Japanese Tea and Transnational History

Robert Hellyer ’ s new book Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America ’ s Tea Cups exemplifies the surprising insights that can emerge from transnational research. Hellyer brings his expertise in Japanese history and his own family history to a study of tea that spans the Pacific (and at times the Atlantic) Ocean. By using commodity chains to trace the changing relationships between American consumers and Asian producers, he reveals a fascinating history of the beverage that most Americans more likely associate with the American Revolution than Japan. Hellyer convincingly argues that Americans have had a long and complex relationship with green and black tea that has nothing to do with the Boston Tea Party. Rather, he demonstrates, American tea consumption has a storied history shaped by events ranging from internal immigration debates to Japanese political changes and racialized advertising campaigns. In turn, the rise and fall of green tea in the United States shaped tea consumption in Japan. This slim volume will interest not only tea lovers but those interested in the intertwined histories of the United States and Japan.Hellyer ’ s book is organized into six chronological chapters that cover the history of what he terms “ teaways ” in both Japan and the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Each chapter interweaves the history of members of his own family, who exported Japanese tea to Britain and later the United States, with Japanese counterparts, who produced and marketed Japanese tea. But he considers the experiences of many others, from the women who refined the tea to the brokers who sold it and the American wives who purchased it. Throughout it all, he illuminates everything from the gendering of teaways in the United States to the evolving packaging and sale of tea. Overall, Hellyer makes a compelling case for the significance of tea to the economic and cultural history of the United States and Japan. Hellyer ’ s first chapter explores and in