Latest / Specialty Matcha Podcast / Interrogating Chanoyu Narratives with Dr. Rebecca Corbett

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Interrogating Chanoyu Narratives with Dr. Rebecca Corbett · Specialty Matcha Podcast

• 0:05
  Hello and welcome to the Specialty Match Podcast.
• 0:07
  My name is Ryan and this is Michael Ho Zongjin who also goes
• 0:10
  by Sam. Hello and we're the Co founders
• 0:12
  of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast
• 0:15
  to discuss our learning journey, Matcha, share startup stories
• 0:18
  and interview experts. And this episode we have Doctor
• 0:21
  Rebecca Corbett with us today to talk about her journey with tea
• 0:25
  and Japanese culture. Welcome.
• 0:27
  Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Ryan, and
• 0:30
  I'm Sam. Awesome.
• 0:31
  Awesome. Yeah.
• 0:31
  So before we start. Could you please?
• 0:34
  Maybe share a little bit more about your personal and
• 0:37
  professional background. Sure I can.
• 0:39
  You can probably tell from my accent.
• 0:41
  I grew up in Australia and I first encountered timing you as
• 0:46
  a high school student. I went on a one year exchange.
• 0:50
  I was living in Kudoishi city in Almori Prefecture, which is the
• 0:55
  northern part of the mainland of Japan.
• 0:57
  And it was just a sort of coincidence in a way or random
• 1:02
  connection that my host family was at a circles in temple.
• 1:06
  So my first father was the head priest of the temple.
• 1:09
  So yeah, it was very interesting for me as an exchange to what
• 1:12
  you want is that generally speaking would be, you know,
• 1:15
  that kind of cultural connection.
• 1:17
  So I got a lot of that living at the temple.
• 1:21
  And then his older sister, like T Teacher, their mother had been
• 1:25
  as well. That was in what we're thinking
• 1:28
  school of tea. And so very early on in my year
• 1:31
  there, they asked, you know, would you like to go to a tea
• 1:34
  ceremony class? And it was with my older host
• 1:37
  sister. And I think they probably
• 1:41
  thought I was just going to go to one class, but something just
• 1:43
  clicked with me. Also, you know, as an exchange
• 1:46
  student, I was like, I'm here the one, you know, culture and
• 1:49
  improve my language skills. I've been studying Japanese at
• 1:52
  school in Australia for a few years by that point.
• 1:55
  And so I just went every week for the year.
• 1:59
  My host sister actually finished her lessons after a few months.
• 2:03
  And I was told that's well, because she's getting married.
• 2:06
  And that was kind of my first window as well into like, oh,
• 2:09
  like one of the reasons that young Japanese even do this in
• 2:12
  bridal training. And also the class that I was
• 2:16
  in, all of the other students were older Japanese women,
• 2:20
  mostly over 70. And so I didn't realise it at
• 2:25
  the time, but I was getting this very like have classic or
• 2:30
  stereotypical introduction to this world of Tonio in Japan in
• 2:35
  the contemporary period that the young women doing it for bridal
• 2:38
  training, older women doing it as a hobby when their children
• 2:42
  have grown up and husbands have retired.
• 2:44
  And because it was the Russian case full of tea, I didn't
• 2:47
  realize that during the year that I was there.
• 2:50
  At the end of the year, my teacher said to me, you know,
• 2:52
  there are teachers overseas in this school of T and we were
• 2:56
  able to look up and find that there was a branch in Sydney
• 3:00
  where I was going back to go to university.
• 3:05
  And so I was able to keep practicing.
• 3:08
  So that was 1999 to like 26 years ago now that I had started
• 3:16
  and then as a professionally, as a university student, I was
• 3:20
  majoring in East Asian, Asian studies and the Japanese
• 3:25
  language and history. And so I was really interested
• 3:28
  in just kind of combining all those things.
• 3:31
  And through my practice of telling you, you know, a lot of
• 3:34
  your, a lot of teachers encourage you to read more about
• 3:37
  history or they're telling me things about time of history.
• 3:42
  And I was reading on my own, But I, I felt there was like a
• 3:45
  disconnect between that and my academic learning within the
• 3:48
  university. I was doing a lot of like gender
• 3:51
  history and women's history. And I kept asking questions and
• 3:56
  teen teachers are not getting very like elucidating responses.
• 4:00
  And so I was interested in looking so my, it just kind of
• 4:05
  felt like a natural profession for me to go into PhD research
• 4:07
  exploring the connections between gender and particularly
• 4:12
  women's role within China you historically, because I didn't,
• 4:15
  I kept being told what women didn't practice prior to the
• 4:18
  major period. And that was like, full stop.
• 4:21
  Like that's the end of the story.
• 4:23
  And that's what China you teachers said.
• 4:24
  That's what the history said. And that just didn't make sense
• 4:30
  to me based on what I knew of of the editor period from my other
• 4:34
  classes. And just like a basic cursory
• 4:37
  glance at some materials, I was finding examples where women
• 4:41
  were studying. So that that became the focus of
• 4:44
  my PhD research. And so now I'm, yeah, a few
• 4:47
  decades into professionally being the historian of Japan.
• 4:51
  And specifically my research focus is on some of you open the
• 4:56
  header and make experience. And I would say I'm more of a
• 4:59
  social and cultural historian who's I'm particularly
• 5:02
  interested in like the narratives around things like
• 5:06
  the gender and history from below.
• 5:09
  So like not looking at the great team officers like Simon Ricu
• 5:13
  who are credited with shaping the practice, but trying to look
• 5:16
  at more complicated stories and look at a broader perspective on
• 5:21
  time of your history. You, you gave a really
• 5:24
  interesting line in a previous podcast interview that you did.
• 5:28
  And I think you said something along the lines of like, I'm
• 5:30
  sick of hearing about Riku. It's like pretty interesting
• 5:34
  because like it's sort of a great man theory of history.
• 5:37
  When you learn anything about Japanese tea, right?
• 5:40
  You learn about ASI, you learn about Riku, and that's kind of
• 5:45
  it. And it's like a simple history,
• 5:47
  yeah. And I, I mean, I'm probably
• 5:49
  being a bit provocative or, you know, deliberately sarcastic
• 5:53
  when I say something like I, I'm sick of hearing about the Q.
• 5:56
  But there's, there's a lot of truths to that as well.
• 5:58
  Because I think he just hit the nail on the head.
• 6:01
  Like the number of publications that we read either in English
• 6:05
  or Japanese that just give us the same version of history.
• 6:09
  And it's there was there were these couple of guys who brought
• 6:12
  TCS over from China and actually who read Wayne Farris's recent
• 6:17
  book. That's a bowl for a coin, a
• 6:19
  commodity history, a Japanese green tea.
• 6:22
  He actually, you know, makes this question, this narrative
• 6:26
  anyway, about the draft involvement of ASI and how much
• 6:29
  we can credit to to these historic is that let's start the
• 6:33
  narrative and then, yeah, we get the you know, we're at the ship
• 6:36
  or, you know, they will send the VQ and then that's kind of it.
• 6:41
  Or that's, you know, then there's a few important people
• 6:43
  out there and that's where we are today.
• 6:45
  And there's hundreds of years of history in between all of that.
• 6:50
  And I think in other fields of history, whether I'm talking
• 6:55
  Japanese history or more broadly globally, that great man
• 7:00
  narrative, like people really interrogate that and say, since,
• 7:04
  you know, we can't just credit everything to a couple of great
• 7:07
  men. But we don't do that so much in
• 7:09
  China. Youth history, I think more
• 7:11
  recent scholarships certainly does.
• 7:13
  And so I I prefer to describe Riku myself, not so much as the
• 7:18
  founder of Tamiyu, but as the most articulate and well known
• 7:23
  tea master of his day. And I think we have to remember
• 7:27
  the fact that his ancestors and particularly the same schools of
• 7:31
  tea have become so dominant. And so they're really shaping
• 7:34
  the narrative. And so and that that starts like
• 7:38
  100 years after his death with the number of Raku and the
• 7:42
  sources being created, that attribute are attributed to
• 7:47
  Biku. And it's Rick, you said this,
• 7:49
  Rick, you did that. But this is already being
• 7:51
  written 100 years after his death.
