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islands of caffeine (1)
Japan: The Tradition of Tea, the Novelty of Coffee

The taste of ch’an [Zen] and the taste of ch’a [tea] are the same.

—Old Buddhist saying

Tea was brought to Japan from China by Buddhist monks more than a thousand years ago. As a result of the Japanese adaptation and codification of the Zen tea ceremony about six hundred years later, the preparation, service, and imbibing of tea became a mirror of a national aesthetic, moral, social, and metaphysical ideal. In the Japanese tea ceremony, taking tea was said to be an earthly finger that “pointed to the moon” of enlightenment, the awakening to which all Buddhists aspired. In modern Japan, with its Western scientific, educational, industrial, and commercial models, the frenzied ethos of the rat race has created a largely urban Japanese market for a new drink to fuel their work and play. As a consequence, while tea use and tea ceremonies abide, coffee has achieved a powerful and growing presence there. In Japan today, the coffeehouse plays the important part it played in Arab countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serving as a place in which people can meet and mingle with others outside of their families or circle of close friends. Because Japanese living quarters are so small, people flee from their confinement to enjoy the pleasant social respite of the coffeehouse, and this resort is even more important to them than to the average American or European.

Of course, old Japan and new Japan exist together, intertwined and inseparable, two aspects of a nation that is in many cultural aspects different from anything European. Yet in the Japanese love of both tea and coffee, we find a twin affection familiar to the West. Tea and coffee, emblematic of the traditional and the new, are enjoyed side by side, there as here.

The Origin of Tea in Japan

In the seventh century, Japanese monks discovered tea in China and introduced it to their homeland, where it was used by Zen practitioners in their communal ceremonies and as a curative drug. In the early ninth century in Hei-an-kyo, the national capital, during a long civil war, tea enjoyed a brief early vogue as a comestible. It was not until four hundred years later, however, that, the publication of a book made tea a nearly universal fixture of Japanese society.

At the end of the twelfth century,¹ Yeisai (1141–1215), or Senko-Soshi, the leader of a Zen sect, planted tea seeds he had brought from China in a friend’s monastary and several other favorable spots around the country. Relying on what he had learned of tea in China and his own experience with its cultivation, Yeisai wrote Kitcha-Yojoki, or The Book of Tea Sanitation, the first Japanese book on tea. Yeisai’s work, which praised the plant as a powerful pharmaceutical, a “divine remedy and a supreme gift of heaven,”² marked a watershed in the history of caffeine use in Japan. Before this book appeared, tea drinking had been confined to monks and aristocrats; after its publication, the practice spread to every stratum of society.

The great influence of Yeisai’s book came about in the following way. The shogun of the time, Minamoto Sanetomo (r. 1203–19), whom gluttony had severely sickened, called on Yeisai to pray for his recovery. But Yeisai did more than that. He sent to the temple for some of his homegrown tea crop and prepared and served the healing brew to Sanetomo. When the military leader promptly regained his health, he asked to learn more about the wonderful remedy. To satisfy Sanetomo’s curiosity, Yeisai copied his book by hand and presented it to the ruler. After reading it, Sanetomo became a tea enthusiast himself, and, from his example, the use of tea as a medicinal tonic rapidly spread from his court into general use across the nation.

Caffeine and Ceremony in the East: The Religion and Art of Chanoyu

“As to the Buddha, he never makes an equivocal statement.
Whatever he asserts is absolute truth.”
“What then is the Buddha’s statement?” asked Hofuku.
“Have a cup of tea, my brother monk.”

—An exchange between two Zen masters,
Chokei (853–932), also called Ch’ang-ch’ing Hui-ling,
and Hofuku (d. 928), also called Pao-fu Ts’ung-chan,
adapted from Suzuki’s translation of a passage
from the Dentoroku, or Transmission of the Lamp³

