A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea

Claiming to be ‘the first book in any language to describe and analyse the history of all Japanese teas’, William Wayne Farris’ latest monograph A Bowl for a Coin provides a wide-ranging commodity history of Japanese tea. Moving away from the study of tea ceremony, Farris endeavours to uncover the methods of farming, processing, and distributing tea from its initial entry into the archipelago in the eighth century through to the present day. The author uses tea as a lens to highlight broader historical trends in medicine, agricultural development, Japan’s ‘industrious revolution’, and the birth of a consumer society. Chapter One, covering the years 750 to 1300, introduces Japanese tea not as the appetising beverage that we know it as today, but instead as a bitter, brown concoction ground on a druggist’s mortar and prescribed as medicine for a variety of ailments. Imported from the continent, early tea had a Sinitic cultural prestige and was often exchanged between court aristocrats as gifts. The farming of tea was small scale and almost exclusively the domain of Buddhist monasteries. Chapter Two, spanning the years 1300 to 1600, is the period the tea industry first began to ‘lift off.’ The most important change was the development of stone tea grinders and bamboo whisks, which transformed tea from an unappetising medicine to a sweet, green, powdered beverage. From the late thirteenth century tea evolved from an exclusive and specialist gift item to a commodity that was traded, taxed, and enjoyed by aristocrats and commoners alike. By the late medieval period new tea strains were imported, agricultural fields were expanded and regional tea ‘brands’ were becoming established. Chapter Three, comprising the years 1600 to 1868, marks the ‘high point’ of Japanese tea. New methods of tea farming diversified production and saw tea cultivation from the northern reaches of Honshu to the southern tip of Kyushu. Trade boomed, and markets facilitated the emergence of a nascent consumer society of not only the social elite, but also commoners, and even an incipient international clientele. This tea culture was depicted by poets, playwrights, and artists of the age. By the nineteenth century tea was a lucrative industry, as shown by disputes between workers and businesses. Chapter Four, covering Japanese tea in the modern period, explores how burgeoning domestic and international demand for Japanese tea caused production to expand from a mountain-based, labour-intensive industry in the 1860s to one that was marshalled by botanical knowledge and mechanisation in the 1920s. The purported health benefits of imbibing tea, in