National Treasure: tea utensils used by early modern practitioners of chanoyu | Hacker News Reader

National Treasure: tea utensils used by early modern practitioners of chanoyu

laphamsquarterly.org

23 pointsprismatic11 comments

Similar processes have been at work in other countries as well; this piece is an interesting counterpoint to an earlier one about tea ceremony in China and Taiwan:

https://anthrodendum.org/2019/12/08/inventing-the-way-of-tea...

https://online.ucpress.edu/gastronomica/article-abstract/16/...

One of the Japanese tea vendors whose newsletters I subscribe to also had a related discussion recently. I can't remember which one it was (I've subscribed to too many now) but they were expressing frustration about how these phenomena can come to be used for manipulative sales tactics in misleading ways.

When I visited Japan I had whiplash from the disappointment at the state of tea drinking.

While the visit was the best holiday in my entire life and I had the opposite of Paris syndrome the one thing I was particularly looking forward to was visiting Japanese tea rooms. But except for tourist traps and museums all the tea rooms I found were Western style tea rooms and English afternoon tea was all the range apparently.

Same thing happened when I moved to the UK and discovered that 99.9% of people drink tea bags most of which are terrible, they brew it with no care and then add half a cup of milk and heap of sugar into it.

And yet in both cases the mystique around tea, tea accessories and tea aesthetics remained. The actual tea part of it atrophied or maybe was never there to begin with, I don't know. Tea sets serve as decoration while they drink a mug of builders tea.

You need to visit Taiwan. Tea drinking and tea buying is still practiced in many stores. They have even made the bags of tea leaves traceable to where the tea was grown. It may be the tea experience you are looking for!

I've not been to Taiwan but I've been to China and Chinese tea rooms are amazing but also people at home drink good tea. I was expecting similar in Japan, except with green tea in place of puerh. I hope to visit Taiwan sometime in the future so looking forward to experiencing their tea culture.

How did you look for tea rooms? I checked tabelog and found a couple that were very nice and not tourist traps.

I used Google but also just walked in from the street.

> The actual tea part of it atrophied or maybe was never there to begin with, I don't know

For Britain I'm pretty confident that victorian era tea for most parts wasn't great either by modern standards.

The milk and sugared, strong(/oversteeped), tea is very traditional form in Britain.

>the opposite of Paris syndrome

Would that be something like Stendhal Syndrome?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal_syndrome

Sorry that you weren't able to visit a nice Japanese tea room during your trip. Not sure if you were looking for Japanese tea rooms as in specifically Japanese tea ceremony, or just tea rooms in general serving Japanese tea in a more traditional feeling room. I've found that many of the Japanese tea companies (Chanoha, Ippodo, Sakurai Tea, etc.) have stores which also offer tastings and tea flights, and there are also some unique modern tea cafes, one of my favorites of which is Tokyo Saryo, which does hand drip tea. I have plenty more recommendations if you're interested!

Not tea ceremony, normal tea rooms. Doesn't have to be traditional either, just a place that serves a wide variety of high quality loose leaf tea. I am interested in recommendations, I hope I can visit again some time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230614104058/https://www.lapha...

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