Interrogating Chanoyu Narratives with Dr. Rebecca Corbett

Ryan · 0:05

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan and this is Zongjun Li who also goes by Sam. Hello and we're the Co founders of Sanko. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, Matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And this episode we have Doctor Rebecca Corbett with us today to talk about her journey with tea and Japanese culture. Welcome.

Zongjun · 0:27

Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Ryan, and I'm Sam. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So before we start. Could you please? Maybe share a little bit more about your personal and professional background. Sure I can.

Rebecca · 0:39

You can probably tell from my accent. I grew up in Australia and I first encountered chanoyu as a high school student. I went on a one year exchange. I was living in Kuroishi city in Aomori Prefecture, which is the northern part of the mainland of Japan.

Rebecca · 0:57

And it was just a sort of coincidence in a way or random connection that my host family was at a circles in temple. So my first father was the head priest of the temple. So yeah, it was very interesting for me as an exchange to what you want is that generally speaking would be, you know, that kind of cultural connection.

Rebecca · 1:17

So I got a lot of that living at the temple. And then his older sister, like T Teacher, their mother had been as well. That was in what we're thinking school of tea. And so very early on in my year there, they asked, you know, would you like to go to a tea ceremony class? And it was with my older host sister. And I think they probably thought I was just going to go to one class, but something just clicked with me. Also, you know, as an exchange student, I was like, I'm here the one, you know, culture and improve my language skills. I've been studying Japanese at school in Australia for a few years by that point.

Rebecca · 1:55

And so I just went every week for the year. My host sister actually finished her lessons after a few months. And I was told that's well, because she's getting married. And that was kind of my first window as well into like, oh, like one of the reasons that young Japanese even do this in bridal training. And also the class that I was in, all of the other students were older Japanese women, mostly over 70. And so I didn't realise it at the time, but I was getting this very like have classic or stereotypical introduction to this world of chanoyu in Japan in the contemporary period that the young women doing it for bridal

Rebecca · 2:38

training, older women doing it as a hobby when their children have grown up and husbands have retired. And because it was the Russian case full of tea, I didn't realize that during the year that I was there. At the end of the year, my teacher said to me, you know, there are teachers overseas in this school of tea and we were able to look up and find that there was a branch in Sydney where I was going back to go to university.

Rebecca · 3:05

And so I was able to keep practicing. So that was 1999 to like 26 years ago now that I had started and then as a professionally, as a university student, I was majoring in East Asian studies and the Japanese language and history. And so I was really interested in just kind of combining all those things.

Rebecca · 3:31

And through my practice of chanoyu, you know, a lot of your, a lot of teachers encourage you to read more about history or they're telling me things about chanoyu history. And I was reading on my own, But I, I felt there was like a disconnect between that and my academic learning within the university. I was doing a lot of like gender history and women's history. And I kept asking questions and tea teachers are not getting very like elucidating responses.

Rebecca · 4:00

And so I was interested in looking so my, it just kind of felt like a natural profession for me to go into PhD research exploring the connections between gender and particularly women's role within chanoyu historically, because I didn't, I kept being told what women didn't practice prior to the Meiji period. And that was like, full stop.

Rebecca · 4:21

Like that's the end of the story. And that's what chanoyu teachers said. That's what the history said. And that just didn't make sense to me based on what I knew of of the Edo period from my other classes. And just like a basic cursory glance at some materials, I was finding examples where women were studying. So that that became the focus of my PhD research. And so now I'm, yeah, a few decades into professionally being the historian of Japan.

Rebecca · 4:51

And specifically my research focus is on some of you open the header and make experience. And I would say I'm more of a social and cultural historian who's I'm particularly interested in like the narratives around things like the gender and history from below.

Ryan · 5:09

So like not looking at the great tea figures like Sen no Rikyu who are credited with shaping the practice, but trying to look at more complicated stories and look at a broader perspective on chanoyu history. You, you gave a really interesting line in a previous podcast interview that you did.

Ryan · 5:28

And I think you said something along the lines of like, I'm sick of hearing about Rikyu. It's like pretty interesting because like it's sort of a great man theory of history. When you learn anything about Japanese tea, right?

Rebecca · 5:40

You learn about ASI, you learn about Rikyu, and that's kind of it. And it's like a simple history, yeah. And I, I mean, I'm probably being a bit provocative or, you know, deliberately sarcastic when I say something like I, I'm sick of hearing about Rikyu.

Rebecca · 5:56

But there's, there's a lot of truths to that as well. Because I think he just hit the nail on the head. Like the number of publications that we read either in English or Japanese that just give us the same version of history.

Rebecca · 6:09

And it's there was there were these couple of guys who brought tea seeds over from China and actually who read Wayne Farris's recent book. Tea in a Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Green Tea. He actually, you know, makes this question, this narrative anyway, about the direct involvement of ASI and how much we can credit to to these historic is that let's start the narrative and then, yeah, we get the you know, we're at the ship or, you know, they will send the Rikyu and then that's kind of it.

Rebecca · 6:41

Or that's, you know, then there's a few important people out there and that's where we are today. And there's hundreds of years of history in between all of that. And I think in other fields of history, whether I'm talking Japanese history or more broadly globally, that great man narrative, like people really interrogate that and say, since, you know, we can't just credit everything to a couple of great men. But we don't do that so much in chanoyu history, I think more recent scholarships certainly does.

Rebecca · 7:13

And so I I prefer to describe Riku myself, not so much as the founder of Tamiyu, but as the most articulate and well known tea master of his day. And I think we have to remember the fact that his ancestors and particularly the same schools of tea have become so dominant. And so they're really shaping the narrative. And so and that that starts like 100 years after his death with the number of Raku and the sources being created, that attribute are attributed to Biku. And it's Rick, you said this, Rick, you did that. But this is already being written 100 years after his death.