• 7:53
  So they're seeing this constant process of shaping this
• 7:56
  narrative that obscures what what else was going on both
• 8:02
  before, like during and immediately after his lifetime.
• 8:06
  And if I can just give a little plug to a project I'd recently
• 8:09
  done with a whole group of colleagues who are also scholars
• 8:13
  of TANU as well as teachers. We created a resource called
• 8:17
  Teaching Tea, and it's on a website called Japan Past and
• 8:21
  Present. And we're trying to make in
• 8:23
  English the most recent scholarship more accessible when
• 8:27
  available to people. Our particular aim is for use in
• 8:30
  undergraduate classrooms at universities to our perfection.
• 8:34
  But there's a great essay by Morgan.
• 8:36
  It's Help Out, who's a wonderful scholar of the 16th century, and
• 8:39
  it's about tea Diaries in the 16th century.
• 8:42
  And he makes this point of just trying to complicate the picture
• 8:46
  and people's understanding of like where Ricky fits into that
• 8:50
  actual time period. I'm looking at the broader
• 8:53
  landscape of what was going on in his life.
• 8:56
  Interesting. Very interesting.
• 8:59
  I guess with descent schools, because they kind of are the
• 9:02
  winners within modern day in terms of dominating the
• 9:05
  narrative. I mean, that's how they
• 9:06
  legitimate their authority is their link back all the way to
• 9:10
  Senoriku. So these are you, I don't know,
• 9:12
  it's it's easy to follow the path of incentives, yes.
• 9:15
  Yes, I think so. And I think we have to remember
• 9:18
  that they, a lot of the sources in terms of primary sources that
• 9:22
  we use as historian, a lot of those belong to the T schools
• 9:26
  and they are deciding when to, to release them and who to
• 9:30
  release them to. So that's another way that they
• 9:32
  can control the narrative. And you know, I have to be
• 9:36
  careful with this. I start on both sides.
• 9:38
  I am both an RSNPT practitioner and I'm a scholar historian of
• 9:43
  Tony. And so as a student in RSNK,
• 9:47
  like within any Japanese cultural practice, you, you're
• 9:51
  sort of taught not to question you.
• 9:54
  Your teacher tells you something, the hierarchy tells
• 9:57
  you something. And that's what you do, and you
• 10:00
  don't push back and you don't ask why.
• 10:02
  But as a scholar, it's the complete opposite of your chart.
• 10:05
  And I'm supposed to question everything.
• 10:07
  So yeah, it's been tricky for me at times.
• 10:09
  But I certainly found with my early research on women's
• 10:12
  participation and very period, there was this clean narrative.
• 10:16
  And in fact, fortunately, it started to change a bit.
• 10:19
  Most sources in both Japanese and English, the scholarship was
• 10:22
  saying women were forbidden from practicing prior to the Meiji
• 10:25
  period and prior to Genghans I opening up the balls of tea
• 10:29
  practice to women. So this is particularly
• 10:31
  privileged in the role of an RSNK EM or the the head of the
• 10:36
  RSNK school of T in the Meiji period.
• 10:39
  This is giving him that role. He opens the doors of tea to
• 10:43
  women. So he's like, they're saying,
• 10:45
  you know the hero, right? And that's only possible very.
• 10:49
  Specific word too. Yeah, that's.
• 10:51
  And they all of those, all of those sources that they
• 10:54
  forbidden, refer to this one particular tea master from the
• 10:58
  Edo period. And it's like, OK, well, even if
• 11:01
  he said that women were forbidden from practicing,
• 11:04
  there's a wealth of other sources and writings by tea
• 11:08
  masters. They were saying the opposite.
• 11:10
  That was kind of an important point for me to get across.
• 11:13
  And I guess I had an awakening myself of like, RSNK is for
• 11:18
  living one narrative of history. And my job as a spy is to
• 11:22
  question that and look more broadly.
• 11:25
  And and I think that that's my problem with a lot of material
• 11:28
  available in English is that people aren't clear whether
• 11:31
  they're presenting an RSNK, a fiction narrative of Tania
• 11:35
  history or whether they're looking more broadly.
• 11:39
  I'd say 90% of the cases people are preventing and grass and key
• 11:42
  version of turning history without actually acknowledging
• 11:45
  that that's what they're doing. It's.
• 11:46
  Almost like the right version of the history that they want
• 11:50
  everyone to be agreed upon, yeah.
• 11:52
  It's like a controlled narrative A.
• 11:54
  Controlled I think. It makes sense for the Orson
• 11:56
  case to have their own version of history that they're putting
• 11:59
  out there. I just think there needs to be
• 12:01
  more clarity around that of like, this is the history of our
• 12:04
  school versus this is the entire history of turning you as a
• 12:08
  cultural practice, which because it obfuscates so much.
• 12:11
  And when you look at the landscape of the Edo period in
• 12:15
  the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, 10 schools were not the dominant
• 12:19
  schools. There were many other schools of
• 12:21
  TEA that were more proactive. So it's a very different
• 12:27
  landscape to what we're in today.
• 12:29
  And I think that people don't always realize how much it's
• 12:32
  shifted across the last kind of like 150 years since the Meiji
• 12:38
  period when now it's it's really irritating and 1% day that
• 12:41
  dominate almost everything I. Guess from a research kind of
• 12:46
  perspective, like it's really hard to really reference all of
• 12:50
  these, you know, officially published history by by the
• 12:54
  schools and like how do you find other materials?
• 12:57
  Like what are other materials that people can reference or
• 13:01
  research on that can kind of a show a different narrative of
• 13:05
  the history and the culture? Yeah, I think that's a really
• 13:08
  important point. And actually a Morgan
• 13:10
  photographer I mentioned earlier, I was a great mentor
• 13:13
  for me in this. So his research on Rafael
• 13:16
  ceramics was what he found was that the similar to how or some
• 13:21
  capitals an average around China, you the Rafael household
• 13:25
  also has that similar kind of system.
• 13:27
  And what he found was that if he went outside of those core
• 13:32
  institutions of Rafael or some care on what they think they
• 13:35
  then they're sources that they historically.
• 13:39
  So we're talking 17th, 18th century sources that they didn't
• 13:43
  create and they therefore don't control.
• 13:46
  And that when you actually look at those, you find a much more
• 13:49
  complex, nuanced, interesting picture anyway.
• 13:53
  So it's actually kind of a win win process scholars.
• 13:57
  So in the end, I would say that what I found is in terms of my
• 14:02
  research, and that's in the book Cultivating Femininity have
• 14:06
  almost, I don't think I have any primary sources that are from
• 14:09
  the OSNK or Amorphis NK schools, chiefly because I I couldn't get
• 14:14
  access the number of times I had people tell me and kill both
• 14:19
  scholars and professionals within the Tanya world.
• 14:22
  When I say I'm researching women's involvement in Tanya
• 14:25
  Native period, you won't find anything.
• 14:28
  There's no story they can't write about that.
• 14:30
  This is what I was being called, but I was fighting commercial
• 14:34
  publications from the Edo period.
• 14:36
  So these were woodblock printed commercially available books
• 14:40
  that were being sold on a in a mass market scale.
• 14:43
  And I was finding those and modern reprints of those
• 14:48
  publications by publishing and they had nothing to do with when
• 14:52
  they weren't being marketed by the modern publishers as like
• 14:55
  sources for tunnel history. They weren't being marketed and
• 14:58
  sold so at the library as sources for women's history.
• 15:03
  And so I was finding materials in there and materials created
• 15:06
  by other schools of tea. So I focused in like one whole
• 15:10
  chapter on manuscript for women see Practice from the signature
• 15:15
  Sporty and then in a later chapter another version of that
• 15:20
  same manuscript by being outskirt, who's a well known
• 15:24
  figure in Japanese history and the safety shoe school of tea.
• 15:27
  We don't really care that much about that today, right?
• 15:31
  It's not significant in the current tiny line state, but it
• 15:35
  was actually very significant in the Edo period.
