Japan Zoominar @ UC San Diego: "Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups," with Robert Hellyer

Wed, Nov 30, 9:00-10:00 am JST (Tue, Nov 29, 4:00-5:00 pm Pacific)

Following the Meiji Restoration, Japan developed a tea export industry, shipping especially high-quality sencha to the US Midwest, where green tea was popular. The export trade thrived and tea emerged as Japan's second largest export product after silk. However, in the 1920s, socioeconomic trends and racial prejudices pushed Americans toward black teas from Ceylon and India. Facing a glut, Japanese merchants aggressively marketed sencha on their home and imperial markets, transforming it into the icon of Japanese culture that it remains today.

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Robert Hellyer is Professor of History at Wake Forest University. A historian of early modern and modern Japan, his most recent monograph is Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups (Columbia UP, 2021), published in Japanese as ロバート・ヘリヤー 著、村山美雪 訳『海を越えたジャパン・ティー緑茶の日米交易史と茶商人たち』(原書房, 2022年). He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, and has also written about the Meiji Restoration, Pacific trade patterns during the Tokugawa period, and foreign relations in early modern Japan.

Ulrike Schaede is Professor of Japanese Business at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy and the director of JFIT. Her research focuses on Japan's changing corporate strategies, including business culture, change management, and business organization. Her 2020 book "The Business Reinvention of Japan" analyzes how Japanese companies are responding to the rise of China and the changing global competition.

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