Rebecca · 7:53

So they're seeing this constant process of shaping this narrative that obscures what what else was going on both before, like during and immediately after his lifetime. And if I can just give a little plug to a project I'd recently done with a whole group of colleagues who are also scholars of TANU as well as teachers. We created a resource called Teaching Tea, and it's on a website called Japan Past and Present. And we're trying to make in English the most recent scholarship more accessible when available to people. Our particular aim is for use in undergraduate classrooms at universities to our perfection.

Rebecca · 8:34

But there's a great essay by Morgan. It's Help Out, who's a wonderful scholar of the 16th century, and it's about tea Diaries in the 16th century. And he makes this point of just trying to complicate the picture and people's understanding of like where Ricky fits into that actual time period. I'm looking at the broader landscape of what was going on in his life.

Ryan · 8:56

Interesting. Very interesting. I guess with descent schools, because they kind of are the winners within modern day in terms of dominating the narrative. I mean, that's how they legitimate their authority is their link back all the way to Senoriku. So these are you, I don't know, it's it's easy to follow the path of incentives, yes.

Rebecca · 9:15

Yes, I think so. And I think we have to remember that they, a lot of the sources in terms of primary sources that we use as historian, a lot of those belong to the T schools and they are deciding when to, to release them and who to release them to. So that's another way that they can control the narrative. And you know, I have to be careful with this. I start on both sides.

Rebecca · 9:38

I am both an RSNPT practitioner and I'm a scholar historian of Tony. And so as a student in RSNK, like within any Japanese cultural practice, you, you're sort of taught not to question you. Your teacher tells you something, the hierarchy tells you something. And that's what you do, and you don't push back and you don't ask why.

Rebecca · 10:02

But as a scholar, it's the complete opposite of your chart. And I'm supposed to question everything. So yeah, it's been tricky for me at times. But I certainly found with my early research on women's participation and very period, there was this clean narrative.

Rebecca · 10:16

And in fact, fortunately, it started to change a bit. Most sources in both Japanese and English, the scholarship was saying women were forbidden from practicing prior to the Meiji period and prior to Genghans I opening up the balls of tea practice to women. So this is particularly privileged in the role of an RSNK EM or the the head of the RSNK school of T in the Meiji period.

Rebecca · 10:39

This is giving him that role. He opens the doors of tea to women. So he's like, they're saying, you know the hero, right? And that's only possible very. Specific word too. Yeah, that's. And they all of those, all of those sources that they forbidden, refer to this one particular tea master from the Edo period. And it's like, OK, well, even if he said that women were forbidden from practicing, there's a wealth of other sources and writings by tea masters. They were saying the opposite.

Rebecca · 11:10

That was kind of an important point for me to get across. And I guess I had an awakening myself of like, RSNK is for living one narrative of history. And my job as a spy is to question that and look more broadly. And and I think that that's my problem with a lot of material available in English is that people aren't clear whether they're presenting an RSNK, a fiction narrative of Tania history or whether they're looking more broadly.

Rebecca · 11:39

I'd say 90% of the cases people are preventing and grass and key version of turning history without actually acknowledging that that's what they're doing. It's. Almost like the right version of the history that they want everyone to be agreed upon, yeah.

Rebecca · 11:52

It's like a controlled narrative A. Controlled I think. It makes sense for the Orson case to have their own version of history that they're putting out there. I just think there needs to be more clarity around that of like, this is the history of our school versus this is the entire history of turning you as a cultural practice, which because it obfuscates so much.

Rebecca · 12:11

And when you look at the landscape of the Edo period in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, 10 schools were not the dominant schools. There were many other schools of TEA that were more proactive. So it's a very different landscape to what we're in today.

Rebecca · 12:29

And I think that people don't always realize how much it's shifted across the last kind of like 150 years since the Meiji period when now it's it's really irritating and 1% day that dominate almost everything I. Guess from a research kind of perspective, like it's really hard to really reference all of these, you know, officially published history by by the schools and like how do you find other materials?

Rebecca · 12:57

Like what are other materials that people can reference or research on that can kind of a show a different narrative of the history and the culture? Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And actually a Morgan photographer I mentioned earlier, I was a great mentor for me in this. So his research on Rafael ceramics was what he found was that the similar to how or some capitals an average around China, you the Rafael household also has that similar kind of system.

Rebecca · 13:27

And what he found was that if he went outside of those core institutions of Rafael or some care on what they think they then they're sources that they historically. So we're talking 17th, 18th century sources that they didn't create and they therefore don't control.

Rebecca · 13:46

And that when you actually look at those, you find a much more complex, nuanced, interesting picture anyway. So it's actually kind of a win win process scholars. So in the end, I would say that what I found is in terms of my research, and that's in the book Cultivating Femininity have almost, I don't think I have any primary sources that are from the OSNK or Amorphis NK schools, chiefly because I I couldn't get access the number of times I had people tell me and kill both scholars and professionals within the Tanya world.

Rebecca · 14:22

When I say I'm researching women's involvement in Tanya Native period, you won't find anything. There's no story they can't write about that. This is what I was being called, but I was fighting commercial publications from the Edo period.

Rebecca · 14:36

So these were woodblock printed commercially available books that were being sold on a in a mass market scale. And I was finding those and modern reprints of those publications by publishing and they had nothing to do with when they weren't being marketed by the modern publishers as like sources for chanoyu history. They weren't being marketed and sold so at the library as sources for women's history.

Rebecca · 15:03

And so I was finding materials in there and materials created by other schools of tea. So I focused in like one whole chapter on manuscript for women see Practice from the signature Sporty and then in a later chapter another version of that same manuscript by being outskirt, who's a well known figure in Japanese history and the Sekishu school of tea.

Rebecca · 15:27

We don't really care that much about that today, right? It's not significant in the current tea lineage state, but it was actually very significant in the Edo period. So basically I just kind of have to look outside of the the official school sources. If you like, I'd love to see like maybe there are materials that they control, but I was able to tell a story without using them, so.

