[KS] Korean impact on Japanese Tea Ceremony

Kenneth Robinson anagosama at hotmail.com
Thu Aug 2 10:11:19 EDT 2012


Dear Colleagues,
 
Lauren Deutsch helpfully brings to our attention a Japanese tea ceremony blog that came into view on another listserve a few days ago. 
 
I have not had time to carefully read the entire, long entry on Korean influences on the Japanese tea ceremony, and do not now have time to comment, except to note two points.
 
First is the author's comment below:
 
"But another thing which most non-scholars do not know is that Sakai and Hakata were NOT part of the country of Japan until 1595, when Hideyoshi ordered their moats filled in and their walls torn down (and their inhabitants either killed outright or scattered out into the general population to become Japanese citizens by default). For before 1595, these two cities were Korean city-states on Japanese soil. This thesis has stood unquestioned and unopposed by Japanese archaeologists and sociologists at least since the 1970s (which was when I was first made aware of it at a scholarly lecture in Kyoto in 1978); ..."
 
Japanese sources and early ChosOn-period Korean sources clearly show that Hakata was part of Japan, was administered by Japanese officials, and was home to Japanese people, including samurai, merchants, and Buddhist monks. Hakata was not independent of the Muromachi bakufu. The city was in Chikuzen Province, to which the Muromachi bakufu appointed a provincial governor. Scholarship by Japanese historians is very clear in demonstrating that Japanese samurai families administered the city in different ways at different times in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Certainly, the Muromachi bakufu's weakness beyond the capital and the home province of Yamashiro, especially after the Onin-Bunmei War of the late 1460s and 1470s, enabled elites in Hakata to enjoy distance from central government power, but that distance never gave rise to a "city-state" or to a "Korean city-state." And in the second half of the 1580s Hideyoshi promoted the reconstruction of Hakata after the fires of war had destroyed a large swath of the city. The comment that residents of Hakata "bec[a]me Japanese by default" in the 1590s would surely surprise those historians who know Hakata's history best.

The history of Sakai is more problematic given the paucity of sources. However, Japanese documents from the mid- and late-sixteenth century identify officials appointed to Sakai by a government in Kyoto. That is, central governments in the second half of the sixteenth century were keen to exercise control in that city. 
 
Second, the discussion of ChosOn-Ming China relations in the fifteenth century will benefit from consideration of Don Clark's chapter in The Cambridge History of China, as well as from Korean-language scholarship.
 
 
Ken Robinson
 
 




Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2012 00:49:00 -0700
From: lwdeutsch at earthlink.net
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Subject: [KS] Korean impact on Japanese Tea Ceremony

Dear List Members:

For the past 27 years I have been a student of Japanese Tea Ceremony (Urasenke School) and have been wondering about the Korean influences on it. The recently retired Grand Master Genshutsu Sen (Hounsai, Soshitsu Sen XVI, informally (but not privately) said that he know that his ancestors had some Korean heritage. We know, too, that the fabled Raku ceramics lineage is easily traceable to Korea during the time of Hideyoshi. But there many be, for example, a Korean source of the kaiseki meal featuring 2 soups and 3 side dishes.

Daniel Burkus, an independent scholar of tea history living in Korea who traces the roots of Rikyu’s chanoyu, has written a piece about it in his blog http://chanoyu-to-wa.tumblr.com. I am wondering if anyone would like to comment / expand on his essay. In advance, thank you.
-- 
Lauren W. Deutsch
835 S. Lucerne Blvd., #103
Los Angeles CA 90005
Tel 323 930-2587  Cell 323 775-7454
E lwdeutsch at earthlink.net
 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20120802/0bed8196/attachment.html>


More information about the Koreanstudies mailing list