Although Yeisai must have observed tea ceremonies during his visit to China, it was Dai-ō the National Teacher (1236– 1303), also a Zen monk, who in 1267 introduced the tea ceremony he had encountered in China’s Zen monastaries to the Zen monastaries of Japan. Following Dai-ō’s lead, succeeding generations of Zen monks continued to practice this ceremony within their own religious communities. Finally, in the fifteenth century, the monk Shukō (1422–1502) employed his artistic talents to adapt the ceremony to Japanese tastes and in so doing originated the first form of chanoyu, the distinctively Japanese tea ceremony that is still practiced today. The tea ceremony itself can be illuminated for western readers by comparing it with the dialectal method of Socrates. Through the grammar of this ceremony, the superficialities and illusions of everyday life and practical pursuits were to be broken down and transcended. The ultimate goal for any practitioner of the shared mundanities of the Zen tea ceremony was satori, the insight into the ultimate reality.⁴ Shukō taught chanoyu to Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1435–90), shogun and patron of the arts, who helped to establish it as a national tradition. As a result, during Ashikaga’s reign, the practice of the tea ceremony escaped the confines of the monasteries and was discovered by the lay population, especially by the warrior class, the samurai.⁵

Sen-no-Rikyu (1522–91), a tea merchant by trade, was in some ways the most important, and, by reputation, the best, in a long line of tea masters in Japan. It was Rikyu who systematically expounded the principles of chanoyu and designed the features of the modern tea ceremony and teahouse, and who became the progenitor of the three major tea schools flourishing in Japan today. In a country where the profession of tea master has been highly regarded for centuries, Rikyu remains the master of them all. It was largely as a result of Rikyu’s efforts that, from his time forward, tea became a symbol of the national culture.

In Rikyu’s day, three groups shared leadership of the nation: the emperor and aristocrats, the warlords, and the merchants. The emperor on his imperial throne had become little more than a ceremonial prop, in this respect comparable in status to Hirohito during World War II or Queen Elizabeth today. The once-feared shogun, who carried what had degenerated into an hereditary title, had suffered the same fate. The actual leaders of the country were a new breed of military dictators who arose from the ranks of the feudal warlords and conspired with the wealthy merchants to increase and solidify their control of the nation.

Although the warlords wielded military power and the merchants amassed large fortunes, the social heirarchy, in which aristocrats and priests enjoyed the highest status, remained anachronistic. It was nearly impossible for anyone outside of their closed circles to attain the respect and honor, the desire for which, shared even by the wise, has been called by Aristotle “the last infirmity of the noble mind.” In the throes of this infirmity, the warlords and merchants tried to establish their legitimacy by patronizing art and culture. They joined in promoting Zen Buddhism and the Ming Chinese culture in opposition to the native styles cultivated by the aristocracy. Encouraged by these military rulers, monk-artists shuttled between China and Japan, established flourishing ateliers, and, for the first time, through these studios, commoners enjoyed the possibility of advancement based on talent and achievement. The tea ceremony became a central device for laying siege to the aristocratic social edifice. In this era of gekokuje, that is, a topsy-turvy world in which the formerly humble ruled the formerly great, the incongruous sight of an illiterate peasant samurai pausing to indulge in the refinement of the tea ritual became increasingly common.

The last Ashikaga shogun was succeeded by Oda Nubunaga (1534–82), strongest of the feudal lords who fought for ascendancy after the shogun’s death. Nubunaga had nearly succeeded in unifying the country when he died in a fire that started while he was brewing tea. After his death, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98), a peasant who had risen to the rank of Nobunaga’s first lieutenant and who is sometimes called, on account of his military and political acumen, “the Napoleon of Japan,” took over his power and completed the work of unifying the country that Nubunaga had begun. Mindful of his low birth and eager to assure the respect of the increasingly important merchant class, Hideyoshi, like Nobunaga before him, was a generous patron of chanoyu. In order to effect a tranquil transition of power and in recognition of Rikyu’s fame as a tea master, Hideyoshi reconfirmed Rikyu’s position as curator of the palace tea ceremony and equipage. As fate would have it, this favor was the beginning of Rikyu’s undoing.

Hideyoshi was an avid tea lover and was among the growing number of samurai, or professional soldiers, who, somewhat incongrously, liked to “seclude themselves in the tearoom and meditatively sipping a cup of tea, breathe the air of quietism and transcendentalism.”⁶ Hideyoshi went further, however, in his vanity, nourishing the conceit that he was a great tea master himself. During each of Hideyoshi’s military engagements, his attendants would erect a portable teahouse on the battlefield. Hideyoshi would then calmly practice the tea ceremony in view of both his own troops and his enemies, inspiring confidence in the first and fear in the second. Hideyoshi, rembering his humble origins, resented that Rikyu, although nominally his servant, was the more honored because of his family’s wealthy merchant connections and his own celebrated status as the leading tea master. Because the dictator imagined himself Rikyu’s competitor in the practice of chanoyu, a strange rivalry gradually developed between them.

