awarded assorted decorations, was given an imperial commission in 1886 to study art history and museum techniques in Europe. Okakura and another Japanese went along.

Upon their return to Japan, however, Okakura and Fenollosa drifted apart, since they apparently no longer found it possible to work together, despite mutual respect and common interests. The reasons seem to have been personal, for both men were aggressive and egotistical and capable of high emotion over questions of art. Added to this was a certain resentment as Okakura outstripped Fenollosa, who was never really at home in Oriental languages. In 1890 the energetic Fenollosa left Japan and became curator of Oriental art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and Okakura, unofficial head of the conservation movement and principal of the Tokyo Art School, started his independent career.

Always controversial, perpetually embroiled in personal quarrels and palace intrigues, by 1898 Okakura had fallen badly out of favor with the government, and he resigned his official post to found a new school, the Japanese Art Institution, for the study of the arts and their philosophical premises within the Great Tradition. This was an Oriental school of the most extreme sort: there were no illusions about who was master; there were no ambiguities about its point of view. It was Asiatic, for during his maturity Okakura came to recognize that acculturation was not just a Japanese dilemma, but one that affected the other Asiatic nations as well. He came to conceive of India and China (the major sources of Asiatic civilization) as pieces with Japan of a larger, traditional culture that was diametrically opposed to the evolution-obsessed ways of the West. More and more the concept grew upon him that his mission was protecting and restoring Asiatic modes of thought and life. In 1902 he visited Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal, and received a tumultuous welcome, for he was now a figure of Asiatic stature. India was especially prone to accept his basic point of view; "The old art of Asia is more valuable than

Reviews for The Book of Tea

[marie2830-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was very fascinated by the different schools of thought and views on life, nature and art that are explored. Though the central theme of Tea is woven through the book, it contains so much more deep thinking and contemplation, when it comes to culture and society. I loved this unique glance at Japanese culture and society, as well as the flowing, comforting language Okakura uses.

[carmacreator · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At first I struggled with this book. It's hard to decipher what he means in some part, where he uses rather romantic language. However, I found reading aloud brought to life it's meaning.

The chapter on flowers was particularly beautiful.

Overall, it was rather educational and an interesting look into the ideas of Western and Eastern differences of art and culture.

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Book of Tea was published in 1906 in North America, where its Japanese author had been living for a number of years. Having grown up in Japan but with a largely Western education there for his earlier years, he sought all the more to connect with his Japanese cultural heritage throughout the rest of his life. Working in a number of artistic institutions and museums, he became expert on the Japanese and Eastern artistic and cultural traditions, and their historical development. What we have here is almost as much a musing on beauty, humanity, and nature, as it is a book on tea. As we come to appreciate through this book, tea and its associated aesthetics, whether or not they are central to the traditional Japanese spirit of culture, are at the very least representative of it as a whole.The aesthetics and practice of tea consumption in Japan differs greatly from tea in China, India, and the West due to a number of historical, social, geographical and philosophical differences between these cultures. This is very much a book on the Japanese culture of tea, which centres around their tea ceremony, though we are supplied with the relevant contextual detail from other regions to appreciate the interplay of these factors and their importance in determining the quintessentials of the Japanese way.As a short (90 pages) and very enjoyable read, I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in tea, world history, aesthetics, or Japanese or Eastern civilisation. Though primarily the work of an aesthete, there is also much to interest the reader in terms of social and anthropological thought. For a hectic modern society that spends so little time in quiet contemplation and enjoyment of the simple things, this book provides a welcome refreshing contrast.

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not actually about tea as much as it's about the way the tradition of the tea-house influenced the Japanese aesthetic. Interesting, touching - and not a terrible introduction to Zen, either.

[rbeffa_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not going to ooh and aah over this book. There is some lovely writing in here, but I'm rather lukewarm at best on this one. A mildly interesting book that was first published in 1906. My edition was published in 2005 and includes a forward and afterward by Hounsai Genshitsu Sen which is almost as interesting as the book itself, and invaluable in helping to understand this book. The book is a bit of a history lesson on tea and Japanese culture and ways of thought. More about the Japanese way of thinking and appreciation for certain arts than anything else. When it was published Japan was just embarking on a path that was not enlightened. It is impossible for me to not think about what was to come. The author clearly believes the East is better than the West. I was hoping for a bit of enlightenment, but came away unimpressed.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Tao of Tea. Briefly, a compendium on how to do it without getting too carried away by it. "How can one be serious with the world itself is so ridiculous!"

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

More about spirituality than actual tea, it's not a bad read if you like that kind of thing, but some of the more Zen chapters are a touch wishy-washy or just downright impenetrable if you aren't in the right frame of mind. Maybe that's the point.

[mykl8s · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A lesson on the importance and usefulness of ritual, when done for good reasons.

[michael5rimmer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Okakura uses tea, a drink partaken of in both East and West, as a way of demystifying Japanese culture and challenging Orientalism in Europe and America. Written in English for a Western audience, it is a wonderfully poetic introduction to Japanese culture and aesthetics.

