Mentioning the Japanese tea ceremony typically conjures up visions of an elegant geisha gracefully tipping a steaming pot in the serene environment of old Japan. To that notion, Kristin Surak offers a sharp contrast. First, the tea ceremony is actually a lengthy meal that involves much more than tea, she says, and today, it’s become a $500 million industry and "the hobby of middle aged women," not unlike a knitting club or spinning class.

And another thing: For most of its 500-year history, men were more often the hosts of the tea ceremony. The gender change occurred only a century or so ago, triggered by the Meiji Restoration of 1860, when the new emperor dismantled the shogun system of regional leaders that had prevailed in Japan for more than two centuries. Losing the patronage of the shoguns, Japan’s powerful tea families had "to find a way to keep themselves relevant in a modernizing Japan and to discover a new customer base," Kristin explains.

Their solution was to reinvent the tea ceremony as a skill needed by "good wives and mothers," she says. Lessons on the tea ceremony became part of the extracurricular activities in schools, and the practice turned up at exhibitions and in books prescribing etiquette or synthesizing Japanese culture, such as The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura. The fact that this 1906 book was first published in English outside of Japan suggests the role the tea ceremony was beginning to assume, Kristin says: "In many cases, it was used to define Japan as a nation, explain what was particularly distinctive about Japaneseness, and even cultivate people into particular visions of Japaneseness."

That idea is at the heart of Kristin’s dissertation in sociology, which will look at two styles of what she calls "nation-work." First, the tea ceremony became a symbol of the emerging modern nation, and second, it was used to transform Japanese, and women in particular, into exemplars of the new national values.

After analyzing the tea ceremony’s history in the first chapter of her dissertation, Kristin will turn to the data collected during her Fulbright-funded year in Tokyo and Kyoto: hundreds of interviews with tea practitioners and their students, as well as her own experiences learning and "doing" tea. She also talked to ordinary Japanese: Since World War II, the tea ceremony has become so central to what is conceived of as Japanese culture that "almost all Japanese have a vague knowledge about the tea ceremony, even if they don’t do it themselves, and feel they should be able to explain it to foreigners."

In media depictions, the tea ceremony is associated with a Zen-like philosophy of equity and simplicity. The reality is far less spiritual. In today’s Japan, the tea ceremony provides an opportunity for mostly middle- and upper-class women to show off not only their skills, but the expensive implements seen as essential to "an authentic tea," Kristin says. A good tea bowl, for example, may cost as much as $50,000.

Kristin was already a veteran of many tea ceremonies, having spent three years teaching English in Japan, when she arrived at UCLA for studies in sociology. She had ended her undergraduate years at Florida State University intending to do doctoral work on German social movements, and her sojourn on the other side of the world hadn’t changed her mind. A conversation with a professor about the tea ceremony, however, persuaded her to make it the theme of her master’s thesis, and then the doctoral topic finally seemed inevitable. As a result of her three predoctoral years, "I was able to position positioned myself well" in the Fulbright application, she says, "as somebody who could accomplish what I set out to do."

"I did that, and more," she says. "I have way too much data." While the writing may be occasionally painful, the collecting was not, as Kristin enjoyed dozens of multicourse Japanese meals featuring the freshest and finest ingredients and the most elegant and beautiful dishes and implements. "Very few people have the opportunity to do delicious research," she says. "I’ve had some of the best food in Japan."

Published in Fall 2008, Graduate Quarterly