ARI Working Paper Series

Tea-drinking is a major feature of the ethnography of Japan. The art of the tea ceremony evokes questions of identity and identification. In New York in 1906, Okakura Kakuzo (Tenshin) wrote The Book of Tea, the quintessential publication that introduced Japan’s culture to America and the West  through the medium of the Japanese tea ceremony. The efforts of Okakura and many others active in promoting the Japan-US bilateral cultural relations started to lay the seeds for mutual transmission of culture. One such seed sprouted in the Georgian Court estate. The Georgian Court Teahouse acted as an intermediary between Japan and the West at a time when they were directly interacting with each other in the great experiment of modernity. Designed by a perfectionist Japanese gardener, it was transported from the austere trappings of a modernizing reformist Japan which was undergoing self-strengthening to the glittery world of the New World’s Gilded Age where it served as an immediate form of aristocratic entertainment for the nouveau riche. For the Gilded cosmopolitans and the aristocrats, the prospects of Eastern art held great possibilities for their respective agendas. From the perspective of the cosmopolitans, it represented an alternative to the stuffy old world European monarchic cultures and a chance to incorporate even more ancient and established cultures for their project in creating a new and unique identity for America. The Japanese tea ceremony in general and the Georgian Court Teahouse represent a penetration of Japanese ideas and culture into Gilded Age America. The handful of figures associated with the Georgian Court Teahouse made enormous efforts to learn everything they could about the world outside their normal routines in the hope of discovering more about the opposing other. The immense effort expended in bringing the Teahouse to Lakewood is a testimony to the power and strength of world cultures and their relationship with the equally forceful capitalism.