Rebecca · 15:54

Almost like investigative journalism. Very. Yeah, I think that's what being a historian is like a lot of the time. And and you, you have to think very creatively at times about if you want to tell a story, how can you do it.

Rebecca · 16:10

But there's also people who've used the official RSNK, almost the same case and school related sources and done so in creative ways as well, doing the classic historical techniques of reading between the lines and or reading against the grain and just focusing on sources actually from the 16th century rather than looking at like just 100 years later and further down the track versions of those sources. So I think it's, I think the scholarship on tea industry has changed a lot in the last 20 years and it's becoming more complicated and more nuanced.

Rebecca · 16:53

And we're actually getting a better understanding of history of the practice in a way that isn't just presenting like a single school authorized narrative, but that's not so widely available to people. And that's one of the things we're trying to do with the Teaching Key project is so we have a lot of like short essays that are 2000 words and are meant to be written in an easy to read, accessible way versus, you know, one of our academic books and articles, they're behind pay walls or they're very expensive and they're not written to be accessible. I've seen a few people on like tea blogs say that they've read my book, but they say, look, it's

Rebecca · 17:36

interesting, but it's very academic. And I'm like, yeah, it is because it's a book and that's how I had to write it. But it's I think it's great that like people interested in matcha and people interested in chanoyu, you want to know more about the history.

Rebecca · 17:50

So I'd like to get as much information as I can out there to people so that they understand that there's more to it than just like Sen no Rikyu came up with this thing and we've been doing it the same way for 400 years since then.

Zongjun · 18:06

And actually, it's interesting, it feels like, you know, a lot of the new modern matcha brands when they try to connect their products and their matcha products, their their whisking bowls, their whisks, their implements, the things that they sell. They're like trying to bring legitimacy to their products and their brand in a very similar way, I think to how everyone is trying to bring legitimacy, like the people who were historically practicing tea.

Zongjun · 18:35

And they wanted to sort of do these practices of these quote, UN quote great men before them, or even good wives and mothers, and, you know, accumulating some form of cultural capital to, to bring like legitimacy to to themselves and to elevate themselves. It's interesting how like the history rhymes here. I mean, everyone's trying to control over these narratives. It's interesting to see.

Rebecca · 19:01

I think we actually see that with tea history even beyond chanoyu and I have to credit some of the students in my history seminar and teaching this semester that the it's a seminar on tea folder in pre modern East Asia.

Rebecca · 19:14

And so we've been talking a lot about this in class. And if you go back to early Chinese sources on tea and you look at something like Lu Yu, it's like there's the right way to have the water. That's the right way to do this.

Rebecca · 19:29

And one of my students was comparing it to like this coffee snobs today, right? And she was like, oh, wow, there's tea snobs too. And there's always been tea snobs. So I think there's something maybe just inheriting all of these, these practices around these beverages are just like I'm defining the right way to do things and I know what's correct and I'm doing it the way that this person did it before me. As, as the waiter.

Zongjun · 19:55

Yeah. Claim your legitimacy. Very. Top down. That's a good point around Lu Yu too, because you hear that all around Chinese tea circles too. But the only difference is like in at least in modern days, Chinese tea culture community, there's there isn't a institutionalized entity to define all these rules, but instead we have like 200,000 different tea gurus.

Zongjun · 20:22

Yes. Telling other people the right way. Yeah. It's the other extreme. Unclear which one's better, the top down or bottom up authority over this narrative? Both create a lot of complexities to navigate as someone who loves tea, If we really zoom out and like, especially for our listeners who might be less familiar with tea ceremony, how can we roughly define what chanoyu is and how and why people have practiced it in Japan?

Rebecca · 20:50

Yeah. That's it should be, yeah. So First off, if we start with something really basic, chanoyu really means hot water for tea, that's why we don't tend to translate it into English because that's not a very helpful translation. Tea ceremony has become the accepted translation. I have a lot of problems with that term. I think it's very misleading.

Rebecca · 21:14

And a lot of people who don't understand the practice, I mean, with these preconceptions and keep talking about, well, the ceremony and this and that. And I, I really feel that it's a practice and it's not a ceremony and it's not a ritual.

Rebecca · 21:29

That's my personal view. Other people can have their, but certainly when I'm engaged in chanoyu I don't think that I'm conducting a ceremony and I don't think that I'm conducting a brick goal. I think I'm involved in a practice. I'm practicing something.

Rebecca · 21:45

I would like us to get to the point where we can use Chanoyu in English just like we do ikebana, just like we do karate karaoke. I know that we don't pronounce those like Japanese do - karaoke, karate. We have pronunciation, but we're just using the Japanese word and we're all like with that. And Chanoyu is actually now in the Oxford English Dictionary. So that's.

Rebecca · 22:08

Yeah. I was told by a copy editor that I didn't need to italicize it anymore in the. That's progress. So that's progress, yeah. And then in terms of what it is, so I would say it's a, it's a, it's a complex set of practices that all involve the preparation and consumption of matcha. And some people see it as spiritual and religious practice.

Rebecca · 22:35

I would say that that is part of it. Obviously there's clear connection with Zen Buddhism, but I don't think that the spiritual or religious practice in and of itself, by which I mean some people practice it in a religious or spiritual way that many people do not and both are possible. So you might compare it to yoga in that sense that can have like a spiritual, religious side, but doesn't have to have it. I guess what's important to note, like we've just been talking about is there's a lot of schools or lineages of practice within Chanoyu that have developed over the last 400 years and at its core,

Rebecca · 23:14

everything is the same. If you like, that's how it is described in one practice. But each of these lineages have their own ways of teaching and their own slight divergences in terms of practice. Exactly how you move within the tea room down towards my new detail.

Rebecca · 23:34

If do you enter with your right foot first or your left foot first and how do you handle certain utensils, etcetera. And that's common across all Japanese literary and cultural practices. Historically, you have different schools of poetry, for example, they might, you know, teach certain ways of composing poem. They they might have said, we takes in certain Chinese characters and we vocalize them this way. Another lineages vocalizing in a different way. You have all the different schools, karate teaching, etcetera.

