BOOK LAUNCH--Green With Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups
Yoshiko Niiya
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University welcomes you to join a Zoom event with Professor Robert Hellyer of Wake Forest University.
Professor Robert Hellyer
Associate Professor of History
Wake Forest University
BOOK LAUNCH: Green With Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups
Thursday, 14 October, at 6:00 PM EST
Pre-register by clicking here to receive Zoom link.
A copy of the book may be purchased here. Use discount coupon code: CUP20
Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas. In Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. Through an examination of the history of the Japan-U.S. tea trade, this presentation will show how these national partialities are deeply entwined. It will focus on the forgotten American penchant for Japanese green tea—often consumed hot with milk and sugar—and how it came to shape Japanese tastes. Highlighting stories of the people involved in the Japan-U.S. trade—including samurai turned tea farmers —the presentation offers not only a social and commodity history of tea in the United States and Japan but also new insights into how national customs have profound if often hidden international dimensions.
Robert Hellyer is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University. A historian of early modern and modern Japan, Hellyer has explored foreign relations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, research presented in Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (Harvard, 2009). He co-organized a multi-year project that examined the Meiji Restoration surrounding the 150-year anniversary in 2018, an initiative that resulted in Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess, eds., The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation (Cambridge, 2020). The research and writing of Green With Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups (Columbia, 2021) was supported by Smithsonian, Japan Foundation, Hakuhodo Foundation, Sainsbury Institute, and NEH fellowships.
~~~~~~~~~~
For more information, please contact Yoshiko Niiya at donald-ke...@columbia.edu. Thank you.