Over the years, Hideyoshi’s envy blossomed into paranoia, a transformation nourished by Rikyu’s deep involvement in the complex social and political intrigues of the day, perilous pursuits for a man with no real power of his own. Finally, giving in to a grudge over a real or imagined conspiracy against him or, some say, out of envy over a statue erected in Rikyu’s honor, Hideyoshi determined to execute his friend, though, in the spirit of good fellowship, he granted him the honorable option of suicide, a privilege ordinarily reserved for his samurai brothers.

The story of Rikyu’s death bears an unsettling similarity to the story of the death of Socrates as told in the Phaedo. Each was honored for his simplicity, austerity, honesty, integrity, and wisdom, and each, having come into conflict with a despotic civil authority and condemned unjustly for subverting the state, was directed to commit suicide, and each, forgoing the opportunity of fleeing to escape his end, did so peacefully, surrounded by disciples. Just before plunging the dagger into his heart, Rikyu addressed it in brief lines imbued with the mind-bending antinomy so dear to the practitioners of Zen:

Welcome to you,
O sword of eternity!
Through Buddha
And through Daruma alike
You have cleft your way.⁷

Rikyu helped to shape and define every aspect of teaism, the teahouse, the tea garden, and the tea ceremony. Among his important innovations was replacing the character “kin” or “reverence,” in the famous traditional hortatory mnemonic Kin Kei Sei Jaku, or “reverence, respect, purity, and tranquillity,” with “wa,” or “harmony.” This change signaled a shift from an emphasis on service to one’s superiors to the more Confucian ideal of harmony and mutual obligation. In Rikyu’s chanoyu “harmony” referenced the harmony between the participants and the implements of tea preparation; “respect” referenced the respect shown by the participants to each other and the implements; “cleanliness,” a Shinto inheritance, referenced the symbolic handwashing and mouth rinsing practiced before entering the teahouse; and “tranquillity,” which is imbued throughout every aspect of the tea ceremony, referenced the deliberate and attentive exercise of each of its components. Rikyu is also credited with the introduction to the laity of passing the commensural bowl of tea, which Chinese Zen monks had centuries before shared among themselves in their ceremonies and which, before his time, was practiced in Japan only among the priesthood. Some people advance the notion that the rituals of the Roman Catholic Mass may have influenced the development of chanoyu, because the tea ceremony became important in lay Japanese life shortly after the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries began proselytizing. According to this view, the increased use of the commensural bowl, for example, is the result of Christian influence.

In a parallel development, tea competitions, which had been widely popular in China during the Sung dynasty (960–1289), became the rage in Japan between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In their new home, these contests were blended with a prior native tradition of monoawase, social competitions involving rival presentations of “poems, flowers, insects, herbs, shellfish”⁸ and other items. To play the new tea game, guests assembled in a tea pavilion, where they were offered four kinds of tea and challenged to determine by taste and scent which were honcha, grown at Toganoo or Uji, and which were hicha, tea grown elsewhere.⁹ These tea competitions, although not direct ancestors of the Japanese tea ceremony, presaged many of the elements of what were soon to become the defining rituals of chanoyu.

Caffeine and Culture: Teaism, Teahouse, Tea Gardens, and the Manners, Art, and Architecture of Japan

The sense of an infinitely expanded present is nowhere stronger than in cha-no-yu, the art of tea. Strictly, the term means something like, “Tea with hot water,” and through this one art Zen has exercised an incalculable influence on Japanese life, since the chajin, or “man of tea,” is an arbiter of taste in the many subsidiary arts which cha-no-yu involves—architecture, gardening, ceramics, metalwork, lacquer, and the arrangement of flowers (ikebana).

—Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (1957)¹⁰

In the Chinese tea ceremony, which arose from the intermingling of Buddhist and Taoist traditions, the mundane was ennobled by the otherworldly loftiness of aesthetic ideals, and the quest for salvation was brought down to earth by contemplation of the commonplace. Its practitioners had discovered an austere beauty and a code of conduct conducive to peace and joy and, ultimately, satori, or enlightenment. In Japan, the spirit and practice of chanoyu maintained this spiritual identity, and, in consequence of the ceremony’s popularity, Japanese art, architecture, and social mores were imbued with the flavor of Zen.