Rebecca · 24:07

So this isn't unique to Chanoyu and I think we can see that the reason these lineages develop is basically you've got people who want to like we were talking about before, this is my way, this is the right way to do it.

Rebecca · 24:21

And it's, you know, for people who are teaching the practice, they're earning an income off of that. So you need to differentiate yourself from other people and have people come to you to learn to study because yours is the right way or the best way or you know, the way that's most closely connected to this historical tea master Sen no Rikyu or whatever it is. So the Sen families claim that through the blood connection historically, other schools claimed it by saying, well, we're the direct recipients of his teachings And that's how our founder, our founder was, you know, he's direct student, not the blood relationship.

Zongjun · 24:59

So you get all of these differences emerging, but it's called all of the schools are around these practices for preparing and consuming matcha and. In terms of like how knowledge is transferred when, when you become a student and you put yourself on a pass and, and you know, one of these schools, like, can you talk a little bit about like the oral tradition of teaching and part of this culture of, I guess not asking questions or being intellectual curiosity doesn't seem like it's very encouraged in this type of learning. Yeah.

Rebecca · 25:32

And I, I think that probably depends on the teacher that you're with as well. But I would say that the idea of not asking questions and learning by observation is very widespread in Chanoyu. And it's also widespread across all the Japanese practices, including the, you know, traditional arts or cultural practices, we might call them. So again, that's not unique to, and I would say you more broadly find it in Japanese society anyway than Western society. The you're told something and you. OK, so that's the way it is rather than immediately asking, but why?

Rebecca · 26:10

But why is that the case, which I think is the more like typically Western reaction thing. And so in general, you when you become a student of one of these schools, you enroll to study. And if we look like just to connect it to what I was saying earlier about my research, there are records of enrollment from the tea schools even as far back as several 100 years ago. And so for me, that was one way I could look in terms of women's participation, like were women listed in these records of students who are being enrolled?

Rebecca · 26:41

But the issue there was I could not get access to those records of enrollment for the Sen schools. They don't release them to scholars like me, but I was able to find women's names in some records of enrollment from other cases. It's not person care and what they think it. And so even today, you register, you're enrolled with the school and then you progress through a licensing system. And these developed historically as well. It's a way again to kind of control access to knowledge and who's getting access to that knowledge and also a way of making money, right?

Rebecca · 27:16

Yeah, it's a way of making money. You pay as you progress and you and the licenses that you receive. It's always said that it's not to say you have mastered this. It's a license to say you can now go on to study the next processes because yes, it's supposed to be a path of continual learning.

Rebecca · 27:34

So if the early levels or the sort of junior levels, I suppose you do have published materials signed to be available from a few 100 years ago. And today we have like textbooks and things that laying out all of the procedures.

Rebecca · 27:47

But you get to a point of the secret teaching where everything is transmitted orally from teacher to student and nothing is written down. And that continues today to be a practice across all of the schools of tea as far as I'm aware. And I think we can see it right pretty clearly as like a way of controlling knowledge and access to knowledge. It's also from a pedagogical perspective, it doesn't make sense because there is sort of controlled way of like progressing as a student practicing. And if you, I think the idea is if you give someone too many options all at once, or you show them too many things at once, it's just it becomes too

Rebecca · 28:28

complicated. And so you, you are building, you know, you start as a student of tea learning the basics that we call it Wadi Geko. So you're learning the individual steps like exactly how to hold the top, then exactly how to wipe the the nuts in it, the left the way tea's container for thin tea for much of it's going to be used to perfecting. And so you're building and you start with rate like easy basic team meeting procedures as you progress. And there's no set time frame people. There's some people who that's the happy to keep studying kind of a basic intermediate level and don't want to either pay the money or invest the energy and

Rebecca · 29:12

the time to go further into the secret teaching. And then there's other people who, you know, they're all in and they're like, you know, a couple of years into studying and I want to learn more and more. And it also depends on the teacher.

Rebecca · 29:25

Some teachers who progress people faster than other teachers. All of those commissions like come from the Central School headquarters. If you're talking about school like on what Omotesenke or Urasenke that are that are very large and have 10s of thousands of registered students all over the world, it's no one at the headquarters is verifying. They're just relying on the teacher locally saying like this student is ready to provide some permission for them to go on to the next level.

Rebecca · 29:55

Both a very centralized and decentralized system get the same time. Yeah, that's true because yeah, it's it's like everything goes to the headquarters for permission. But like you said, it's kind of decentralized. They're relying on that feature a local level and I've certainly heard stories of teachers who are granting students through but not really actually teaching them the procedures that they're receiving licenses for.

Rebecca · 30:23

Like in any industry, you have people who are maybe a little shady or dodgy and they're the teachers make money as well. They they charge more for lessons that are at that higher level of secret teaching that they may receive gifts of money from their students when those licenses are handed out.

Rebecca · 30:44

And that it's called the iemoto system that we can think of as like a pyramid structure that developed a few 100 years ago as well. A scholarship around that is generally about creating this system of control. So I think that's the like more cynical view of it, but it's true. I also think we can think about it pedagogically like it does, having seen it in action a couple of decades now and progress through it myself and seeing other students. I think it does make sense to, you know, to some extent, like we met people have this kind of controlled structure around learning and you're building steps to your practice. This whole system and the idea

Rebecca · 31:26

of secret teaching, it's also not unique to Japan too, because when you kind of cross reference without a culture like you see kind of a similar system being done in like 10 Buddhism or Tibetan Buddhism. And I wonder if there's any linkage between Buddhism and and chanoyu this.

Rebecca · 31:44

Yeah. Motosis. Yeah. And I mean, historically there's a lot of links between and Buddhism. I'm not aware of myself of any like recognition in terms of like the secret agents. But I wouldn't be surprised. Like I think like you said, this isn't it's not specific to chanoyu and I think it's like a wider practice that exists most for pedagogical reasons and reasons of maintaining control, right. Right.

