The Book of Tea
The Book of Tea
Okakura Kakuzo · first published 1906 · ISBN 9780241425534
A short book written in English for a Western audience, arguing that the tea ceremony is a coherent aesthetic philosophy rather than a quaint ritual. Okakura is making a cultural case at a moment when Japan was being flattened into exotica.
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Written in English in 1906 for a Western audience that treated Japan as decoration, and arguing that the tea ceremony is a coherent aesthetic philosophy. Short, still in print, and quietly polemical.