Zen traditions shone through chanoyu in the secular spirituality of the tea ceremony itself, which entirely lacked the liturgical character of a service in a church, synagogue, or mosque. However, politics, business, and money were not discussed at the ceremony. Sometimes a friendly exchange about a philosophical topic was acceptable, but the preferred subjects of conversation were nature and art. Discretion was the guiding principle for the participants. As the host brought the tea utensils, offered the guests sweets, and whipped each serving of powdered tea within its cup, ideal conversation consisted of praising the beauty and inquiring after the provenance of the serving implements.

In Japanese tradition, following a Way leads to makoto, or ultimate truth. There is a Way of Flowers, a Way of Painting, a Way of Poetry, and many others. However, of all the innumerable Ways, it is the Way of Tea that has affected Japanese culture the most deeply. Over the centuries in Japan, architects, painters, gardeners, and craftsmen have worked under the stylistic guidance of the tea masters in creating the houses, gardens, and utensils of the tea ceremony. As a result of this tutelage, Japanese artists and artisans could not help but impart the flavor of Zen tastes to the surroundings and objects of everyday use, including such ordinary items as kitchen implements, teapots, cups, and floor mats, fabric design, and bottles and jars.

A type of pottery originally devised for the tea ceremony as codified by Rikyu became the source of some of Japan’s most revered art objects. It received its name after Hideyoshi, who, as we have seen, was a great patron of tea-related culture, rewarded an artisan with a gold seal engraved with the word “raku” or “felicity.” Because Rikyu’s ceremony was characterized by “wabi,” which means “simplicity” or “tranquillity,” this raku ware was made in a simple style: Wide, straight-side bowls placed on a narrow base, originally with a dark brown glaze. Raku wares were molded by hand, not modeled on a wheel, so that each piece is more elaborately differentiated than is typical for ceramic work. As time went on, the choice of glazes expanded to include light orange-red, straw color, green, and cream. The glazed ware was placed in a hot kiln for about one hour then removed and cooled rapidly, as opposed to the usual process of warming the pottery slowly in a cold kiln. This rapid cooling and, an additional special process unique to the production of raku ware, reduction firing, multiplied dramatic, random surface variations in the glaze.

In Hideyoshi’s day, the tea master Hon’ami Koetsu (1558–1637) established a colony of Nichiren Buddhist artists and craftsman northwest of Kyoto dedicated to expressing the philosophy of teaism. It had a major influence on the development of Japanese art and style. Koetsu himself, a man of many parts, connoisseur of swords, landscape gardener, as well as artisan of lacquerwork and pottery, calligrapher, and poet, is sometimes called “the Leonardo of Japan.” He created what is often regarded as the finest raku Japanese tea bowl ever made, today esteemed a national treasure. In the words of art critic Joan Stanley-Baker in Japanese Art, “Its taut, straight lines taper slightly towards the bottom, the reddish body is covered entirely in a blackish matt slip with opaque white glaze over the upper half, leaving the darker glaze for the bottom: the effect produced by firing is that of gently falling snow. The vigour and grandeur of Mount Fuji are suggested…. The impression is of monumentality.” Today this bowl is part of the Sakai Tadamasa Collection in Tokyo.

From Koetsu’s artist’s colony arose a major school of decorative painting, dedicated to expressing the philosophy of teaism. It later became known as the Korin school, after Ogata Korin (1658–1716), a relative of Koetsu and descendant of the Ashikaga family, who was one of its most illustrious practitioners. Korin is especially esteemed for his screen paintings and lacquerwork executed in an abstract, asymmetrical style and based on the close observation of nature.

No stylistic traditions better illustrate the minimalist motto “Less is more” than the Zen temples and the tea gardens that surround them. In kare-sansui, or “dry landscape” gardens, a few stones and sand are all that remain to conjure the sense of the traditional ornaments of ponds, waterfalls, and flowering plants. Zen monks were primarily interested in the balance of form and were therefore, like the Chinese Sung painters, sparing in their use of color. Therefore, unlike English gardens, tea gardens are not primarily designed around masses of color. Despite their simplicity, celebrated sand gardens, each with its own aesthetic character, present changing faces to visitors coming at different times, as they are meant to be experienced successively in rain, sun, moonlight, and covered in snow, and are designed to present themselves differently with alterations in light and shadow.

