Learning to be Graceful: Tea in Early Modern Guides for Women's Edification

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the eighteenth and nineteenth century popular discourse on women's tea practice in guides for women's edification. It argues that in these commercially produced texts we find evidence of the dissemination of information on tea culture to a new social group, namely, wealthy commoner women. Thus, we see that with economic growth came new opportunities for commoner women to participate in cultural practices associated with the elite. Tea was a particularly significant cultural practice as it taught women etiquette and manners. Through learning tea, commoner women could learn to comport themselves in a manner associated with those of higher status. It was a way of displaying their, and their family's, accumulation of capital, both social and economic, and also a way to potentially raise their status through marriage. This early modern discourse on women's tea laid the foundations for the growth of women's tea in modern Japan, a development made possible by the flexibility of the status system as it affected women.

Notes

¹On the origins of tea culture see Sen, The Japanese Way of Tea; Kumakura, Chanoyu no rekishi; and Ishida, Chanoyu zenshi no kenkyū. On the interaction between the early merchant tea masters and the military and political elite see Bodart, ‘Tea and Counsel’ and Ludwig, ‘Chanoyu and Momoyama’. On warrior tea culture in the early modern period see Demura-Devore, ‘The Political Institutionalization of Tea Specialists’; Nakano-Holmes, ‘Furuta Oribe’; and Tanimura, ‘Tea of the Warrior’.

²See, for example, Kato, ‘“Art” for Men, “Manners” for Women’, and Kumakura, ‘Josei to chanoyu’.

³There are records of tea gatherings with female participants dating as far back as the late sixteenth century. For example, see Yoshida, Kanemi kyōki, vol.1, 124 and 180 , and Nagashima, Matsuya kaiki, 402.

⁴See Kagotani, Josei to chanoyu, 85–98; Tanihata, Kinsei chadōshi, 139–145; and Tanihata, Kuge chadō no kenkyū, 281–288.

⁵Tanihata, Kinsei chadōshi, 145.

⁶Following David Howell I use the term ‘commoner’ to denote a single status group comprising peasants, artisans and merchants rather than treating them as separate status groups. Commoners comprised approximately 90 percent of the population of early modern Japan. See Howell, Geographies of Identity, 24–25.

⁷This paper will use ‘tea’ as a translation for the term chanoyu, following the trend in recent English scholarship to avoid the commonly used but problematic translation ‘tea ceremony’.

⁸Etsuko Kato, in her study of women's tea practice in contemporary Japan, has said that in the early modern period, ‘women's tea ceremony had no such official discourse equivalent to men's (no texts survive)’. Kato, The Tea Ceremony and Women's Empowerment, 62. In a study of tea practice among women of the Ii household in the nineteenth century, Ii Hiroko has said that no other texts on tea for women aside from Toji no tamoto (A Handbook for Women's Tea, written by the Sekishū school tea master Ōguchi Shōō in 1721) existed in the early modern period. Ii, ‘Oku jochū no chanoyu’, 220–222.

⁹Kato, Tea Ceremony and Women's Empowerment, 67.

¹⁰For the view that women's tea practice began after the Meiji Restoration see Sen, ‘Autobiographical Essay-3’, 6; Varley, ‘Foreword’, in Sen, The Japanese Way of Tea, x; Kato, The Tea Ceremony and Women's Empowerment, 62; and Kumakura, ‘Josei to chanoyu’, 246.

¹¹There were, as always, exceptions to the norm, with examples of commoner men being granted samurai status or privileges. See Howell, Geographies of Identity.

¹²Howell, Geographies of Identity, 27.

¹³See Walthall, ‘Edo bunka ni okeru Ō-oku’; Hata, Edo oku jochū monogatari; and Walthall, ‘From Peasant Daughter to Samurai Wife’.

¹⁴See Kornicki, The Book in Japan, 140–207; Shively, ‘Popular Culture’, 725–733; Ishikawa, Joshiyōōraimono bunrui mokuroku; and Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 286–288.

¹⁵Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 291–294; Keene, World Within Walls, 1–7; and Rubinger, Popular Literacy, 80–85.

¹⁶Sugano, ‘Terakoya to onna shishō’, 140–158.