• 15:39
  So basically I just kind of have to look outside of the the
• 15:42
  official sound sources. If you like, I'd love to see
• 15:46
  like maybe there are materials that they control, but I was
• 15:50
  able to tell a story without using them, so.
• 15:54
  Almost like investigative journalism.
• 15:56
  Very. Yeah, I think that's what being
• 15:59
  a historian is like a lot of the time.
• 16:01
  And and you, you have to think very creatively at times about
• 16:06
  if you want to tell a story, how can you do it.
• 16:10
  But there's also people who've used the official RSNK, almost
• 16:17
  the same case and school related sources and done so in creative
• 16:22
  ways as well, doing the classic historical techniques of reading
• 16:27
  between the lines and or reading against the green and just
• 16:32
  focusing on sources actually from the 16th century rather
• 16:36
  than looking at like just 100 years later and further down the
• 16:42
  track versions of those sources. So I think it's, I think the
• 16:46
  scholarship on tiny industry has changed a lot in the last 20
• 16:49
  years and it's becoming more complicated and more nuanced.
• 16:53
  And we're actually getting a better understanding of history
• 16:58
  of the practice in a way that isn't just presenting like a
• 17:01
  single school authorized narrative, but that's not so
• 17:05
  widely available to people. And that's one of the things
• 17:09
  we're trying to do with the Teaching Key project is so we
• 17:13
  have a lot of like short essays that are 2000 words and are
• 17:17
  meant to be written in an easy to read, accessible way versus,
• 17:22
  you know, one of our academic books and articles, they're
• 17:25
  behind pay walls or they're very expensive and they're not
• 17:28
  written to be accessible. I've seen a few people on like T
• 17:33
  blogs say that they've read my book, but they say, look, it's
• 17:36
  interesting, but it's very academic.
• 17:39
  And I'm like, yeah, it is because it's a book and that's
• 17:42
  how I had to write it. But it's I think it's great that
• 17:45
  like people interested in Mata and people interested in China,
• 17:48
  you want to know more about the history.
• 17:50
  So I'd like to get as much information as I can out there
• 17:54
  to people so that they understand that there's more to
• 17:57
  it than just like Senor. VQ came up with this thing and
• 18:01
  we've been doing it the same way for 400 years since then.
• 18:06
  And actually, it's interesting, it feels like, you know, a lot
• 18:10
  of the new modern matcha brands when they try to connect their
• 18:13
  products and their matcha products, their their whisking
• 18:17
  bowls, their whisks, their implements, the things that they
• 18:20
  sell. They're like trying to bring
• 18:22
  legitimacy to their products and their brand in a very similar
• 18:27
  way, I think to how everyone is trying to bring legitimacy, like
• 18:32
  the people who were historically practicing tea.
• 18:35
  And they wanted to sort of do these practices of these quote,
• 18:39
  UN quote great men before them, or even good wives and wives,
• 18:43
  mothers and, you know, accumulating some form of
• 18:46
  cultural capital to, to bring like legitimacy to to themselves
• 18:51
  and to elevate themselves. It's interesting how like the
• 18:54
  history rhymes here. I mean, everyone's trying to
• 18:57
  control over these narratives. It's interesting to see.
• 19:01
  I think we actually see that with tea history even beyond
• 19:04
  charming you and I have to credit some of the students in
• 19:07
  my history seminar and teaching this semester that the it's a
• 19:12
  seminar on tea folder in pre modern East Asia.
• 19:14
  And so we've been talking a lot about this in class.
• 19:17
  And if you go back to early Chinese sources on tea and you
• 19:21
  look at something like new you, it's like there's the right way
• 19:26
  to have the water. That's the right way to do this.
• 19:29
  And one of my students was comparing it to like this coffee
• 19:32
  snobs today, right? And she was like, oh, wow,
• 19:35
  there's tea snobs too. And there's always been tea
• 19:37
  snobs. So I think there's something
• 19:40
  maybe just inheriting all of these, these practices around
• 19:44
  these beverages are just like I'm defining the right way to do
• 19:48
  things and I know what's correct and I'm doing it the way that
• 19:52
  this person did it before me. As, as the waiter.
• 19:55
  Yeah. Claim your legitimacy.
• 19:57
  Very. Top down.
• 19:59
  That's a good point around new you too, because you hear that
• 20:01
  all around Chinese tea circles too.
• 20:04
  But the only difference is like in at least in modern days,
• 20:08
  Chinese tea culture community, there's there isn't a
• 20:12
  institutionalized entity to define all these rules, but
• 20:16
  instead we have like 200,000 different tea gurus.
• 20:22
  Yes. Telling other people the right
• 20:24
  way. Yeah.
• 20:26
  It's the other extreme. Unclear which one's better, the
• 20:30
  top down or bottom up authority over this narrative?
• 20:34
  Both create a lot of complexities to navigate as
• 20:37
  someone who loves tea, If we really zoom out and like,
• 20:40
  especially for our listeners who might be less familiar with tea
• 20:43
  ceremony, how can we roughly define what Chano you is and how
• 20:48
  and why people have practiced it in Japan?
• 20:50
  Yeah. That's it should be, yeah.
• 20:56
  So First off, if we start with something really basic, telling
• 20:59
  you that really means hot water for tea, that's why we don't
• 21:03
  tend to translate it into English because that's not a
• 21:05
  very helpful translation. Tea ceremony has become the
• 21:08
  accepted translation. I have a lot of problems with
• 21:12
  that term. I think it's very misleading.
• 21:14
  And a lot of people who don't understand the practice, I mean,
• 21:19
  with these preconceptions and keep talking about, well, the
• 21:21
  ceremony and this and that. And I, I really feel that it's a
• 21:25
  practice and it's not a ceremony and it's not a ritual.
• 21:29
  That's my personal view. Other people can have their, but
• 21:33
  certainly when I'm engaged in China, you I don't think that
• 21:36
  I'm conducting a ceremony and I don't think that I'm conducting
• 21:41
  a brick goal. I think I'm involved in a
• 21:43
  practice. I'm practicing something.
• 21:45
  I would like us to get to the point where we can use Taniu in
• 21:48
  English just like we do ikebana, just like we do karate karaoke.
• 21:53
  I know that we don't pronounce those like Karolke karate.
• 21:57
  We have pronunciation, but we're just using the Japanese word and
• 22:02
  we're all like with that. And China is actually now in the
• 22:05
  Oxford English Dictionary. So that's.
• 22:08
  Yeah. I was told by a copy editor that
• 22:10
  I didn't need to italicize it anymore in the.
• 22:14
  That's progress. So that's progress, yeah.
• 22:17
  And then in terms of what it is, so I would say it's a, it's a,
• 22:22
  it's a complex set of practices that all involve the preparation
• 22:28
  and consumption of Mata. And some people see it as
• 22:32
  spiritual and religious practice.
• 22:35
  I would say that that is part of it.
• 22:37
  Obviously there's clear connection with them, Buddhism,
• 22:41
  but I don't think that the spiritual or religious practice
• 22:44
  in and of itself, by which I mean some people practice it in
• 22:47
  a religious or spiritual way that many people do not and both
• 22:52
  are possible. So you might compare it to yoga
• 22:54
  in that sense that can have like a spiritual, religious side, but
• 22:58
  doesn't have to have it. I guess what's important to
• 23:02
  note, like we've just been talking about is there's a lot
• 23:05
  of schools or lineages of practice within China you that
• 23:09
  have developed over the last 400 years and at its core,
• 23:14
  everything is the same. If you like, that's how it is
• 23:18
  described in one practice. But each of these lineages have
• 23:22
  their own ways of teaching and their own slight divergences in
• 23:28
  terms of practice. Exactly how you move within the
• 23:31
  tea room down towards my new detail.
• 23:34
  If do you enter with your right foot first or your left foot
• 23:36
  first and how do you handle certain utensils, etcetera.
• 23:40
  And that's common across all Japanese literary and cultural
• 23:43
  practices. Historically, you have different
• 23:46
  schools of poetry, for example, they might, you know, teach
• 23:50
  certain ways of composing poem. They they might have said, we
• 23:56
  takes in certain Chinese characters and we vocalize them
• 23:59
  this way. Another lineages vocalizing in a
• 24:02
  different way. You have all the different
• 24:04
  schools, karate teaching, etcetera.