The most famous sand gardens are in Kyoto, the finest example of which may be Ryonan-ji’s garden, comprising five groups of rocks laid out on a rectangular plot of raked sand, surrounded by a low stone wall and trees. In Alan Watts’ words:

It suggests a wild beach, or perhaps a seascape with rocky islands, but its unbelievable simplicity evokes a serenity and clarity of feeling so powerful that it can be caught even from a photograph. The major art which contributes to such gardens is bonseki, which may well be called the “growing” of rocks.¹¹

Among the simplest of these sand gardens is the tea garden, the roji, or “dewy path,” the functional garden path that leads to the teahouse. As with much else in the tea ceremony, Rikyu’s designs set the standard for future excellence. A roji comprises the soto roji, the outer part near the garden entrance, and the uchi roji, or the inner part, near the teahouse. The intention of the Zen designers is not to create the illusion of a landscape, but to pursue a more abstract ambition: to evoke its general atmosphere in a confined space.

The teahouse, the cha-shitsu, is a small, one-room hut with a thatched roof, set apart from the main dwelling, featuring a charcoal pit covered with straw mats and paper walls supported by wooden rods. On one side is a tiny alcove, or tokonoma, in which is hung a single painted or calligraphed scroll below which is placed a rock, bouquet of flowers, or other simple decorative object. Much care is devoted by the tea master to choosing the object to place in the tokonoma, as the contents of this niche are intended to set the mood for the ceremony to follow.

Although the Zen masters lavish great care and hard work on designing, building, and maintaining these houses and gardens, as with everything pertaining to Zen, they are ambivalent about acknowledging their individual intellectual and artistic contributions. Their goal is to execute designs with such a light touch that they appear to have been merely helped, rather than governed, by human agency. With this in mind the Zen architect or gardener attempts to follow the “intentionless intention” of the natural forms themselves, achieving his results in a way that could be called “accidentally on purpose.”

Teaism Today and the Traditions of Japan

Restoring the Traditions: The Okakuran Campaign

Kakuzo Okakura (1862–1913), curator of Chinese and Japanese art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, undertook a lifelong mission to preserve, purify, and introduce the West to Japanese art, ethics, and social customs. He brought to this work an integrated, original vision of entire artistic movements in China and Japan, and it is said that under his direction “the study of Oriental art attained its first maturity.”¹² The Boston Museum’s collections became world-famous, attracting a small community of Japanese artisans who settled in the area to perform restorations. Today Okakura is most famous for his Book of Tea (1906), a turn-of-the-century apology to the West for Japanese tea tradition as exemplified in the cult or philosophy of teaism. Written in English, it was read by hundreds of thousands of Americans as their introduction to Japanese culture. In adducing the pervasive importance of tea, Okakura mentions a locution that has entered general use:

In our common parlance we speak of the man “with no tea” in him, when he is insusceptible to the serio-comic interests of the personal drama. Again we stigmatize the untamed aesthete who, regardless of the mundane tragedy, runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one “with too much tea” in him.¹³

There is no question about the identity of Okakura’s favorite among the leading beverages:

There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealization…. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.¹⁴

Okakura explains the great influence the tea masters have had on the customs and conduct of Japanese life. Preparing and serving delicate dishes, as well as dressing and decorating in muted colors, have encouraged what he believes is the nation’s natural aspiration for simplicity and humility. Okakura states that despite the Western disdain for most Eastern customs, the West has fallen under the spell of chado and chanoyu. The English ceremony of afternoon tea is no more than a Western imitation of the great tea ceremony of Japan:

Strangely enough, humanity has so far met in the tea-cup. It is the only Asiatic ceremonial which commands universal esteem. The white man has scoffed at our religion and our morals, but has accepted the brown beverage without hesitation. The afternoon tea is now an important function in Western society. In the delicate clatter of trays and saucers, in the soft rustle of feminine hospitality, in the common catechism about cream and sugar, we know that the Worship of Tea is established beyond question. The philosophic resignation of the guest to the fate awaiting him in the dubious decoction proclaims that in this single instance the Oriental spirit reigns supreme.¹⁵

