Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. x, 227 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7660-9.
Tea—a beverage made from the leaves of Camellia Sinensis—is one of the staple drinks in Japan today. One of the cultural practices that came out of tea-drinking customs was the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu), which is considered a crucial, and marketable, component of Japan’s national cultural tradition, as demonstrated in its inclusion in the Japanese government’s Cool Japan Project.
Because of its significance in this regard, much has been studied and written about the history of Japanese tea culture from its inception to the present time. Compared to the strong interest in the cultural and artistic elements of Japanese tea culture, especially that of powdered green tea (matcha), the study of the history of tea as a daily commodity, especially a comprehensible history from an economic perspective, has been relatively scarce (almost nonexistent in the English language). Although there is rich Japanese-language literature on the history of the production and circulation of tea in the period before modernity, the focus has been on regional significances. The authors do not tend to comprehend tea production on an archipelago-wide network. A Bowl for a Coin is the first English-language title that encompasses the period from around 750 CE to the present and connects the history of the production, distribution, and consumption of a wide range of Japanese teas.
The chapters are chronologically organized. Chapter 1 discusses the development of tea production from around 750 to 1300. It overviews how a novel beverage, tea, gained its status as a luxury good, penetrating the life of the elite, and then circulated through the gift exchange amongst the elite, reaching the eastern government in Kamakura by the thirteenth century. The gift relationships were routine enough to be transformed into a near tax and some institutions were becoming involved in the trading of the herb.
Chapter 2 discusses the period between 1300 and 1600, when tea gradually became widely available for members outside the small circle of the religious establishment and aristocratic elite in the western capital. The period from 1400 through 1550 witnessed a diffusion of tea cultivation in regions climatically suited for the plant. Tea drinking also became available to commoners, in exchange for money, at tea shops in some cities, such as Kyoto and Nara, as well as in some villages outside these urban areas. The circle of consumers expanded to include numerous commoners who raised their own tea or bought on the market, although “over a third of the reference to tea shipments in one compendium of source portray the commodity as a gift” (56–57).
Chapter 3 discusses the period when tea became an urban commodity, readily available for all classes in the Japanese archipelago. The author points out that a large sector of the populace was drinking the beverage daily. However, according to Farris, during the Edo period “industrious” revolution, the role of tea was relatively insignificant. Tea was a daily commodity but largely cultivated and processed for household use. In other words, it was domestically consumed and “did not engage the market or … demand-pull ‘virtuous circle’” (123). Chapter 4 discusses the development of tea production from the Meiji period to the present, mainly focusing on the amount of tea produced in Japan during the period.
The author claims that tea was a central commodity in Japan’s emergent consumer society and its production indicates tea was available through the market or domestically from southern Kyushu to the northern tip of the Tohoku by the mid-Edo period (chapter 3). Farris emphasizes that the many northern provinces began to experiment with their own cultivation of the tea plant, spreading tea production to new areas not ideally suited to the industry. By examining the writings by agrarian experts of the period, Farris asserts that tea cultivation production in the frigid northern part of Japan was surprisingly high and “even for peasants from northeastern Japan in the early eighteenth century, tea retained its ceremonial aura” (80). However, the examples given in this book as evidence of the development of tea production in northeastern Japan in the early eighteenth century are from Hokuriku (northwestern Japan)—the Echigo and Kaga Provinces—not Tohoku (northeastern Japan): these two regions are climatically different. Thus, it is problematic to argue about tea industry growth in the northern tip of Tohoku by examining these two provinces. This topic—the spread of the tea industry in northeastern Japan—needs further investigation by using historical sources from the Tohoku region.
Overall, the book encompasses the production, circulation, and consumption of tea in Japanese history. Although most of the arguments in the book rely on existing Japanese-language research, A Bowl for a Coin is the first book that has made an effort to incorporate a transregional narrative in the history of the production, distribution, and consumption of a wide range of Japanese teas. It is a good read for a non-specialist interested in the history of tea in general, as well as those interested in the socio-economic aspects of Japanese tea history.
Taka Oshikiri
The University of the West Indies, Mona