• 24:07
  So this isn't unique to China You and I think we can see that
• 24:12
  the reason these lineages develop is basically you've got
• 24:15
  people who want to like we were talking about before, this is my
• 24:19
  way, this is the right way to do it.
• 24:21
  And it's, you know, for people who are teaching the practice,
• 24:25
  they're earning an income off of that.
• 24:27
  So you need to differentiate yourself from other people and
• 24:31
  have people come to you to learn to study because yours is the
• 24:35
  right way or the best way or you know, the way that's most
• 24:38
  closely connected to this historical team after saying no
• 24:41
  VQ or whatever it is. So the same families claim that
• 24:45
  through the blood connection historically, other schools
• 24:48
  claimed it by saying, well, we're the direct recipients of
• 24:52
  his teachings And that's how our founder, our founder was, you
• 24:56
  know, he's direct student, not the blood relationship.
• 24:59
  So you get all of these differences emerging, but it's
• 25:03
  called all of the schools are around these practices for
• 25:07
  preparing and consuming matcha and.
• 25:09
  In terms of like how knowledge is transferred when, when you
• 25:12
  become a student and you put yourself on a pass and, and you
• 25:15
  know, one of these schools, like, can you talk a little bit
• 25:18
  about like the oral tradition of teaching and part of this
• 25:23
  culture of, I guess not asking questions or being intellectual
• 25:27
  curiosity doesn't seem like it's very encouraged in this type of
• 25:30
  learning. Yeah.
• 25:32
  And I, I think that probably depends on the teacher that
• 25:35
  you're with as well. But I would say that the idea of
• 25:39
  not asking questions and learning by observation is very
• 25:45
  widespread in China. You and it's also widespread
• 25:48
  across all the Japanese practices, including the, you
• 25:52
  know, traditional arts or cultural practices, we might
• 25:55
  call them. So again, that's not unique to,
• 25:58
  and I would say you more broadly find it in Japanese society
• 26:01
  anyway than Western society. The you're told something and
• 26:05
  you. OK, so that's the way it is
• 26:07
  rather than immediately asking, but why?
• 26:10
  But why is that the case, which I think is the more like
• 26:13
  typically Western reaction thing.
• 26:15
  And so in general, you when you become a student of one of these
• 26:19
  schools, you enroll to study. And if we look like just to
• 26:23
  connect it to what I was saying earlier about my research, there
• 26:26
  are records of enrollment from the T schools even as far back
• 26:30
  as several 100 years ago. And so for me, that was one way
• 26:33
  I could look in terms of women's participation, like were women
• 26:38
  listed in these records of students who are being enrolled?
• 26:41
  But the issue there was I could not get access to those records
• 26:44
  of enrollment for the same schools.
• 26:47
  They don't release them to scholars like me, but I was able
• 26:50
  to find women's names in some records of enrollment from other
• 26:54
  cases. It's not person care and what
• 26:56
  they think it. And so even today, you register,
• 27:00
  you're enrolled with the school and then you progress through a
• 27:04
  licensing system. And these developed historically
• 27:07
  as well. It's a way again to kind of
• 27:10
  control access to knowledge and who's getting access to that
• 27:13
  knowledge and also a way of making money, right?
• 27:16
  Yeah, it's a way of making money.
• 27:17
  You pay as you progress and you and the licenses that you
• 27:21
  receive. It's always said that it's not
• 27:23
  to say you have mastered this. It's a license to say you can
• 27:27
  now go on to study the next processes because yes, it's
• 27:31
  supposed to be a path of continual learning.
• 27:34
  So if the early levels or the sort of junior levels, I suppose
• 27:39
  you do have published materials signed to be available from a
• 27:42
  few 100 years ago. And today we have like textbooks
• 27:45
  and things that laying out all of the procedures.
• 27:47
  But you get to a point of the secret teaching where everything
• 27:51
  is transmitted orally from teacher to student and nothing
• 27:55
  is written down. And that continues today to be a
• 28:00
  practice across all of the schools of T as far as I'm
• 28:03
  aware. And I think we can see it right
• 28:06
  pretty clearly as like a way of controlling knowledge and access
• 28:09
  to knowledge. It's also from a pedagogical
• 28:12
  perspective, it doesn't make sense because there is sort of
• 28:16
  controlled way of like progressing as a student
• 28:19
  practicing. And if you, I think the idea is
• 28:22
  if you give someone too many options all at once, or you show
• 28:26
  them too many things at once, it's just it becomes too
• 28:28
  complicated. And so you, you are building,
• 28:32
  you know, you start as a student of tea learning the basics that
• 28:36
  we call it Wadi Geko. So you're learning the
• 28:39
  individual steps like exactly how to hold the top, then
• 28:43
  exactly how to wipe the the nuts in it, the left the way tea's
• 28:47
  container for thin tea for much of it's going to be used to
• 28:50
  perfecting. And so you're building and you
• 28:54
  start with rate like easy basic team meeting procedures as you
• 28:58
  progress. And there's no set time frame
• 29:00
  people. There's some people who that's
• 29:03
  the happy to keep studying kind of a basic intermediate level
• 29:07
  and don't want to either pay the money or invest the energy and
• 29:12
  the time to go further into the secret teaching.
• 29:15
  And then there's other people who, you know, they're all in
• 29:19
  and they're like, you know, a couple of years into studying
• 29:22
  and I want to learn more and more.
• 29:23
  And it also depends on the teacher.
• 29:25
  Some teachers who progress people faster than other
• 29:28
  teachers. All of those commissions like
• 29:31
  come from the Central School headquarters.
• 29:33
  If you're talking about school like on what SNK or SNK that are
• 29:37
  that are very large and have 10s of thousands of registered
• 29:41
  students all over the world, it's no one at the headquarters
• 29:46
  is verifying. They're just relying on the
• 29:48
  teacher locally saying like this student is ready to provide some
• 29:52
  permission for them to go on to the next level.
• 29:55
  Both a very centralized and decentralized system get the
• 29:59
  same time. Yeah, that's true because yeah,
• 30:02
  it's it's like everything goes to the headquarters for
• 30:05
  permission. But like you said, it's kind of
• 30:06
  decentralized. They're relying on that feature
• 30:09
  a local level and I've certainly heard stories of teachers who
• 30:14
  are granting students through but not really actually teaching
• 30:19
  them the procedures that they're receiving licenses for.
• 30:23
  Like in any industry, you have people who are maybe a little
• 30:27
  shady or dodgy and they're the teachers make money as well.
• 30:32
  They they charge more for lessons that are at that higher
• 30:36
  level of secret teaching that they may receive gifts of money
• 30:40
  from their students when those licenses are handed out.
• 30:44
  And that it's called the EM auto system that we can think of as
• 30:48
  like a pyramid structure that developed a few 100 years ago as
• 30:53
  well. A scholarship around that is
• 30:55
  generally about creating this system of control.
• 30:59
  So I think that's the like more cynical view of it, but it's
• 31:03
  true. I also think we can think about
• 31:06
  it pedagogically like it does, having seen it in action a
• 31:10
  couple of decades now and progress through it myself and
• 31:12
  seeing other students. I think it does make sense to,
• 31:16
  you know, to some extent, like we met people have this kind of
• 31:19
  controlled structure around learning and you're building
• 31:23
  steps to your practice. This whole system and the idea
• 31:26
  of secret teaching, it's also not unique to Japan too, because
• 31:30
  when you kind of cross reference without a culture like you see
• 31:33
  kind of a similar system being done in like 10 Buddhism or
• 31:37
  Tibetan Buddhism. And I wonder if there's any
• 31:40
  linkage between Buddhism and and channel you this.
• 31:44
  Yeah. Motosis.
• 31:45
  Yeah. And I mean, historically there's
• 31:47
  a lot of links between and Buddhism.
• 31:50
  I'm not aware of myself of any like recognition in terms of
• 31:53
  like the secret agents. But I wouldn't be surprised.