Zongjun · 32:09

So something that you've talked about in your book and is a big focus of it is the fact that there's sort of a glass ceiling that women practitioners cannot progress past. Is that a defined ceiling? And where? Where is that ceiling I? Don't think it's defined in the sense that I've never seen anything where any of the schools of we have said explicitly like a woman can never progress to this rank. But it is clear because a woman has never progressed to that rank that they are not able to do so, if that may sense. And so we think at the very top, you have the iemoto, the head of the school, head of the

Rebecca · 32:47

household. And we haven't ever had a woman as an iemoto in any of the schools of tea. And it's that position is passed down patrilinearly. And when there is not a man, when there's not been a male heir available to inherit, a man has been adopted from one of the branch families. So historically, if you look at the three main schools of tea, they have done that.

Rebecca · 33:13

So you've had Boris NK BMO those who have been adopted in from the on what they sent a family and then they become are trained and become the Urasenke heir. And that's again, it's not this isn't specific to chanoyu either.

Rebecca · 33:33

We see across Japanese culture more broadly and historically, this practice of like adopting sons into the household heads, etcetera and take over the family businesses or adopting by a marriage. So bearing in as the son-in-law, he then becomes the next head of the household, the family they need whatever it is. And even below the emoto you have this next level of teachers that are called guilty.

Rebecca · 34:00

At that guilty level of teachers, there's some interesting translations that happen into English. You also then have below that these ranks that are translated into English with like professor and associate professor and assistant professor A-Team. So women can hold those ranks, but we've never seen in the I actually am not 100% sure on the smallest schools of TI mean. Some of those schools are so small that you have an iemoto who has like 50 students, so they don't have a bunch of ranks beneath them.

Rebecca · 34:31

But in the large schools like Urasenke and Omotesenke, you have all of these ranks of teachers below and then at the dual pay sense a ranks. So that's the teaching level immediately. But borrow the iemoto. Those positions are also never being held by women supposedly or Urasenke, I believe, was one woman during the World War Two era who attained that rank because of the shortage of men because they were in World War.

Rebecca · 34:57

But it's I actually don't know the details of that and it's never happened since then. And it's pretty widely known and discussed. Like women who are very experienced in senior, you know, people will sometimes say, like if she was a man, she would be at your patient day at this point, but she's a woman, so she won't be.

Rebecca · 35:15

And then often, not always, but a lot of the most guilty sensitive positions. It's also like men who are like born into a certain family that has the connections to Omotesenke or Urasenke or synthetic kind of will rise to that position if you like. So there's a lot of patriarchal patrilineal structures at play. And again, I think that's a reflection more broadly of Japanese cultural practices.

Rebecca · 35:41

And if we look at something like it's on the more conservative, traditional culture side of Japanese culture. So it's not a place where we should expect to see like, radical acts of feminism or, you know, gender equality.

Zongjun · 35:56

It's generally something that people just kind of accept and don't question or push back again. Do you see this situation being changed recently? Has there been any discussions about this kind of change within the chanoyu community? Because we've heard there might be a woman iemoto for Urasenke, and now there's a female Prime Minister of Japan. Like, it seems like there's some progress. Yeah.

Rebecca · 36:20

Although I think a lot of people would say that she's not the new Prime Minister isn't exactly the great feminist. Yeah, she's she's a woman Prime Minister and she's very conservative and not a champion of women's are explaining means she's a promoter of the law, for example, that forbids married couples from having different surnames, which essentially means that women have to take the husband's surname.

Rebecca · 36:47

And she said things like that if a mother has a different surname from her children, she can't bond with them. We're talking about the woman Prime Minister. He's very conservative. So I don't know we're at the top levels like within that, you know, person cave in a sanctum or more the same thing, a symptom whether they are having these conversations and imagines maybe they are, but we are not aware of them. Certainly among like the traditional level of people that I'm connected with.

Rebecca · 37:17

We talk about it and say like, we would love to see a change, but I think we're all like relatively kind of, you know, shrugging our shoulders like we know it probably won't happen. Some people were talking about a few years ago within Urasenke that, you know, it seemed one of the daughters was progressing a little more and more seemed more chain and publicly involved in the family business than her brother.

Rebecca · 37:45

And people were like speculating and wondering, like, would something change and happen? But, you know, he, he's kind of, you know, stepped up if you left and then he's being designated as the heir apparent. And that put to death those sorts of speculations that I think it was also a bit of wishful thinking on a lot of people's paths that something changed like that would happen. I think the first thing that would happen would we would be that we would get a woman designated as a girl person, say, before we would ever get a woman designated as an iemoto.

Ryan · 38:17

I also think that we're more likely to see a woman in a leadership position in one of the smaller schools of team. I'll speak for salmonized outsiders because we're we're both not in from the culture, but we're also not tea ceremony practitioners. How should we interpret like this institutionalized sexism and the way we, I don't know, mentally frame or position, you know, traditional tea ceremony, like because I feel like it, it gets it's, it's given sort of every benefit of the doubt and everyone hails it as this thing in macho that we must respect. But I don't think most people are aware that like these institutions are deeply sexist

Rebecca · 38:56

implicitly and explicitly. Is it fair that we're making this judgment? I guess I would say it's not specific to China you I would say this is a reflection of Japanese society and the institutionalized sexism that we see across Japanese society. And like I said before, when you look at something like it is on the traditional conservative side of culture. So it's not the place that we should be looking to see. Revolution, yeah.

Rebecca · 39:27

Revolution, yeah. And like we were just talking about the new Japanese Prime Minister. I think broadly, when we look at Japanese culture today, in 2025, over the last 50 years, if we want to go further, it is institutionalized sexism in and deeply embedded patrilineal and patriarchal structure for one, across Japanese culture and Japanese institutions. And so I think it would be unfair of us to criticize Tana, you specifically for this.