The example he gives is of the English essayist Charles Lamb, an ardent tea lover, who seemed to evince the authentic spirit of teaism. For Lamb “the greatest pleasure…was to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.” As Okakura explains, “For Teaism is the art of concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare not reveal.”¹⁶

Nevertheless, like the first boil of tea in Lu Yü’s recipe, Okakura’s passionate prose should be taken with a grain of salt. In his view teaism is, in effect, coextensive with human wisdom, irrespective of whether the wise men who authored the wisdom in question were thinking of, were inspired by, or had even ever heard of tea:

Japanese women performing the traditional tea ceremony, from a 1905 photograph by Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942). (University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia, negative #s4–142240)

It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humor itself,—the smile of philosophy. All genuine humorists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers,—Thackeray, for instance, and, of course, Shakespeare.¹⁷

A Contrarian View: Urasenke, or the Church That Caffeine Built

The ideals of religious and cultural movements are often poorly realized in the institutions and activities that advance under their banners. For example, Christ’s ideals of poverty, self-denial, and the primacy of the spirit were not well represented in the opulence, self-indulgence, and depravity of Renaissance papal courts. What of the traditional ideals of chanoyu? To what extent are they faithfully represented in the current practice of teaism and the tea ceremony in Japan? And to what extent does the use of the drug caffeine play a part in the tea ceremony experience?

The green tea that today is served everywhere and endlessly in Japanese restaurants is, by Western standards, brewed for a very short time and extremely weak, almost hard to distinguish from water, and must be very low in caffeine. In contrast, the whipped brew served at formal tea ceremonies is strong and bitter, a completely different drink. Ma-cha literally means “powdered tea,” and it is this tea which is whipped into a bright green froth in the tea ceremony. There are two types of ma-cha: usu-cha, or thin tea, and koi-cha, or thick tea. The tea most often referred to in speaking of the tea ceremony is usu-cha. The use of koi-cha is reserved for very special ceremonies among intimate friends. In these ceremonies only one cup is used and tea is drunk by turns without washing the cup.

Ma-cha is the cured tips of the just-budding tea plant. Japanese laboratory analysis reveals that these tips contain about 4.6 percent caffeine by weight (compared with only 2 percent for other green teas), more caffeine than any other part of the tea plant, and indeed, more caffeine by weight than any other vegetable source. This caffeinerich tea is sometimes used by Japanese students to help them stay up late for study, the way coffee is by used by their American counterparts.

Small, hard candies made entirely of sugar accompany the tea and are freely consumed during the ceremony. Thus, in addition to a large caffeine wallop, the participants’ blood-sugar levels increase quickly. Some participants claim that the combination of caffeine, sugar, and the enforced discipline of remaining almost perfectly still and composed during the ceremony account for what one called “the huge ‘rush’ often attributed to ‘mystical’ aspects of the tea ceremony.” Because the minds of the participants are free from distraction and imbued with tranquillity and harmony, we can only assume that they would have a more acute awareness of the effects of any drug circulating in their systems. If this evaluation is even partially accurate, caffeine has certainly played more than an incidental part in the flowering of the tea ceremony and the traditions of teaism.

As to the spiritual elevation of the Urasenke school and the Urasenke tea masters, some observers are skeptical. Rikyu, the shrewd intriguer and grand master of tea, worked to increase the wealth and political influence of the Kyoto-based Urasenke tea masters. Urasenke is still the leading school of the tea ceremony and commands a major worldly presence that in Japan today, like that of the Catholic Church in many lands, is immense. Despite such comparisons of Urasenke worldly power and pomp with that of the Catholic Church, chanoyu is usually regarded as entirely secular. Some people see the contemporary tea ceremony as a pastime or hobby of the idle rich. Studying and practicing the tea ceremony is very expensive, in part because of the exorbitant cost of tea ceremony lessons. Also costly are the tools required, including the bowls, implements, and other equiment, not to mention the necessity of buying or renting a traditional teahouse, typically something only the very wealthy can afford to do. Add to these costs the leisure necessary to devote to the study of teaism, and it is easy to understand why average Japanese cannot afford to indulge. Many, perhaps most, Japanese have never attended a tea ceremony. Certainly only a small percentage of Japanese actively pursue serious study of the ceremony, mostly women with inherited wealth or the wives of wealthy businessmen. Many other women study some tea ceremony lore in high school or in special schools for prospective brides, but few continue through advanced studies.