• 31:57
  Like I think like you said, this isn't it's not specific to funny
• 32:00
  you and I think it's like a wider practice that exists most
• 32:04
  for pedagogical reasons and reasons of maintaining control,
• 32:08
  right. Right.
• 32:09
  So something that you've talked about in your book and is a big
• 32:12
  focus of it is the fact that there's sort of a glass ceiling
• 32:15
  that women practitioners cannot progress past.
• 32:18
  Is that a defined ceiling? And where?
• 32:21
  Where is that ceiling I? Don't think it's defined in the
• 32:25
  sense that I've never seen anything where any of the
• 32:28
  schools of we have said explicitly like a woman can
• 32:32
  never progress to this rank. But it is clear because a woman
• 32:38
  has never progressed to that rank that they are not able to
• 32:42
  do so, if that may sense. And so we think at the very top,
• 32:45
  you have the EM off to the head of the school, head of the
• 32:47
  household. And we haven't ever had a woman
• 32:51
  as an EM of doing any of the schools of T.
• 32:53
  And it's that position is passed down patrilinearly.
• 32:59
  And when there is not a man, when there's not been a male
• 33:02
  heir available to inherit, a man has been adopted from one of the
• 33:07
  branch families. So historically, if you look at
• 33:09
  the three stands full of tea, they have done that.
• 33:13
  So you've had Boris NK BMO those who have been adopted in from
• 33:18
  the on what they sent a family and then they become are trained
• 33:25
  and become the Rosenka heir. And that's again, it's not this
• 33:30
  isn't specific to telling you either.
• 33:33
  We see across Japanese culture more broadly and historically,
• 33:37
  this practice of like adopting sons into the household heads,
• 33:40
  etcetera and take over the family businesses or adopting by
• 33:44
  a marriage. So bearing in as the son-in-law,
• 33:48
  he then becomes the next head of the household, the family they
• 33:52
  need whatever it is. And even below the emoto you
• 33:56
  have this next level of teachers that are called guilty.
• 34:00
  At that guilty level of teachers, there's some
• 34:04
  interesting translations that happen into English.
• 34:06
  You also then have below that these ranks that are translated
• 34:10
  into English with like professor and associate professor and
• 34:13
  assistant professor A-Team. So women can hold those ranks,
• 34:18
  but we've never seen in the I actually am not 100% sure on the
• 34:22
  smallest schools of TI mean. Some of those schools are so
• 34:25
  small that you have an EMO who has like 50 students, so they
• 34:29
  don't have a bunch of ranks beneath them.
• 34:31
  But in the large schools like Ross and get amorphous and get
• 34:33
  it, you have all of these ranks of teachers below and then at
• 34:37
  the dual pay sense a ranks. So that's the teaching level
• 34:41
  immediately. But borrow the EMO.
• 34:44
  Those positions are also never being held by women supposedly
• 34:49
  or us in care believe was one woman during the World War Two
• 34:52
  career who attained that rank because of the shortage of men
• 34:56
  because they were in World Cup war.
• 34:57
  But it's I actually don't know the details of that and it's
• 35:00
  never happened since then. And it's pretty widely known and
• 35:04
  discussed. Like women who are very
• 35:06
  experienced in senior, you know, people will sometimes say, like
• 35:10
  if she was a man, she would be at your patient day at this
• 35:13
  point, but she's a woman, so she won't be.
• 35:15
  And then often, not always, but a lot of the most guilty
• 35:19
  sensitive positions. It's also like men who are like
• 35:23
  born into a certain family that has the connections to amorphous
• 35:26
  and care or synthetic kind of will rise to that position if
• 35:30
  you like. So there's a lot of patriarchal
• 35:33
  patrilineal structures at play. And again, I think that's a
• 35:37
  reflection more broadly of Japanese cultural practices.
• 35:41
  And if we look at something like it's on the more conservative,
• 35:44
  traditional culture side of Japanese culture.
• 35:48
  So it's not a place where we should expect to see like,
• 35:50
  radical acts of feminism or, you know, gender equality.
• 35:56
  It's generally something that people just kind of accept and
• 35:59
  don't question or push back again.
• 36:01
  Do you see this situation being changed recently?
• 36:05
  Has there been any discussions about this kind of change within
• 36:09
  the Channel Yu community? Because we've heard there might
• 36:12
  be a woman Moto for Earth and gay, and now there's a female
• 36:16
  Prime Minister of Japan. Like, it seems like there's some
• 36:19
  progress. Yeah.
• 36:20
  Although I think a lot of people would say that she's not the new
• 36:24
  Prime Minister isn't exactly the great feminist.
• 36:29
  Yeah, she's she's a woman Prime Minister and she's very
• 36:31
  conservative and not a champion of women's are explaining means
• 36:37
  she's a promoter of the law, for example, that forbids married
• 36:41
  couples from having different surnames, which essentially
• 36:45
  means that women have to take the husband's surname.
• 36:47
  And she said things like that if a mother has a different surname
• 36:51
  from her children, she can't bond with them.
• 36:54
  We're talking about the woman Prime Minister.
• 36:56
  He's very conservative. So I don't know we're at the top
• 37:00
  levels like within that, you know, person cave in a sanctum
• 37:04
  or more the same thing, a symptom whether they are having
• 37:06
  these conversations and imagines maybe they are, but we are not
• 37:10
  aware of them. Certainly among like the
• 37:13
  traditional level of people that I'm connected with.
• 37:17
  We talk about it and say like, we would love to see a change,
• 37:21
  but I think we're all like relatively kind of, you know,
• 37:25
  shrugging our shoulders like we know it probably won't happen.
• 37:28
  Some people were talking about a few years ago within Rosenke
• 37:33
  that, you know, it seemed one of the daughters was progressing a
• 37:38
  little more and more seemed more chain and publicly involved in
• 37:43
  the family business than her brother.
• 37:45
  And people were like speculating and wondering, like, would
• 37:48
  something change and happen? But, you know, he, he's kind of,
• 37:52
  you know, stepped up if you left and then he's being designated
• 37:56
  as the heir apparent. And that put to death those
• 37:59
  sorts of speculations that I think it was also a bit of
• 38:01
  wishful thinking on a lot of people's paths that something
• 38:05
  changed like that would happen. I think the first thing that
• 38:08
  would happen would we would be that we would get a woman
• 38:12
  designated as a girl person, say, before we would ever get a
• 38:14
  woman designated as an Ian model.
• 38:17
  I also think that we're more likely to see a woman in a
• 38:21
  leadership position in one of the smaller schools of team.
• 38:24
  I'll speak for salmonized outsiders because we're we're
• 38:27
  both not in from the culture, but we're also not tea ceremony
• 38:30
  practitioners. How should we interpret like
• 38:33
  this institutionalized sexism and the way we, I don't know,
• 38:38
  mentally frame or position, you know, traditional tea ceremony,
• 38:42
  like because I feel like it, it gets it's, it's given sort of
• 38:45
  every benefit of the doubt and everyone hails it as this thing
• 38:49
  in macho that we must respect. But I don't think most people
• 38:52
  are aware that like these institutions are deeply sexist
• 38:56
  implicitly and explicitly. Is it fair that we're making
• 38:59
  this judgment? I guess I would say it's not
• 39:03
  specific to China you I would say this is a reflection of
• 39:07
  Japanese society and the institutionalized sexism that we
• 39:12
  see across Japanese society. And like I said before, when you
• 39:15
  look at something like it is on the traditional conservative
• 39:20
  side of culture. So it's not the place that we
• 39:23
  should be looking to see. Revolution, yeah.
• 39:27
  Revolution, yeah. And like we were just talking
• 39:30
  about the new Japanese Prime Minister.
• 39:32
  I think broadly, when we look at Japanese culture today, in 2025,
• 39:38
  over the last 50 years, if we want to go further, it is
• 39:43
  institutionalized sexism in and deeply embedded patrilineal and
• 39:48
  patriarchal structure for one, across Japanese culture and
• 39:53
  Japanese institutions. And so I think it would be
• 39:55
  unfair of us to criticize Tana, you specifically for this.
• 39:59
  I also don't think that that means that we should ignore it.
