Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan by Rebecca Corbett (review)

Art and literary historians of Japan have long been fascinated with the tea ceremony (chanoyu) and have examined in multiple ways its rich artistic forms and broad influences on Japanese society and culture. Rebecca Corbett is clear and direct about how she wishes to add a new interpretation to this crowded field of scholarship by demonstrating the significant role of women in the early modern development of chanoyu, which she translates broadly as "tea culture." In this aim she clearly succeeds, as her monograph is a well-researched and engaging volume that contributes much to our understanding of not only tea culture but also Edo-period society overall.

Corbett explains how prominent tea schools, notably the Urasenke, have dominated discourse on chanoyu, placing men as central in narratives about tea culture that stretch from today back into the sixteenth century. Much scholarship has also focused on the role of male tea masters who advanced tea culture through service to samurai lords. As Corbett emphasizes, both of these interpretations have overly influenced popular and scholarly understandings of early modern tea culture. Despite ample contrary evidence, the assumption that women did not practice tea prior to the Meiji period has become ingrained. In fact, studies have doggedly followed this assumption to the point that it now resembles another persistent "myth" concerning the Edo period—that the Tokugawa shogunate effectively "closed" the Japanese realm in the early seventeenth century. Corbett observes that many studies have portrayed Gengensai, the head of the Urasenke school at the time of the Meiji Restoration, as having been the first to "open" the world of the tea ceremony to women. Gengensai has thus taken on a role akin to that of US Commodore Matthew Perry, who is still often presented as having been the primary actor in "opening" Japan to the outside world in 1853 (p. 16).

Corbett states that an aim of her book is to "bring the approach of feminist history to a field that is still very much dominated by a top-down and male-centered approach to history writing" (p. 6). In addition, she uses Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of social and cultural capital and Norbert Elias's "civilizing process" as theoretical pillars for explaining the social incentives that prompted women to study chanoyu. She provides numerous examples of the ways in which women practiced tea culture, often in venues outside the world of the established schools. She effectively supports her assertions through close readings of a range of privately circulated and commercially published texts dating chiefly from the Edo period. Readers learn much from Corbett's analysis of A Woman's Handbook, a privately circulated manuscript that guided eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century elite women in the study of tea "as a way of developing morals, ethics, and control over the mind" (p. 21). Commoner women consumed many of the commercially produced edification guides, which explained how the study of tea culture could lead to the personal development of a genteel femininity modeled on the proper comportment, etiquette, and manners practiced by the samurai elite.

The book is divided into five chapters, four on the Edo period and one covering the Meiji period and trends extending into the 1930s. Chapter 1 explores several texts that reveal the household-based tea practices for women that emerged amid the economic growth and related commercial publishing boom of the seventeenth century. Chapter 2 gives a nuanced analysis of A Woman's Handbook, explaining the ways in which the text details "appropriate" and "correct" manners, tastes, and behavior for samurai women (p. 23). This handbook is also the focus of chapter 3, which discusses the use of the text by Ii Naosuke, an influential daimyo tea master (and bakufu leader in the 1850s and 1860s). Corbett highlights how early-nineteenth-century women studied the tea ceremony to prepare for marriage or service in an elite household, a trend...