Rebecca · 39:59

I also don't think that that means that we should ignore it. And certainly as someone who is. A feminist and an historian of women at a time you practice now. Like, I'm very aware of this and I wrestle with it and it frustrates me. And when I have the opportunity in a small way to do something or say something, I do.

Rebecca · 40:19

And a lot of other practitioners I know do the same. And sometimes you unfortunately just have to boil inside this range and hold your tongue and just think to yourself, like, when you see something happening, you know, just think this isn't, it's not right. But like, what?

Zongjun · 40:35

You know, what? What can I do in this moment about it? Yeah. Doctor Corbett just a question out of my curiosity and not really related to Taniyu either. Speaking of like females roleed in Japanese society and culture. It's it's not like unheard of for, for, for Japan, for female leadership in Japanese society because we because they had like female emperors and a lot of female teas like like like in like in China, we only had one female emperor throughout the few 1000 years of.

Zongjun · 41:12

In. Japan, they had, they had a lot. So how, how do we interpreted that? How did they perceive as a female leader or, or is that like female miss being perceived at all when they are being seen as emperor or deity? Yeah.

Rebecca · 41:26

That's a really good question. I don't want to be like oversimplified, but the, the general narrative historian would describe is that over the long course of Japanese history, we see a greater shift towards more patriarchal structures to lineal structures for local as a marriage system and more what we would define in today's terms as institutionalized sexism and gender discrimination, etcetera. So the emperor's, I don't know the dates off the top of my head, but we're talking about empresses. We're we're going further back in Japanese history, right? And I don't remember off the top of my head, I'm sorry, the most recent Empress, but it's

Rebecca · 42:09

certainly hundreds of years ago. And so, and when we look at the pay on period to like 700 through to the 9 hundreds, we're seeing a lot of what we call natural local marriage and then marrying into women, a woman's family, things like this wedding more we're seeing women have the ability to hold and inherit land and land ownership. And a lot of that starts to shift. And when we get into the early modern or Edo periods as Olympic 1819 centuries, we're seeing more patriarchal with patrilineal structures have to local marriage becomes the norms of the woman marrying into the man's family. And then we actually see even

Rebecca · 42:51

more institutionalized patriarchal and sexist structures, if you like, developing in Japan with the influence of Westernization in the late 19th and early 20th century. I think that's something a lot of Western would like to ignore. But I think it's pretty clear when you look at Japanese history over the long period.

Rebecca · 43:11

But it is interesting, like with the current Imperial family, there's been these questions around the succession. They are and the current Imperial household law that is a modern product to bids an Empress. And every time people keep raising, you know, like, but there's been empresses historically.

Rebecca · 43:29

What's the problem here? Yeah, there's been the succession issues in the imperial family as well of like lots of girls being born and not enough boys being born. What are we going to do? And then there's suddenly a boy is born like a crisis about it. We don't need to advise that the law. So yeah, it's it's certainly an intriguing. 1st century question only in Japan.

Rebecca · 43:49

So this is actually more recent when you're comparing long history. Yeah. And I'm. Not trying to say that like Japan in the 700 or 1300 or some kind of like venomous paradise either, you know, ideas around like feminism and like gender equality in the sense that we understand it today, we shouldn't be looking for. But certainly women, especially if there's elite social levels of the imperial court, like you said, there were emphasis and women were owning property, inheriting property, holding that kind of power in ways that we don't see. And getting properly educated, too. Like the author of The Tales of

Rebecca · 44:26

Kenji, she's a female author. Yeah, yeah. We see high levels of literacy for women and education in that in that hand period. So when Teledy was written also in that editor period. So coming back to my research with women's participation in China, you in the 18th and 19th century, I was talking about those commercially available books that were being written and concluded segments on time you and encouraging women to study.

Ryan · 44:54

They were able to be published and have an audience because women had very high rates of literacy. Interesting. Wow. Fascinating. Yeah. It's fascinating. I know we're running short on time. There's one topic I really wanted to discuss before this ended, and that's when we think of tea culture in Japan and Chennaiyu culture.

Ryan · 45:15

There's very little emphasis on the actual production of the tea. I feel like it's outside of everyone's mental model and I kind of wanted to understand like historically why it was that case. And like, you know, our current understanding is that just farmers were so low in terms of social status and that's why we don't think of them as part of tea culture.

Rebecca · 45:39

But I would love to. I don't know how like have that validated or if you could add any color to to why it's really not the focus seems both historically and and even to this day it seems. Yeah, I'm not not sure that I can answer the question like in a way that is really more than speculating because that to be honest with you, it's not something I thought that much about until you've brought it up. Suddenly when I think about the primary sources that I'm familiar with, if we look at like tea Diaries or records of tea gatherings, there are really important primary source. But historians of telling you,

Rebecca · 46:20

when we look at those from the 16th century, 17th, 18th centuries, I don't recall ever seeing that many details about much of specifically the more details are about it's about who was president of the tea gatherings, the host, the guests and then the utensils use the objects.

Rebecca · 46:41

I'm also just thinking though, that like sometimes you look at things and you look for what you're looking for. So like I was looking at records of tea gatherings to find names and women. So that like was my focus when I looked at them. Other people are looking at records of tea gatherings to look for specific for the material culture. So maybe they're trying to find records where a specific child and ceramics tea container was being used or things like that. So it could be that it's there and I just haven't noticed, but I don't think so.

Rebecca · 47:13

Certainly those other texts that I was talking about like writings about chanoyu for kind of a general audience of commoners, both men and women. I don't remember that matcha itself being described as as like a product. It might be that it's in different publications rather than the ones about time you. I feel like chanoyu is always the focus is more like a practice and I was on the aesthetics and on the etiquette and comportment side of things and less writings about the matcha itself. As I'm talking, I'm sort of wondering like, is that because it's taken for a given?

Rebecca · 47:51

Like sometimes you don't need to describe something if it's so like ubiquitous and obvious to the reader. But I would say like in terms of my current understanding of tea practice, I think it depends on the individual practitioner and the their teacher and the groups that they're part of.