As a conventional accomplishment of young ladies, chanoyu has unquestionably become associated with sentimental absurdities of brocaded girls lined up like dolls, straining to attain what they fancy are the most elevated feelings about porcelain and flower blossoms. In fairness, however, one must acknowledge that such costume displays are by no means the only examples of chanoyu today. The Soshu Sen school of chanoyu, for example, is an austere Zen tradition that requires no fancy or expensive surroundings or equipment, only a bowl, tea, and hot water.¹⁸

Westerners may have difficulty understanding how Urasenke, a tea school, has attracted millions of tuition-paying students each year, and maintains economic and cultural control of a dozen of the nation’s traditional crafts, including architecture, gardening, ceramics, metalwork, lacquerwork, and the arrangement of flowers. It wields such authority in modern Japan that it has been called “the Vatican of Japanese culture.” When tea is to be offered to the imported Buddhist or autochthonous Shinto gods, visiting royalty, or heads of state, the hereditary Urasenke grand tea master is tapped to officiate.

In the early 1990s, with what justice we cannot say, Urasenke became the center of a scandal after being accused of sanctioning the pollution of village water sources in order to protect its leaders’ interest in a luxury golf course development. This, together with a number of other factors, has eroded the reputation of the school and the standing of the values it represents, at least in some quarters. Some modern Japanese reject the tea ceremony utterly, judging it to be nothing more profound or spiritual than an elitist, self-indulgent intellectual exercise in aesthetic appreciation through affected but harmless chatter, accompanied by the ingestion a psychoactive drug.

Contemporary Caffeine: The Society and Commerce of Coffee Come to Japan

Dutch merchants, who record drinking coffee in Japan in 1724, were the first people known to have consumed it there. The Japanese themselves were remarkably cool to the new drink. Their affection for coffee only began to develop more than a century later. In 1888 two establishments called “Kahisakan” or “coffee-tea houses,” were opened in Tokyo, advertising that they combined the atmosphere of an exotic European café with the familiar Chinese tearoom.¹⁹ Other coffeehouses followed, each offering its own special Eastern interpretation of the Middle Eastern and European tradition. More coffeehouses appeared in the 1920s, founded by Japanese who had lived abroad, often in France, and who had returned with the idea of recreating the atmosphere of the Parisian cafés. By the 1930s, the brew had percolated through Japanese culture to the extent that certain shops known as “pure tearooms” began selling only coffee. In the tense and dangerous days before the outbreak of World War II, the Japanese government closed these coffeehouses, perhaps because of their potential role as “seminaries of sedition.”²⁰

Following the war, the coffeeshop, or small short-order restaurant, similar in nature to those that are so common in Western nations and invariably serving coffee, tea, and caffeinated soft drinks, began to proliferate. In the 1950s and 1960s, these establishments often served as meeting spots for businessmen as well as social gathering places for young people. In the 1970s and 1980s, the prewar coffeehouse or café reemerged in more than a dozen different styles. Some are classified according to the style of recorded music they feature—jazz, chamber music, folk songs, and so on. Others are known as “bijin,” or “beautiful girl,” coffee shops because they treat their patrons to waitresses chosen for their good looks. Still others, especially to be found in larger cities such as Tokyo, set up to attract foreign tourists, function as meeting spots for Japanese who are interested in forming a liaison with a person of different nationality. Some simply prepare and serve coffee as their main attraction, sometimes accompanied by small sandwiches or curried rice and sometimes only by a small cup of green tea.

Contemporary Japan has a growing coffee, or koh-hi, culture unique to itself, featuring such un-Western preparations as hot or cold canned coffee, available from countless vending machines for a dollar a can, and even jellied coffee. Coffeeshops and cafés charge as much as $5 a cup for a non-refillable serving. An American traveler recently counted more than twenty-five coffeehouses in a six-block stretch of downtown Tokyo. The hundreds of cafés that line the streets have assumed a place in Japanese society similar to that occupied by coffeehouses in early Arabia. With cramped conditions in offices and homes, the coffeeshops have become a kind of second home for many Japanese, a place to meet for business, a romantic rendezvous, a casual chat with friends, or just to take a break from a busy day. Some natives and visitors chalk up the high price for a cup to getting a little peace and a place to rest. In a crowded, bustling city where space is the most valuable commodity, one can rent a little space for a few minutes while drinking a cup of coffee.

