Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice by Kristin Surak (review)

All nation-states and their political and social elites are keen to embrace cultural practices and products that embody the characteristics of a unique national essence in order to reaffirm ironically enough both difference and sameness – difference between the nation-state and its rivals and sameness of the national subjects that reside within it. In the case of Japan, perhaps one might think first of anything from sushi to sumo to samurai, but Kristin Surak’s fine study unpacks the social and historical context of tea and its ceremonial preparation as a highly illustrative case in point of nationalized cultural production and representation. Deftly crossing disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, sociology and history, Making Tea, Making Japan is a well-crafted and interpretively provocative book that anyone with an interest in Japanese society and the theoretical dynamics of nationalism will find fascinating.

Eschewing a standard chronological narrative structure, Surak instead presents five core chapters, each providing its own meaningful layer of the overarching argument of the book. After an introduction in which the term “nation-work” is explained as a conceptual framework for bridging the gap between the political construction of nationalist myth by ruling elites and the common expression of national identity in everyday life, Chapter One (Preparing Tea: Spaces, Objects, Performances) provides a richly textured description of the starkness, discipline and simplicity that characterize tea rooms, utensils and the ceremony itself. All three, Surak contends, play a key role in fashioning tea as “a markedly traditional formulation of the national essence.” (p. 54). Chapter Two (Creating Tea: The National Transformation of a Cultural Practice) then offers some deeper historical context by tracing the evolution of tea practice from the Warring States era of the 16^th century until the early Showa period of the 1930s. Here Surak rightly points out that “the nation itself had to be created and tea made national before it could help make the nation” (p. 57). Tea thus can hardly be seen as emblematic of Japanese culture before the late nineteenth century. The articulation of tea as inherently “Japanese” by late Meiji era intellectuals, however, was possible only because the tea ceremony by that time possessed deeply rooted associations with the expression of political power and the artistic aesthetics of beauty cultivated during the Tokugawa period.

Surak shifts gears toward the twentieth century sociology of tea in the next three chapters. The origins, evolution and more recent corporatization of the so-called iemoto, or hereditary authorities on tea practice, make up the content of Chapter Three (Selling Tea: An Anatomy of the Iemoto System), and here Surak offers some of her most thoughtful analysis. The malleability of tea and its meanings is brought into sharp focus through her analysis of how iemoto employed the tea ceremony as an expression of wartime nationalism during the early 1940s, but quickly repackaged it into “the epitome of a peace-loving Japanese civilization” (p. 104) after defeat and foreign occupation. Moreover, the iemoto played a central part in intensifying the commodification of tea practitioner status by way of an organizational infrastructure that both affirmed and was dependent upon the indisputable “Japaneseness” of the tea ceremony in postwar society. With this understanding of the iemoto in place, Surak turns next in Chapter Four (Enacting Tea: Doing and Demonstrating Japaneseness) to the actions of tea school adherents and the ways in which their behaviors animate and validate the iemoto-dominated reproduction of tea as Japanese culture. If the iemoto authenticate tea as national culture, it is their devotees who propagate that notion through lessons, demonstrations and various public expositions on tea and its links to national identity. Indeed, it seems that the public at large is able to reconnect with “traditional” culture in an ever more internationalized Japanese world largely through the enthusiastic efforts of adepts (almost all women) trained under dominant tea schools such as Urasenke.

Finally, Surak reflects upon the ubiquity of tea in Japanese popular culture as a symbol of national...