• 40:03
  And certainly as someone who is. A feminist and an historian of
• 40:07
  women at a time you practice now.
• 40:09
  Like, I'm very aware of this and I wrestle with it and it
• 40:12
  frustrates me. And when I have the opportunity
• 40:15
  in a small way to do something or say something, I do.
• 40:19
  And a lot of other practitioners I know do the same.
• 40:21
  And sometimes you unfortunately just have to boil inside this
• 40:25
  range and hold your tongue and just think to yourself, like,
• 40:28
  when you see something happening, you know, just think
• 40:32
  this isn't, it's not right. But like, what?
• 40:35
  You know, what? What can I do in this moment
• 40:38
  about it? Yeah.
• 40:39
  Doctor Corbett just a question out of my curiosity and not
• 40:44
  really related to Taniyu either. Speaking of like females roleed
• 40:48
  in Japanese society and culture. It's it's not like unheard of
• 40:55
  for, for, for Japan, for female leadership in Japanese society
• 40:59
  because we because they had like female emperors and a lot of
• 41:02
  female teas like like like in like in China, we only had one
• 41:08
  female emperor throughout the few 1000 years of.
• 41:12
  In. Japan, they had, they had a lot.
• 41:14
  So how, how do we interpreted that?
• 41:16
  How did they perceive as a female leader or, or is that
• 41:20
  like female miss being perceived at all when they are being seen
• 41:24
  as emperor or deity? Yeah.
• 41:26
  That's a really good question. I don't want to be like
• 41:29
  oversimplified, but the, the general narrative historian
• 41:33
  would describe is that over the long course of Japanese history,
• 41:38
  we see a greater shift towards more patriarchal structures to
• 41:44
  lineal structures for local as a marriage system and more what we
• 41:50
  would define in today's terms as institutionalized sexism and
• 41:54
  gender discrimination, etcetera. So the emperor's, I don't know
• 41:57
  the dates off the top of my head, but we're talking about
• 42:00
  empresses. We're we're going further back
• 42:03
  in Japanese history, right? And I don't remember off the top
• 42:06
  of my head, I'm sorry, the most recent Empress, but it's
• 42:09
  certainly hundreds of years ago. And so, and when we look at the
• 42:13
  pay on period to like 700 through to the 9 hundreds, we're
• 42:18
  seeing a lot of what we call natural local marriage and then
• 42:22
  marrying into women, a woman's family, things like this wedding
• 42:27
  more we're seeing women have the ability to hold and inherit land
• 42:32
  and land ownership. And a lot of that starts to
• 42:34
  shift. And when we get into the early
• 42:36
  modern or Edo periods as Olympic 1819 centuries, we're seeing
• 42:40
  more patriarchal with patrilineal structures have to
• 42:45
  local marriage becomes the norms of the woman marrying into the
• 42:48
  man's family. And then we actually see even
• 42:51
  more institutionalized patriarchal and sexist
• 42:56
  structures, if you like, developing in Japan with the
• 43:00
  influence of Westernization in the late 19th and early 20th
• 43:03
  century. I think that's something a lot
• 43:04
  of Western would like to ignore. But I think it's pretty clear
• 43:07
  when you look at Japanese history over the long period.
• 43:11
  But it is interesting, like with the current Imperial family,
• 43:15
  there's been these questions around the succession.
• 43:18
  They are and the current Imperial household law that is a
• 43:21
  modern product to bids an Empress.
• 43:25
  And every time people keep raising, you know, like, but
• 43:27
  there's been empresses historically.
• 43:29
  What's the problem here? Yeah, there's been the
• 43:32
  succession issues in the imperial family as well of like
• 43:35
  lots of girls being born and not enough boys being born.
• 43:38
  What are we going to do? And then there's suddenly a boy
• 43:40
  is born like a crisis about it. We don't need to advise that the
• 43:44
  law. So yeah, it's it's certainly an
• 43:46
  intriguing. 1st century question only in Japan.
• 43:49
  So this is actually more recent when you're comparing long
• 43:53
  history. Yeah.
• 43:54
  And I'm. Not trying to say that like
• 43:56
  Japan in the 700 or 1300 or some kind of like venomous paradise
• 44:01
  either, you know, ideas around like feminism and like gender
• 44:04
  equality in the sense that we understand it today, we
• 44:07
  shouldn't be looking for. But certainly women, especially
• 44:09
  if there's elite social levels of the imperial court, like you
• 44:13
  said, there were emphasis and women were owning property,
• 44:17
  inheriting property, holding that kind of power in ways that
• 44:21
  we don't see. And getting properly educated,
• 44:23
  too. Like the author of The Tales of
• 44:26
  Kenji, she's a female author. Yeah, yeah.
• 44:30
  We see high levels of literacy for women and education in that
• 44:35
  in that hand period. So when Teledy was written also
• 44:38
  in that editor period. So coming back to my research
• 44:41
  with women's participation in China, you in the 18th and 19th
• 44:46
  century, I was talking about those commercially available
• 44:49
  books that were being written and concluded segments on time
• 44:52
  you and encouraging women to study.
• 44:54
  They were able to be published and have an audience because
• 44:57
  women had very high rates of literacy.
• 45:00
  Interesting. Wow.
• 45:01
  Fascinating. Yeah.
• 45:02
  It's fascinating. I know we're running short on
• 45:05
  time. There's one topic I really
• 45:07
  wanted to discuss before this ended, and that's when we think
• 45:11
  of tea culture in Japan and Chennaiyu culture.
• 45:15
  There's very little emphasis on the actual production of the
• 45:20
  tea. I feel like it's outside of
• 45:23
  everyone's mental model and I kind of wanted to understand
• 45:26
  like historically why it was that case.
• 45:29
  And like, you know, our current understanding is that just
• 45:32
  farmers were so low in terms of social status and that's why we
• 45:37
  don't think of them as part of tea culture.
• 45:39
  But I would love to. I don't know how like have that
• 45:41
  validated or if you could add any color to to why it's really
• 45:45
  not the focus seems both historically and and even to
• 45:49
  this day it seems. Yeah, I'm not not sure that I
• 45:53
  can answer the question like in a way that is really more than
• 45:59
  speculating because that to be honest with you, it's not
• 46:02
  something I thought that much about until you've brought it
• 46:05
  up. Suddenly when I think about the
• 46:09
  primary sources that I'm familiar with, if we look at
• 46:13
  like tea Diaries or records of tea gatherings, there are really
• 46:17
  important primary source. But historians of telling you,
• 46:20
  when we look at those from the 16th century, 17th, 18th
• 46:24
  centuries, I don't recall ever seeing that many details about
• 46:28
  much of specifically the more details are about it's about who
• 46:33
  was president of the tea gatherings, the host, the guests
• 46:37
  and then the utensils use the objects.
• 46:41
  I'm also just thinking though, that like sometimes you look at
• 46:44
  things and you look for what you're looking for.
• 46:46
  So like I was looking at records of tea gatherings to find names
• 46:49
  and women. So that like was my focus when I
• 46:53
  looked at them. Other people are looking at
• 46:55
  records of tea gatherings to look for specific for the
• 46:58
  material culture. So maybe they're trying to find
• 47:01
  records where a specific child and ceramics tea container was
• 47:06
  being used or things like that. So it could be that it's there
• 47:10
  and I just haven't noticed, but I don't think so.
• 47:13
  Certainly those other texts that I was talking about like
• 47:16
  writings about funny for kind of a general audience of commoners,
• 47:21
  both men and women. I don't remember that matcha
• 47:25
  itself being described as as like a product.
• 47:28
  It might be that it's in different publications rather
• 47:32
  than the ones about time you. I feel like Tony is always the
• 47:35
  focus is more like a practice and I was on the aesthetics and
• 47:39
  on the etiquette and comportment side of things and less writings
• 47:44
  about the March itself. As I'm talking, I'm sort of
• 47:48
  wondering like, is that because it's taken for a given?
• 47:51
  Like sometimes you don't need to describe something if it's so
• 47:55
  like ubiquitous and obvious to the reader.
• 47:58
  But I would say like in terms of my current understanding of tea
• 48:02
  practice, I think it depends on the individual practitioner and
• 48:07
  the their teacher and the groups that they're part of.