The giant among Japanese coffeehouse chains is Doutor, which, starting around 1980, took command of the market by offering good coffee much cheaper than their competitors. Today they charge only about ¥180, or about $1.80, for a non-refillable cup, less than half of what you would pay at many other places. Doutor operates nearly five hundred shops nationwide and for a time opened about five new ones every month. In 1995 the company began to encounter competition with America’s Seattle-based coffeehouse chain Starbucks, which had decided to make Japan its first overseas target, beginning with Tokyo. Yuji Tsunoda, president of Starbucks Coffee Japan, speaks of Starbucks as a “new lifestyle concept” for Japan and about the “Starbucks experience.” Although such puffing sounds like a public relation man’s dream, we must acknowledge that references to a new style of living and an atmosphere filled with new experiences was and is genuinely to be associated with coffeehouse culture everywhere.

The brick-and-mortar coffeehouses are apparently carrying on the Middle Eastern and European traditions of creating centers of recreational socializing with strangers or friends. Coffeehouse environments range from student hangouts in Tokyo playing new wave jazz, and cafés that provide comic books, magazines, and books for their customers, to those reminiscent of teahouses, featuring traditional lute music and scroll paintings. Rolnick, in The Complete Book of Coffee (1982), comments on their large numbers and exotic variety:

Today, it is said that there are 16,000 kohi shops in Tokyo alone, while 100,000 is reckoned for the country. Some are miniature concert halls, where symphonies, opera, jazz and rock music are relayed over sophisticated stereophonic systems. Others have romantic music, poetry readings, or the most opulent decor. Places like Lily of the Valley or Picasso, Hygiene, Ten Commandments (the latter looking as if it were straight out of a Cecil B.DeMille epic) and Magicland, have everything from monstrous five-storey-high stained-glass murals and Finnish wood, to something resembling a High Anglican church.²¹

As she is in many technological areas, Japan is in the forefront in the rush into cyberspace. A cursory search of the Internet turns up dozens of so-called cybercafés, with such names as Electronic Café International, KISS, Café Des Pres, and Cybernet Café. Following the Japanese lead, other Asian countries, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan, now boast cybercafés in great numbers.

Japan has been the launching pad for the Asian coffeehouse. Taiwan, under Japanese influence, now boasts many coffeehouses with geishalike companionship for the patrons. Korea also has a number of coffeehouses, often featuring classical music, after the Japanese model, in the Myongdong district. And in Hong Kong, coffee drinkers sit at outdoor cafés on benches in the springtime, in a manner reminiscent of Rome, Paris, and even harkening back to the first Islamic coffee drinkers in Mecca, Cairo, and Constantinople.

David Landau, editor of Coffee Talk Magazine, who describes himself as a “Japanophile,” says that, even though we associate the Japanese with green tea, they have regularly used coffee for years, and many consider it a fixture of life just as Americans do. In fact, ten years ago, Landau judges, the Japanese were making better coffee than Americans. Today, however, with our now maturing and widespread love of specialty coffees, Americans could teach them a great deal. According to Landau, these higher-grade coffees are available in upscale restaurants but are not yet in general use:

So far, the new wave of North American quality coffee has not made popular inroads. [However] If you go to a chic Italian restaurant in the Akasaka or Roppongi district of Tokyo, you will undoubtedly find an espresso that holds its own with the best of Milano or of Seattle.²²

It’s expensive, though. A non-refillable cup will cost $2 or more. In any case, outside of fancy restaurants, which are out of reach for average Japanese, fine coffee is still hard to find.

The All-Japan Coffee Association, the primary coffee trade group, estimates the total value of the Japanese coffee market at about ¥1 trillion ($10 billion) per year. The association contends that the traditional markets for instant and regular brewed coffee are saturated, but it is optimistic about the growth of specialty coffees. Although Japanese coffee customs are evolving, the average Japanese apartment, perhaps in part because space is tight, doesn’t have a coffeemaker of any sort. Japanese typically make instant coffee at home for themselves and serve the same to their guests. A person looking for coffee brewed from exotic beans or fancy drinks such as a “double-tall café latte” in Japan must go to a kissaten, or coffeeshop.