Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Lecture Series 2013

Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice (
http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/html/events/2013-2014/13121
3_Surak.pdf )

Kristin Surak
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Japanese Politics at SOAS, University of London

18:30-20:00
Dec. 13, 2013
Sophia University Building 10, 3F, Room 301

Few practices are simultaneously as exotic and representative, esoteric and quotidian, instrumental and sensual, political and cultural as the Japanese tea ceremony. While most Japanese have never participated in a formal tea gathering, and to many its arcane procedures remain rather alien, the practice is all but universally recognized as a defining constituent of Japanese culture, integrating arts, manners, and sensibilities deemed peculiarly characteristic of the nation into a single, striking form. This talk will explore how it is that the tea ceremony serves as a site and instrument for evoking Japaneness, even within Japan where such ethonational associations might otherwise be taken for granted. First, drawing on Barthes, I will enter the flow of tea preparation to examine phenomenologically how an alternation of parallels with and contrasts to common features of everyday life in Japan facilitates an experience of Japaneseness within Japan. Second, I will turn attention towards the actions and interactions of tea practitioners themselves to investigate how they employ three modalities of ethnonational categorization to establish what precisely is "Japanese."

Kristin Surak is a Senior Lecturer (Associate
Professor) in Japanese Politics at SOAS, University of London who specializes in international migration, culture, ethnicity, and nationalism. Her book Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice was published by Stanford University Press in 2013, and her articles have appeared in the European Journal of Sociology, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Lettre International, Merkur, and the New Left Review. Her current research compares migration regimes and temporary migrant labor programs in East Asia and across the globe.
Lecture in English / No registration necessary

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More ICC talks in December!

Dec. 2:
Twenty-One Haiku Lessons from The Book of Tea Michael Dylan Welch, Vice president of the Haiku Society of America
http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/html/events/2013-2014/13120
2_Welch.pdf

Dec. 5:
Takeshima and Shimane Prefecture
Alexander Bukh, Senior Lecturer, Victoria University, Wellington
http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/html/events/2013-2014/13120
5_bukh.pdf


Dec. 9:
Fatherhood and Consumption: An Exploratory Study of Soon-to-be Fathers in Japan Florian Kohlbacher, German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) Tokyo
http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/html/events/2013-2014/13120
9_Kohlbacher.pdf