[landschaft_archt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A classic, well written work of Japanese literature. Its subtitle could be 'an asian life philosophy.' Written in 1906 as western culture became more adopted in Japan. This book was meant to preserve the traditions and 'Teaism' culture developed in Japan based in the ancient tea ceremony.

[carolee888 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura gave a history of tea and the Asian philosophy of tea. It is important to note that the author died in 1913 before major world events and that his ideas reflect an ethnocentric view which may have been common when he was living.Tea originally was thought of as medicinal only but later gained recognition as a beverage in 8th Century China. Teaism is a cult in Japan that emphasized purity, cleanliness and simplicity. This philosophy compared emotions to tea. There could be too little tea or emotion or too much. My favorite parts of this book are the discussion of the evolution or the three ways of preparing tea. The first way that tea was prepared was by boiling it with rice, ginger, salt, milk and spices until you have a cake to make tea from. It is still prepared that way in Tibet and Mongolia.The second way developed in the Ming Dynasty is powdered tea. This is called the whipped method and does not use salt. It began in Southern China but this method only survives in Japan where the Mongols were unable to take over. Along with this, the simple tea room and the tea ceremony developed in Japan. The ceremony and drinking of tea is supposed to drive away fatigue.The Ming Dynasty in China started using steeped tea which the Western world is familiar with. Tea was best enjoyed in porcelain cups.What I didn’t like in this book was the assumption that the Japanese way of Teaism is the best way. The author criticizes the Western way and instead of thinking of them as just different assumes that the Eastern way is best.I did enjoy this e-book very much, especially the history of tea and the discussion of the requirement s of Japanese tea rooms and the philosophy of Teaism. I just touched on the topics in this book; the author goes into great depth on them.I do recommend it but you will need to accept the authors’ assumptions about which culture is better, West or East.

[andrewblackman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a delightful book, written about 100 years ago, about the tea ceremony, its spiritual roots and its influence on Japanese culture.The writer traces the roots of the tea ceremony in Taoism and Zen Buddhism, emphasising the importance of enjoying the present moment and seeing beauty in small, everyday things. He shows how the purity and simplicity of the tea-room came from emulation of the Zen monastery, and this in turn influenced Japanese architecture for centuries. There were some wonderful observations, for example on the deliberate avoidance of symmetry or repetition in the decoration of the tea-room, on the grounds that "True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete." The process was more important than attempting a perfect end result.The writing itself is a thing of elegant beauty. Here's a brief example:"The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things."

[pondlife_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting and short book. It covers some of the history of Tea in China and Japan, but focusses more on the cultural, religious and artistic aspects of tea drinking, the tea ceremony and the tea house.

[bookdivasreads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great introductory book into the "art of tea" from an Asian perspective.

[aethercowboy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am an avid tea drinker. I must drink multiple cups a day. While I prefer black tea usually, I have found that I am fond of an occasional cup of green, white, or oolong. This, of course, does not include the teasans I also like to drink: mate, rooibos, the like. I like me a good cup of tea.When I discovered The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo, I knew that I had to read it. Okakura has written here a delightful gem tracing the history of tea, including the history of Teaism, as well as describing the Japanese tea ceremony. In addition, he goes into detail about things that went hand-in-hand with tea, including zen, and some philosophical thoughts on things like flowers, which have their place in the tea ceremony.If you would be interested in a deeper history of tea, at least as far as the Japanese tea culture was involved as of the turn of the 20th centure, then this book is indispensible. While it doesn’t cover much if any of the UK tea customs, I found that it stood well as a useful resource to anybody who has a curiosity regarding tea.Much enjoyed, albeit with a cup of Earl Grey. I won’t tell if you won’t.

[cameling_2 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I should have thought to read other reviews about this book before picking it up because I thought this was going to be a book that told me all I'd want to know about tea. What it turned out to be is a book that doesn't live up to its title.I was expecting to read about the history of tea, who started to drink it first, how they drank it, and how the practice of drinking tea spread. The initial chapters did manage to cover some of this, and I enjoyed the first third of the book as it traced the practice of drinking tea through China, Japan and India. It also introduced Taoism, Buddhism and Zen philosophy but that was a nice complement to the practice of drinking tea. From there, we went into the architecture of Japanese tea houses and at that point, all references to tea seemed rather incidental as the author took us then to comparisons between the Japanese minimalist approach to artistic perfection in architecture, interior decoration, art and flower arrangement. I was expecting to learn about how the different types of tea were grown and harvested. I was expecting to learn about how the teas are blended, how different cultures drink their tea and how their tea drinking practices evolved over time. I was expecting to learn about tea ceremonies (if any) in different countries and the significance behind the rituals. There were references to tea masters in this book, but no explanation about how one became a tea master ... I assume it's more than just drinking and making copious pots of tea? I was expecting to learn about any medicinal properties in tea, and even how tea is sometimes used in some cuisines. I was expecting to read about the evolution of tea from its simple beginnings to the more complex offerings available today.And all my expectations were left unfulfilled. The author appeared to have forgotten what he started out to write.

[identitea · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

More about Zen than tea, but still a very inspiring read.