The tea ceremony persists as one of the most evocative symbols of Japan. Originally a pastime of elite warriors in premodern society, it was later recast as an emblem of the modern Japanese state, only to be transformed again into its current incarnation, largely the hobby of middle-class housewives. How does the cultural practice of a few come to represent a nation as a whole? Although few non-Japanese scholars have peered behind the walls of a tea room, sociologist Kristin Surak came to know the inner workings of the tea world over the course of ten years of tea training. Here she offers the first comprehensive analysis of the practice that includes new material on its historical changes, a detailed excavation of its institutional organization, and a careful examination of what she terms "nation-work"-the labor that connects the national meanings of a cultural practice and the actual experience and enactment of it. She concludes by placing tea ceremony in comparative perspective, drawing on other expressions of nation-work, such as gymnastics and music, in Europe and Asia. Taking readers on a rare journey into the elusive world of tea ceremony, Surak offers an insightful account of the fundamental processes of modernity-the work of making nations.
"Surak's greatest strength is her awareness of the factors that inform the tea ceremony's central place in Japanese society, from commercial structures allowing the seamless delivery of the objects and architecture of tea anywhere on the globe, to the casual use of history-not always accurate-deployed in a Sunday lesson. . . Surak's book offers a scholarly story of choreography and commercializati
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Cultural Review
"Kristin Surak's excellent work, Making Tea, Making Japan, provides an eye-opening survey of the history and practice of chanoyu that reveals the tea world's institutional frameworks and patterns of authority, physical and material aspects of its training and practice, and its representation to general audiences."
Monumenta Nipponica
"Surak's careful ethnography and clear theoretical analysis demonstrate the historical role of the tea ceremony in constructing and defining the nation, but she also shows how it is an important part of the slightly different work of maintaining and explicating Japanese-ness. Through careful ethnographic details she shows how the tea ceremony is embodied in ways both gendered and historically cont
