Crafting Identity as a Tea Practitioner in Early Modern Japan: Ōtagaki Rengetsu and Tagami Kikusha

Premodern Japanese tea culture has been depicted overwhelmingly as a male activity. Reading any standard history of tea culture, we learn about the merchants who formalized the practice in the late sixteenth century and the warlords they served; the warrior tea masters who continued to develop the practice and philosophy throughout Japan’s early modern period; the wealthy industrialist-connoisseurs in the early twentieth century; and the grand masters of the now dominant Sen-family schools of tea (Urasenke, Omotesenke, and Mushanokojisenke).1 When women do feature in either popular or academic discussion of tea culture, they generally figure as middle-class housewives in modern Japan who are learning tea culture as a way of cultivating gender and national identity, the assumption being that by studying tea they learn how to be a proper Japanese woman.2 Female tea practitioners from the early modern period (1600–1868) are generally presented as exceptions to the norm, such as women of the imperial family who were able to practice tea because of their high status.3 Even then, a divide is perceived between men’s tea practice, whether historically or in the modern period, and women’s tea practice. Men’s tea practice is said to be focused on connoisseurship, the collecting of tea utensils as art, and an intellectual or philosophical understanding of tea culture. Women’s tea practice is said to be about learning comportment, etiquette, and manners—a mode of practice that encompasses neither the rational, intellectual dimensions of male practice nor the aesthetic