The Book of Tea: Japanese Tea Ceremonies and Culture

‘Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage,’ are the opening words of Okakura Kakuzō’s The Book of Tea, written in English in 1906 for a Western audience. The book is a long essay celebrating the secular art of the Japanese tea ceremony and linking its importance with Zen Buddhism and Taoism. It is both about cultural life, aesthetics and philosophy, emphasising how Teaism – a term Kakuzō coined – taught the Japanese many things; most importantly, simplicity, which can be seen in Japanese art and architecture. Looking back at the evolution of the Japanese tea ceremony, Kakuzō argues that Teaism, in itself, is one of the profound universal remedies that two parties could sit down to. Where the West had scoffed at Eastern religion and morals, it held Eastern tea ceremonies in high regard.

With a new introduction, this is an exquisitely produced edition of a classic text made using traditional Chinese bookbinding techniques. Surely it’s time for tea.

About the Author:

Okakura Kakuzo was born in 1862, the son of a merchant. He learnt English as a child and went on to study languages at Tokyo University. There, he started a movement to preserve Japanese culture from the rise of modernism and westernisation. At the age of only twenty-nine, he was made principal of the National Art School, and many of his students went on to become famous artists. In 1898, he resigned to found a dissident school of art. To raise funds, he travelled to America, where he found a wealthy and interested patron in Mrs Isabella Gardner, ‘Queen of Boston’. Now a successful artist, he was also appointed curator of Chinese and Japanese art at the Boston Museum. A dramatic and extroverted character, he wrote The Book of Tea in 1906 and died seven years later, in 1913.