The Book of Tea - Okakura, Kakuzo
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That a nation should construct one of its most resonant national ceremonies round a cup of tea will surely strike a chord of sympathy with at least some readers of this review. To many foreigners, nothing is so quintessentially Japanese as the tea ceremony--more properly, "the way of tea"--with its austerity, its extravagantly minimalist stylization, and its concentration of extreme subtleties of meaning into the simplest of actions. The Book of Tea is something of a curiosity: written in English by a Japanese scholar. It was first published in 1906, in the wake of the naval victory over…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
That a nation should construct one of its most resonant national ceremonies round a cup of tea will surely strike a chord of sympathy with at least some readers of this review. To many foreigners, nothing is so quintessentially Japanese as the tea ceremony--more properly, "the way of tea"--with its austerity, its extravagantly minimalist stylization, and its concentration of extreme subtleties of meaning into the simplest of actions. The Book of Tea is something of a curiosity: written in English by a Japanese scholar. It was first published in 1906, in the wake of the naval victory over Russia with which Japan asserted its rapidly acquired status as a world-class military power. It was a peak moment of Westernization within Japan. Clearly, behind the publication was an agenda, or at least a mission to explain. Around its account of the ceremony, The Book of Tea folds an explication of the philosophy, first Taoist, later Zen Buddhist, that informs its oblique celebration of simplicity and directness--what Okakura calls, in a telling phrase, "moral geometry." And the ceremony itself? Its greatest practitioners have always been philosophers, but also artists, connoisseurs, collectors, gardeners, calligraphers, gourmets, flower arrangers.
Autorenporträt
Okakura Kakuz, also known as Okakura Tenshin, was a Japanese academic and art critic who, during the Meiji Restoration reform era, defended conventional forms, practices, and beliefs. He lived from February 14, 1863, to September 2, 1913. He is most known outside of Japan for his 1906 book The Book of Tea: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture, and the Simple Life. It was written in English after the Russo-Japanese War, denounced Western stereotypes of Asians in general and the Japanese specifically, and voiced the worry that Japan would only acquire respect to the extent that it copied the barbaric practices of Western militarism. On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, he released The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan, a book on Asian aesthetic and cultural history. It is famous for its opening paragraph, which asserts that Asia differs from the West because of its spiritual unity. When Kakuzo persisted in visiting his mountain estate in Akakura in August 1913, his sister, wife, and daughter eventually transported him there by train. Kakuzo was able to communicate with others and feel a little better for almost a week before suffering a heart attack on August 25.