• 48:10
  I think some people emphasize it more than others.
• 48:12
  Like in the group that I'm studying with in LA, you know,
• 48:16
  we're all pretty interested in like Matcha itself.
• 48:20
  And we try different brands and brands and we will tend to try,
• 48:25
  if it's a new one, we'll try it first in the museum.
• 48:28
  So like in the kitchen area and just like we stop balls for each
• 48:31
  other and like, OK, what do we think of this one?
• 48:33
  Is it one that we would try actually using the tea gathering
• 48:37
  or not? Because of course your, your
• 48:39
  whole focus is at the end of the day, like making a delicious
• 48:43
  bottle of PP of guests. So it is the quality of the much
• 48:46
  as important. And then what's always been part
• 48:48
  of tea practice is the discussions between the guests
• 48:53
  and the host. And just like today, where
• 48:55
  historically a guest will always ask the host about the matcha,
• 48:59
  you know, what blend have you used?
• 49:01
  Where is it from? So that's always been a part of
• 49:04
  the practice. So I don't know if I'm like
• 49:07
  fully answering the question. In your current practice and
• 49:11
  what you see across like the ersink a global community, like
• 49:14
  how do they form product distinctions and how do they
• 49:17
  evaluate like high quality from low quality?
• 49:21
  Like what are their anchors for drawing these distinctions and
• 49:26
  forming their own preferences? So I.
• 49:28
  Think first and foremost the biggest distinction is are you
• 49:31
  using the teeth quick dial just are you making it into thick tea
• 49:36
  or thick tea. And then and often we're relying
• 49:39
  on the brand itself to tell us that.
• 49:41
  So if you look at like Mabi Kukoyama and has a really big
• 49:45
  friend and they have their teas that are designated for Rosenke
• 49:48
  and or multi Zenke etcetera, and they have ones that are given
• 49:54
  the seal of approval by the EA Moto.
• 49:57
  Yeah, so I mean in yeah, so I mean Ross NK in any group that
• 50:01
  I've studied with, because I started in Japan, I studied in
• 50:04
  Australia and now now I've studied with the rest.
• 50:06
  We're always most of the time. Are you using that if you and
• 50:10
  different blends from them. And so we're they're telling us
• 50:14
  like this is designated for quite and then I'd say it's just
• 50:19
  taste, you know, do you like it? Do you think that your guests
• 50:22
  will like it some of that personal profits.
• 50:25
  I, I definitely think in the, the tea group that I'm in, in LA
• 50:28
  right now is the group where there's been the most discussion
• 50:32
  among the members and with our teacher about like trying
• 50:36
  different blends like I was saying, and do we like this?
• 50:39
  And what do we think about that wasn't sort of common in other
• 50:42
  groups that I've studied in. It was just like the teacher had
• 50:45
  it there and it's like, this is the matcha that we're using
• 50:49
  today. And then we would often use the
• 50:50
  same match on most of the time and there's no description
• 50:53
  around that. So maybe that's to do with our
• 50:56
  teacher. It's probably also to do with
• 50:57
  the fact that we have a few people in our current group who
• 51:01
  are like more interested in that kind of thing.
• 51:04
  And maybe also that it's easier now to get an access like
• 51:08
  different ones are much of them than it was even like 10-15
• 51:12
  years ago. You know, we can buy something
• 51:15
  now in the US that we couldn't buy 10 years ago.
• 51:21
  And then a lot of us in our group traveled back and forth to
• 51:24
  Japan pretty often, both the Japanese and non Japanese
• 51:28
  people. So then we might keep something
• 51:30
  up while we're there that we can bring back and things like that.
• 51:33
  Got. It makes sense.
• 51:35
  And I think the only thing I can say is that like a couple when
• 51:39
  I'm talking about taste, like I'm not, I don't know if I have
• 51:42
  like the full language and the words that people in the team
• 51:45
  just do would be using to describe things.
• 51:47
  But like when I'm tasting and you marked up one of the things
• 51:50
  I've noticed with some of the ones that tried here in that
• 51:53
  have been created in the US is I I drink it and I'm like, Oh, I
• 51:58
  don't I don't like this because either it doesn't really have a
• 52:01
  fling funnel or like it's just kind of bland and nothing or
• 52:05
  I've had one that almost tastes like dusty, like both the taste
• 52:09
  is dusty and the texture feels a bit dusty.
• 52:12
  And so that sounds like I drink it and other people in the group
• 52:16
  that often drinking at the same time that we try and we just
• 52:18
  like, Oh no, we would never. We're not going to use that.
• 52:21
  We wouldn't have that because we don't.
• 52:24
  It just doesn't taste nice to us.
• 52:26
  Or sometimes it tastes if it tastes too bitter.
• 52:29
  And now I might not want to use it.
• 52:31
  There's probably a whole like world of terminology that I
• 52:34
  don't know. So I don't know.
• 52:36
  That the people in the tea industry would use.
• 52:39
  We've heard of some matcha, some very high end matcha that's like
• 52:42
  honzu shaded Asahi cultivar, or some Ersenke, very traditional
• 52:47
  in Japan, like older Japanese ladies who are lifelong Ersenke
• 52:51
  practitioners trying it and saying that it's not real matcha
• 52:54
  because it's not bitter. Oh, OK, yeah.
• 52:58
  I mean, you wanted to be bitter, but you don't want it to be so
• 53:00
  bitter that your guests are like screwing up their face when they
• 53:04
  drink it. You know there's a.
• 53:07
  That's when. The Lakashi comes in.
• 53:10
  As a last question, I know you're working on some really
• 53:12
  interesting new research about how Westerners were exposed to
• 53:17
  matcha like 100 years ago and sort of the first exposures.
• 53:20
  And we'd love to learn more about that research.
• 53:22
  And I know you're turning it into a book as well.
• 53:24
  Yes. Well, I'm, I'm still deciding if
• 53:26
  it'll be a book and still kind of working on the materials and
• 53:31
  figuring out what I've got. But I do have some publications
• 53:34
  coming out in this research, so I started looking in 2019.
• 53:40
  I found some references to some elite foreigners from the
• 53:45
  diplomatic community, like ambassadors in Tokyo in the
• 53:49
  1880s and 1890s starting China you're holding together in.
• 53:54
  I was pretty much, I just thought, what?
• 53:57
  Wow, that's surprising. And so that intrigued me first.
• 54:00
  And I found the references in Japanese.
• 54:02
  There are Japanese newspaper articles that were published
• 54:04
  about it. And I was interested in that.
• 54:07
  And then I had been doing other research and was supposed to go
• 54:10
  to Japan in 2020 and I couldn't visit the pandemic.
• 54:13
  And I suppose pandemic autumn kind of kicked in.
• 54:18
  And I started reading a bunch of travel Diaries from Westerners
• 54:22
  who were travelling to Japan in the Meiji period from the 1870s,
• 54:26
  eighteen 80s. And a lot of them, you know,
• 54:30
  they're out of copyright, so they've been digitized and
• 54:32
  they're available online. So I was just able to read them
• 54:35
  that way. And I started noticing that like
• 54:38
  quite a few of them have references to attending a Tony
• 54:42
  tea gathering and or drinking matcha.
• 54:44
  And so I, I became kind of interested in that.
• 54:47
  And then I think over the course of the last five years with this
• 54:50
  matcha being increasing kind of like broader interest in this
• 54:54
  research when I've talked to people about it has also grown
• 54:57
  and people like, oh, that is actually interesting to hear
• 55:00
  about. What's another's first thought
• 55:02
  of March when they were encountering that.
• 55:04
  So I do have actually, it's probably something that some of
• 55:08
  your listeners would be interested in.
• 55:09
  I don't know if you're aware of it, at UC Davis, the University
• 55:12
  of California. Oh yeah, yeah, there's a global
• 55:15
  tea institute there, the DTI, which a lot and they so they
• 55:21
  bring together like academic research as well as industry
• 55:24
  research and it's really great. And Catherine Bennett, who is
• 55:28
  the founder and director of the GTA is fantastic scholar and
• 55:31
  fantastic person. And so they have launched a book
• 55:34
  series with Brill of the Press. And so the first book and the
• 55:38
  book series is Global T Studies and the first book is coming out
• 55:42
  next year. And it is a kind of broad
• 55:46
  ranging look at tea globally. And there's both scholars and
• 55:52
  industry people who've written for it.