¹⁷On economic growth see Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan; Smitka, The Japanese Economy in the Tokugawa Era; Nakai and McClain, ‘Commercial Change and Urban Growth in Early Modern Japan’; and Totman, Early Modern Japan, 140–159.

¹⁸On the issue of literacy in early modern Japan see Rubinger, Popular Literacy. On women's education and literacy, in particular, see Tocco, ‘Norms and Texts for Women's Education’; and Walthall, ‘Family Ideology’.

¹⁹Ishikawa, Joshiyōōraimono bunrui mokuroku, 1–10.

²⁰Lindsey, Fertility and Pleasure, 141.

²¹Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners, 15.

²²Ibid.

²³Takada, Joyō fuku judai, 18. See the similarities with Kimura, Shinzō onna shorei ayanishiki, 2: 18.

²⁴In chanoyu there are two types of tea served, both of which are made using powdered green tea (matcha) which is mixed with hot water and whisked, either to a thin consistency (usucha), or to a thick, viscous consistency (koicha). The procedures for making thick tea are more formal and complicated than those for making thin tea. The guest's role is likewise more complicated for the thick tea service.

²⁵On the concept of a ‘civilizing process’ see Elias, The Civilizing Process.

²⁶Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 329.

²⁷Elias, The Civilizing Process, 82. Ikegami relates how one member of a village elite turned his back on haikai poetry in favour of the more aristocratic waka form once the former became so popular that ‘even women, children and lowlifes’ started to be involved; Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 151.

³⁰Naitō, Onna rōei kyōkunka.

²⁸The term charei presumably referred to topics such as those included in Joyō fuku judai, as discussed above. Kimura, Shinzō onna shorei ayanishiki, 2: 22.

²⁹Takada, Joyō fuku judai, 18.

³²Shimokōbe, Onna kuku no koe, 297.

³¹Ikeda, Shūgyoku hyakunin isshu ogura shiori, 290.

³³Ume, Jokyō taizen himebunko, 291.

³⁴Ikeda, Shūgyoku hyakunin isshu ogura shiori, 290.

³⁶Ibid.

³⁵Morinaga, ‘The Gender of Onnagata’, 268.

³⁷See David Howell's discussion of customs and ‘other elements of outward appearance’ and status in Geographies of Identity, 15–16 and 25–39

³⁸Griswold, ‘Sexuality, Textuality’, 72.

³⁹See, for example, Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 155; Walthall, ‘Edo bunka ni okeru Ō-oku’, 56; and Hata, Edo oku jochū monogatari, 22.

⁴⁰Walthall, ‘From Peasant Daughter to Samurai Wife’, 97.

⁴¹While it may seem odd that commoner girls were learning shamisen in order to serve in a noble household, as Ikegami has noted, though shamisen was considered an art form more suited to commoners than samurai, ‘aesthetic “slumming” was not uncommon’ and samurai did enjoy such arts. See Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 157.

⁴²Ikeda, Shūgyoku hyakunin isshu ogura shiori, 290.

⁴³On sugoroku see Formanek, ‘The “Spectacle” of Womanhood’.

⁴⁴For examples see Walthall, ‘From Peasant Daughter to Samurai Wife’, 97–100; Gramlich-Oka, Thinking Like a Man, 67; and Formanek, ‘The “Spectacle” of Womanhood’, 103.

⁴⁵See Anne Walthall's discussion of the benefits of having a daughter in service, ‘From Peasant Daughter to Samurai Wife’, 99–102.

⁴⁶See Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 112–120, and Bourdieu, Distinction, 1–3.

⁴⁷Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 118.

⁴⁸Kato, The Tea Ceremony and Women's Empowerment, 4.

⁴⁹Lovell, ‘Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu’, 20–21; Skeggs, ‘Context and Background’, 10–11.

⁵⁰Lovell, ‘Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu’, 23.

⁵¹For examples of such contests see Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 273.

⁵²Lovell, ‘Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu’, 20–21.

⁵³Ibid., 24.

⁵⁴Kato, The Tea Ceremony and Women's Empowerment, 5.

⁵⁵Beverley Skeggs has argued that gender, when symbolically legitimated via class, can become a form of cultural capital. Skeggs, ‘Context and Background’, 5–6.