A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea

Extract

Commodity history has been something of a boom topic in recent years, with the publication of works ranging from the engagingly popular to the seriously academic—a recent review article deals with monographs on items ranging from guano and cocaine to matsutake mushrooms (Specht 2019). This popularity owes something to the growing interest in the history of consumption, material goods, and ordinary life, but it has also emerged as an excellent vehicle for the burgeoning school of global historians who track the paths of economic, social and cultural interaction over time across the world.

The application of the commodity-history approach to green tea, a quintessentially Japanese product yet one with a global story, is therefore a potentially path-breaking venture within both Japanese studies and global history. For the former, it can highlight the ways in which tea, from its very first appearance in Japan, involved global connections; for the latter, it can provide an East Asian addition to the expanding literature on the global history of beverages as central goods in the spread of everyday commercialisation and consumerism. In this light, Farris begins promisingly, describing how he was inspired to write the book by observing Japanese-style green tea on offer in cafes as far apart as Cape Town and St Louis, Missouri. Yet later evidence makes clear that such tea was very unlikely to have been Japanese-grown, whereas what Farris has in fact produced is a history of the tea industry in Japan, with little reference to the processes which have made ‘Japanese’ tea a global commodity consumed all over the world. The chance to apply commodity history’s ‘insights about connection, power and material life’ (Specht 2019: 146) to analysis of Japanese-style green tea as a global phenomenon is thus largely lost within a mass of undoubtedly erudite detail on the history of how tea was grown, processed and consumed within Japan.