• 55:54
  There's two chapters that are on China Yu and Mata and Japan
• 55:58
  focused on is by Ako Yoshino. He's from the Japan Tea
• 56:03
  Association and she's writing about China Yu at the world's
• 56:08
  fairs in North America. So looking at these like world's
• 56:12
  fairs, Expos that were held in the nature periods of late 19th
• 56:15
  and early 20th century and how China Yu was presented wanted to
• 56:18
  American audiences. And then in my chapter, I'm
• 56:22
  addressing this question of what did Westerners think of both ton
• 56:25
  of you as a practice and master as a beverage when they first
• 56:29
  encountered it in the major period, So late 19th, early 20th
• 56:32
  century. And I'm using these travel
• 56:35
  Diaries and newspaper articles as my sources.
• 56:40
  So there's also like Western American, Australian, British
• 56:43
  newspaper articles I've been finding that we're talking about
• 56:47
  like around the world and including matcha or just
• 56:50
  specifically talking about matcha and Japan.
• 56:52
  And so I think what was happening was like this was a
• 56:55
  new enough beverage for people that were encountering Japanese
• 56:58
  culture for the first time. Either the wealthiest tourists,
• 57:03
  like people who could actually travel to Japan and you had to
• 57:05
  be pretty wealthy in the 1880s, eighteen 90s early nights to
• 57:09
  travel to Japan. And then people who were
• 57:11
  encountering it world span expedition outside Japan.
• 57:15
  And then also just in like the newspaper articles, you know,
• 57:19
  from like The Wichita Eagle newspaper in Wichita, KS in
• 57:23
  1888. Those people, those readers
• 57:25
  probably weren't going to get actually, it's I much have it
• 57:28
  was it was something that was interesting for the newspaper to
• 57:32
  write about. And Robert Paglia has a great
• 57:36
  book called Green Big Milk and Sugar when Japan Filled
• 57:38
  America's Teacups. And that book looks at how loose
• 57:42
  leaf tea, particularly center ones, very popular in the US in
• 57:47
  the 1800s. I had no idea before I read that
• 57:51
  book, but they were putting milk and sugar in that.
• 57:53
  That's where the title comes from.
• 57:55
  And So what I found was a lot of these Western writers were
• 57:58
  actually contrasting much with the, at the time, more popular
• 58:02
  and widely known loosely, Daphne's Green Tea.
• 58:06
  And so they're sometimes saying things like we must preferred
• 58:10
  the ordinary infusion by which they mean send just I think
• 58:13
  that's because they're adding milk and sugar to it.
• 58:16
  Whereas the much of they were being served at world's fairs,
• 58:20
  outgoing Japan or the tourists who could go to Japan was much
• 58:24
  as we do it in China, you which in meat, it's stuff much water.
• 58:28
  And so yeah, they're overall, they're pretty critical.
• 58:31
  They're saying things like it's it's green rule.
• 58:34
  It's more bitter than cleaning. It's unpalatable, A lot of stuff
• 58:38
  like that. Yeah, I'm palatable.
• 58:41
  My mother would agree with him. Quite crazy she did and then,
• 58:48
  but I'm not opposite side. I've also found a lot sources
• 58:51
  that show that they were Westerners who were studying
• 58:54
  Tami pretty seriously in this time period.
• 58:57
  And they're not talking about the much job, but I have to
• 59:01
  assume that, like me, they liked it because otherwise why would
• 59:05
  they keep studying for how many years?
• 59:07
  Because and hosting key gatherings because you can't do
• 59:10
  that without drinking much. So I think it's the people who
• 59:13
  didn't like that. He was the ones who are like
• 59:15
  actually writing more about it because if they didn't like the
• 59:18
  taste of it. So yeah, that'll be out early
• 59:21
  next year. And then I have a few more
• 59:24
  publications in the works from that research.
• 59:28
  Then it's like other academic chapters and edited books and so
• 59:32
  on. And then I'm working with my
• 59:34
  friend and fellow or a same care practitioner and fellow scholar,
• 59:38
  Michelle Carriger, who's a professor at UCLA.
• 59:41
  We did the teaching, we LED that teaching tea project together
• 59:44
  that I talked about the online resources we're working on Co
• 59:48
  editing book and I have contributions from other
• 59:51
  scholars and that will be on China U and much globally beyond
• 59:55
  Japan that will have both historical and contemporary.
• 1:00:00
  Very cool. I would love to learn the story
• 1:00:02
  of how RSNK just came to dominate, like all the tea
• 1:00:06
  practices globally. It is incredibly impressive what
• 1:00:10
  they've built. You can go to Venezuela, you can
• 1:00:13
  go, can be in Paris, you can be anywhere and it feels like
• 1:00:17
  there's. A yeah, I've been, I've met,
• 1:00:21
  I've met with people in Sofia, Bulgaria, in Mexico City and
• 1:00:28
  yeah, all over the world. It really is like the global
• 1:00:31
  reach. And yeah, I think like we
• 1:00:33
  alluded to earlier, you know, that's that's the last 75 to 60
• 1:00:36
  years that that's happened. But because that's happened,
• 1:00:39
  you're essentially to become so dominant that it's kind of
• 1:00:42
  affected people understanding of history.
• 1:00:45
  Yeah. That makes sense because that's
• 1:00:47
  how they were exposed to it for the first time and, you know,
• 1:00:49
  whatever circumstance or country they found themselves in at some
• 1:00:52
  public demonstration or something.
• 1:00:54
  That's really interesting story. Well, I can't wait for that
• 1:00:56
  research. And we'll link everything in the
• 1:00:59
  show notes for people because I'm sure there's a lot of
• 1:01:01
  listeners that might be interested.
• 1:01:02
  Sure. And I'll definitely let you know
• 1:01:05
  when that book from the Global Tea Studies series is out
• 1:01:09
  because I think it is something that probably some of your
• 1:01:12
  listeners would be interested in.
• 1:01:14
  So I'll let you know early next year when that's out that.
• 1:01:17
  Would be awesome and we'll we'll help spread the word on that,
• 1:01:20
  yeah. Looking forward to reading that.
• 1:01:23
  Yeah, me too. We need more in English language
• 1:01:25
  tea, literature and research. Yeah, it's so nice we do.
• 1:01:29
  Yeah, Yes, we do. Yeah, well that's why they have
• 1:01:32
  yet the global Tea study. So hopefully we'll get some good
• 1:01:36
  books coming up in the next few years.
• 1:01:38
  Well, thank you so much for your time.
• 1:01:40
  We really appreciate you coming on.
• 1:01:43
  Really recommend everyone who's listening to pick up a copy of
• 1:01:46
  your book Cultivating femininity, Women in tea culture
• 1:01:49
  in Edo and Meiji Japan really was kind of a bombshell book it
• 1:01:54
  at least for me and like breaking down narratives that I
• 1:01:58
  had been told and kept hearing over and over, which has kind of
• 1:02:01
  led me to become a little more skeptical when acquiring new
• 1:02:04
  information that's. Great.
• 1:02:05
  That's what I would hope for. And I'll just find that the
• 1:02:09
  ebook is actually available for free.
• 1:02:12
  The publisher of the University of Hawaii Press made it Open
• 1:02:16
  Access at the time for publication till you can buy a
• 1:02:19
  print version in paperback and I think still in hardback.
• 1:02:23
  But they we wanted to make the e-book Open Access so that it's
• 1:02:27
  more readily available for people.
• 1:02:28
  So it's not a mistake if you see it for $0.00 on any of your
• 1:02:33
  preferred type of forms, including the giant A.
• 1:02:36
  Or you can get it directly for free download from the
• 1:02:39
  University of IE Press website. That's awesome.
• 1:02:43
  So thank you, dear listeners, and we'll see you on the next
• 1:02:46
  one. Thanks.
• 1:02:47
  See you in the future.