Women Gathering for Tea: Global Perspectives from Edo to Meiji

Women’s participation is often excluded in discussions of chanoyu history, but research has shed light on how women were involved in both the practice and production of tea culture in Japan from at least the mid-eighteenth century. In this talk, Rebecca Corbett, USC, will give examples of Buddhist nuns who crafted their own tea utensils in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, discuss what we know of commoner and samurai women’s tea practice in the Edo period (1600–1868), and introduce new research about Western women who practiced chanoyu and, in some cases, wrote about it and collected tea utensils in Meiji Japan (1868–1912).

This program is part of the online series Perspectives on Japanese Tea Practice, which brings together various experts on Japanese tea practice, called chanoyu, to explore its evolution from the past into the present. Roundtable discussions and lectures with tea practitioners, collectors, curators, university professors, architects, and artists reveal how cross-cultural connections have been crucial to historic and contemporary Japanese tea practice. The series is held in conjunction with the current exhibition Reasons to Gather: Japanese Tea Practice Unwrapped.