Rebecca · 48:10

I think some people emphasize it more than others. Like in the group that I'm studying with in LA, you know, we're all pretty interested in like Matcha itself. And we try different brands and brands and we will tend to try, if it's a new one, we'll try it first in the mizuya.

Rebecca · 48:28

So like in the kitchen area and just like we stop balls for each other and like, OK, what do we think of this one? Is it one that we would try actually using the tea gathering or not? Because of course your, your whole focus is at the end of the day, like making a delicious bottle of PP of guests. So it is the quality of the matcha as important. And then what's always been part of tea practice is the discussions between the guests and the host. And just like today, where historically a guest will always ask the host about the matcha, you know, what blend have you used?

Rebecca · 49:01

Where is it from? So that's always been a part of the practice. So I don't know if I'm like fully answering the question. In your current practice and what you see across like the Urasenke global community, like how do they form product distinctions and how do they evaluate like high quality from low quality?

Rebecca · 49:21

Like what are their anchors for drawing these distinctions and forming their own preferences? So I. Think first and foremost the biggest distinction is are you using usucha or koicha, just are you making it into thin tea or thick tea. And then and often we're relying on the brand itself to tell us that.

Rebecca · 49:41

So if you look at like Marukyu Koyamaen and has a really big friend and they have their teas that are designated for Urasenke and or Mushakoji Senke etcetera, and they have ones that are given the seal of approval by the iemoto.

Rebecca · 49:57

Yeah, so I mean in yeah, so I mean Urasenke in any group that I've studied with, because I started in Japan, I studied in Australia and now now I've studied with the rest. We're always most of the time. Are you using that if you and different blends from them. And so we're they're telling us like this is designated for koicha and then I'd say it's just taste, you know, do you like it? Do you think that your guests will like it some of that personal profits.

Rebecca · 50:25

I, I definitely think in the, the tea group that I'm in, in LA right now is the group where there's been the most discussion among the members and with our teacher about like trying different blends like I was saying, and do we like this?

Rebecca · 50:39

And what do we think about that wasn't sort of common in other groups that I've studied in. It was just like the teacher had it there and it's like, this is the matcha that we're using today. And then we would often use the same matcha most of the time and there's no description around that. So maybe that's to do with our teacher. It's probably also to do with the fact that we have a few people in our current group who are like more interested in that kind of thing.

Rebecca · 51:04

And maybe also that it's easier now to get an access like different ones are much of them than it was even like 10-15 years ago. You know, we can buy something now in the US that we couldn't buy 10 years ago. And then a lot of us in our group traveled back and forth to Japan pretty often, both the Japanese and non Japanese people. So then we might keep something up while we're there that we can bring back and things like that.

Rebecca · 51:33

Got. It makes sense. And I think the only thing I can say is that like a couple when I'm talking about taste, like I'm not, I don't know if I have like the full language and the words that people in the tea industry would be using to describe things.

Rebecca · 51:47

But like when I'm tasting and you marked up one of the things I've noticed with some of the ones that tried here in that have been created in the US is I I drink it and I'm like, Oh, I don't I don't like this because either it doesn't really have a flavor profile or like it's just kind of bland and nothing or I've had one that almost tastes like dusty, like both the taste is dusty and the texture feels a bit dusty.

Rebecca · 52:12

And so that sounds like I drink it and other people in the group that often drinking at the same time that we try and we just like, Oh no, we would never. We're not going to use that. We wouldn't have that because we don't.

Rebecca · 52:24

It just doesn't taste nice to us. Or sometimes it tastes if it tastes too bitter. And now I might not want to use it. There's probably a whole like world of terminology that I don't know. So I don't know. That the people in the tea industry would use.

Ryan · 52:39

We've heard of some matcha, some very high end matcha that's like honzu shaded Asahi cultivar, or some Urasenke, very traditional in Japan, like older Japanese ladies who are lifelong Urasenke practitioners trying it and saying that it's not real matcha because it's not bitter. Oh, OK, yeah.

Ryan · 52:58

I mean, you wanted to be bitter, but you don't want it to be so bitter that your guests are like screwing up their face when they drink it. You know there's a. That's when. The wagashi comes in. As a last question, I know you're working on some really interesting new research about how Westerners were exposed to matcha like 100 years ago and sort of the first exposures.

Rebecca · 53:20

And we'd love to learn more about that research. And I know you're turning it into a book as well. Yes. Well, I'm, I'm still deciding if it'll be a book and still kind of working on the materials and figuring out what I've got. But I do have some publications coming out in this research, so I started looking in 2019.

Rebecca · 53:40

I found some references to some elite foreigners from the diplomatic community, like ambassadors in Tokyo in the 1880s and 1890s starting China you're holding together in. I was pretty much, I just thought, what? Wow, that's surprising. And so that intrigued me first.

Rebecca · 54:00

And I found the references in Japanese. There are Japanese newspaper articles that were published about it. And I was interested in that. And then I had been doing other research and was supposed to go to Japan in 2020 and I couldn't visit the pandemic.

Rebecca · 54:13

And I suppose pandemic autumn kind of kicked in. And I started reading a bunch of travel Diaries from Westerners who were travelling to Japan in the Meiji period from the 1870s, eighteen 80s. And a lot of them, you know, they're out of copyright, so they've been digitized and they're available online. So I was just able to read them that way. And I started noticing that like quite a few of them have references to attending a Tony tea gathering and or drinking matcha.

Rebecca · 54:44

And so I, I became kind of interested in that. And then I think over the course of the last five years with this matcha being increasing kind of like broader interest in this research when I've talked to people about it has also grown and people like, oh, that is actually interesting to hear about. What's another's first thought of March when they were encountering that.

