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Paper short abstract:

My paper explores how intellectuals in Japan developed different “writing back” strategies to the empires by constructing discourses on Japan’s tradition by focusing on the practice of the tea ceremony, which was originated in ancient India and China and later introduced in medieval Japan.

Paper long abstract:

My paper explores how intellectuals in Japan developed different “writing back” strategies to the empires by constructing discourses on Japan’s tradition. I will particularly focus on the practice of the tea ceremony, which was originated in ancient India and China and later introduced in medieval Japan. I will examine how critics and practitioners of the tea ceremony in Japan in the twelfth century, the sixteenth century, and the 1930’s, discussed the origin of the tea ceremony and its development in Japan. I will conclude that, discourses on Japan’s tradition, which wove the complex “colonizer” and “colonized” relationships of Japan with other areas in East Asia, Europe, and the U.S., showcase a contestation of various strategies of “writing back” to the empires.

I will start by indicating that Monk Eisai (1141-1215), who introduced the tea ceremony in Japan after traveling in China to study Zen Buddhism, attempted to “write back” to the cultural and religious empires, namely India and China, by describing the tea ceremony as a traditional custom conducted not only in India and China but also in Japan, by which he could demonstrate that there was no hierarchical orders among these regions in terms of the way in which the ceremony was conducted.

Moving on to the late nineteenth century, I will argue that modern practitioners of the tea ceremony in Japan such as Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913) attempted to decolonize the custom of the tea ceremony from the Chinese influence by demonstrating that the ceremony had been valued as tradition in Japan, while those practitioners resulted in colonizing the tea ceremony.

I will finally focus on Horiguchi Sutemi (1895-1984), an established Japanese architect and poet, who developed a contradictory concept of “Japanese-ness”, which could mean both the pursuit of modernist aesthetics and the embodiment of unchanging tradition. I will demonstrate how Horiguchi attempted to overcome the power relationship between European modernity and Japanese pre-modernity as well as the hierarchical order of the origin and the evolution of the tea ceremony between China and Japan.