Kyoto Lectures

京都は、日本の主要な学問の中心地として、また世界中の研究者が集う場所として、古くから伝統文化を守ってきました。このシリーズでは、フランス国立極東学院(EFEO)・京都大学人文科学研究所の協力のもと、東アジアの文化・社会学の専門家が、ここ京都で研究成果を発表する機会を提供しています。
Tea Making and Drinking

Kyoto Lectures

Tea Making and Drinking

Socio-Economic Perspectives on late 19th and early 20th-century Japan.

Robert Hellyer

January 24th, 2018 18:00

École française d'Extrême-Orient

Around the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan developed a tea export industry, shipping large volumes of green tea to the United States, then a predominately green-tea consuming nation.  This presentation will use a socio-economic lens to outline the making of export tea, highlighting the perspectives of farmers, workers in refining factories, as well as the craftsmen who made the chests and the artists who created the labels adorning the tea packages shipped to the United States.  It will also consider how the export trade influenced tea drinking practices in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, creating trends that continue to shape Japanese tea consumption today.

Robert Hellyer (Ph.D. Stanford), a historian of early modern and modern Japan, is associate professor at Wake Forest University since 2005. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he is a Visiting Research Scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto. His previous research on Edo period foreign relations was presented in a monograph, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).  He has also published on the socio-economic integration of the Pacific Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is now completing an international history of Japan’s export of green tea to the United States from circa 1850 to 1950.