Rebecca · 55:04

So I do have actually, it's probably something that some of your listeners would be interested in. I don't know if you're aware of it, at UC Davis, the University of California. Oh yeah, yeah, there's a global tea institute there, the DTI, which a lot and they so they bring together like academic research as well as industry research and it's really great. And Catherine Bennett, who is the founder and director of the GTA is fantastic scholar and fantastic person. And so they have launched a book series with Brill of the Press. And so the first book and the book series is Global T Studies and the first book is coming out

Rebecca · 55:42

next year. And it is a kind of broad ranging look at tea globally. And there's both scholars and industry people who've written for it. There's two chapters that are on China Yu and Mata and Japan focused on is by Ako Yoshino. He's from the Japan Tea Association and she's writing about China Yu at the world's fairs in North America. So looking at these like world's fairs, Expos that were held in the nature periods of late 19th and early 20th century and how China Yu was presented wanted to American audiences. And then in my chapter, I'm addressing this question of what did Westerners think of both ton

Rebecca · 56:25

of you as a practice and master as a beverage when they first encountered it in the major period, So late 19th, early 20th century. And I'm using these travel Diaries and newspaper articles as my sources. So there's also like Western American, Australian, British newspaper articles I've been finding that we're talking about like around the world and including matcha or just specifically talking about matcha and Japan.

Rebecca · 56:52

And so I think what was happening was like this was a new enough beverage for people that were encountering Japanese culture for the first time. Either the wealthiest tourists, like people who could actually travel to Japan and you had to be pretty wealthy in the 1880s, eighteen 90s early nights to travel to Japan. And then people who were encountering it world span expedition outside Japan.

Rebecca · 57:15

And then also just in like the newspaper articles, you know, from like The Wichita Eagle newspaper in Wichita, KS in 1888. Those people, those readers probably weren't going to get actually, it's I much have it was it was something that was interesting for the newspaper to write about. And Robert Paglia has a great book called Green Big Milk and Sugar when Japan Filled America's Teacups. And that book looks at how loose leaf tea, particularly center ones, very popular in the US in the 1800s. I had no idea before I read that book, but they were putting milk and sugar in that.

Rebecca · 57:53

That's where the title comes from. And So what I found was a lot of these Western writers were actually contrasting much with the, at the time, more popular and widely known loosely, Daphne's Green Tea. And so they're sometimes saying things like we must preferred the ordinary infusion by which they mean send just I think that's because they're adding milk and sugar to it.

Rebecca · 58:16

Whereas the much of they were being served at world's fairs, outgoing Japan or the tourists who could go to Japan was much as we do it in China, you which in meat, it's stuff much water. And so yeah, they're overall, they're pretty critical.

Rebecca · 58:31

They're saying things like it's it's green rule. It's more bitter than cleaning. It's unpalatable, A lot of stuff like that. Yeah, I'm palatable. My mother would agree with him. Quite crazy she did and then, but I'm not opposite side. I've also found a lot sources that show that they were Westerners who were studying Tami pretty seriously in this time period.

Rebecca · 58:57

And they're not talking about the much job, but I have to assume that, like me, they liked it because otherwise why would they keep studying for how many years? Because and hosting key gatherings because you can't do that without drinking much. So I think it's the people who didn't like that. He was the ones who are like actually writing more about it because if they didn't like the taste of it. So yeah, that'll be out early next year. And then I have a few more publications in the works from that research.

Rebecca · 59:28

Then it's like other academic chapters and edited books and so on. And then I'm working with my friend and fellow or a same care practitioner and fellow scholar, Michelle Carriger, who's a professor at UCLA. We did the teaching, we LED that teaching tea project together that I talked about the online resources we're working on Co editing book and I have contributions from other scholars and that will be on China U and much globally beyond Japan that will have both historical and contemporary.

Rebecca · 1:00:00

Very cool. I would love to learn the story of how RSNK just came to dominate, like all the tea practices globally. It is incredibly impressive what they've built. You can go to Venezuela, you can go, can be in Paris, you can be anywhere and it feels like there's. A yeah, I've been, I've met, I've met with people in Sofia, Bulgaria, in Mexico City and yeah, all over the world. It really is like the global reach. And yeah, I think like we alluded to earlier, you know, that's that's the last 75 to 60 years that that's happened. But because that's happened, you're essentially to become so dominant that it's kind of

Ryan · 1:00:42

affected people understanding of history. Yeah. That makes sense because that's how they were exposed to it for the first time and, you know, whatever circumstance or country they found themselves in at some public demonstration or something.

Rebecca · 1:00:54

That's really interesting story. Well, I can't wait for that research. And we'll link everything in the show notes for people because I'm sure there's a lot of listeners that might be interested. Sure. And I'll definitely let you know when that book from the Global Tea Studies series is out because I think it is something that probably some of your listeners would be interested in.

Ryan · 1:01:14

So I'll let you know early next year when that's out that. Would be awesome and we'll we'll help spread the word on that, yeah. Looking forward to reading that. Yeah, me too. We need more in English language tea, literature and research. Yeah, it's so nice we do.

Zongjun · 1:01:29

Yeah, Yes, we do. Yeah, well that's why they have yet the global Tea study. So hopefully we'll get some good books coming up in the next few years. Well, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you coming on.

Zongjun · 1:01:43

Really recommend everyone who's listening to pick up a copy of your book Cultivating femininity, Women in tea culture in Edo and Meiji Japan really was kind of a bombshell book it at least for me and like breaking down narratives that I had been told and kept hearing over and over, which has kind of led me to become a little more skeptical when acquiring new information that's. Great.

Rebecca · 1:02:05

That's what I would hope for. And I'll just find that the ebook is actually available for free. The publisher of the University of Hawaii Press made it Open Access at the time for publication till you can buy a print version in paperback and I think still in hardback.

Rebecca · 1:02:23

But they we wanted to make the e-book Open Access so that it's more readily available for people. So it's not a mistake if you see it for $0.00 on any of your preferred type of forms, including the giant A. Or you can get it directly for free download from the University of Hawaii Press website. That's awesome.

Ryan · 1:02:43

So thank you, dear listeners, and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks. See you in the future.