Robert Hellyer begins Green with Milk and Sugar with a challenge to presentist views of American and Japanese tea cultures. Contrary to national habits in recent decades, he writes, Americans once drank more green tea than black; while sencha, the variety of green tea most common in daily life in Japan today, was for decades produced primarily for export. How, he asks, did those tastes in tea change so drastically? By answering that question through a layered, ocean-crossing story of tea production, trade, marketing, and consumption in Japan and the United States, he not only tells a transnational history of a dietary staple but also highlights the contingency of cultural practices that can seem transhistorical.
Hellyer traces the meandering path of what he calls American “teaways” from colonial times to the mid-twentieth century. Changing patterns and habits of consumption were continually shaped by factors such as developments in the tea industry in modernizing Japan, changing American attitudes toward tea-producing countries, competing marketing campaigns by purveyors of Japanese green teas and importers of black teas from Ceylon and India, and political pressures for revision of US trade regulations. Hellyer integrates this story with explanations of trends in the production and consumption of tea in Japan, revealing the mutual influence of developments on either side of the Pacific.
While showing how the tea trade was shaped by international relations and technological progress, Hellyer anchors these overarching narratives with detailed stories of individual businessmen, including his own paternal ancestors, who tried their hands in the tea trade—and whose letters home make for some of the many fascinating sources Hellyer relies on to make his arguments. Throughout, we learn about cultures surrounding the consumption of tea (such as the recipe for a green tea punch with sugar, cream, and champagne), popular formats for tea parties, and changing gender associations of types of tea and ways of drinking it.
After laying a foundation of the politics, economics, and cultures of tea in early modern Japan and colonial America, Hellyer turns his focus to his main story: the connections between US-Japanese trade and American teaways. The Hellyer family enters the story in the late nineteenth century, when American demand for green tea from Japan began to stimulate the industry there, and businessmen from Europe and the United States went to Japan to make their fortunes by quenching that thirst. The story bounces back and forth between Japan and the United States, elucidating mutually formative industrial and consumer trends. For instance, Hellyer shows the impact of anti-Chinese sentiment on American interest in clearly identified “Japan Tea.” He then describes the boost to tea production caused by the social dislocations of the early Meiji period, demonstrating that people as socially disparate as former samurai and river-crossing porters made redundant by the construction of a bridge sought new careers as tea farmers. These trends combined to produce a plentiful supply and enthusiastic consumption of green tea in the United States.
The answer to Hellyer's opening query becomes clear in the final two chapters, which show the marketing success of black tea from India and Ceylon chipping away at demand for Japanese sencha. The Asia-Pacific War brought a sudden decline in exports and a green tea glut in Japan. The Japan Tea Association responded by promoting tea no longer bound for American households to a growing urban Japanese market, advertising it in terms of its health benefits and as a way to support the nation at a time of crisis. The conclusion notes the recent resurgence of sencha's popularity among Americans, whose tastes and interests continue to change, reinforcing Hellyer's arguments about the connection of the tea trade to innovative business ventures, international relations, and cultural trends.
This book defies easy categorization. A history of business and trade told by following a specific commodity chain, it is contextualized within international relations and domestic political economies in two countries, and enlivened with cultural history, individual biography, and family stories. It is a valuable entry in the growing body of work exploring the ways our food choices are related to social trends, scientific and industrial developments, and political concerns, as well as international relations.
The book is both comparative and transnational, placing separate but simultaneous developments in American and Japanese history side-by-side while also considering diplomatic and trade relations between the two nations, all based on extensive archival research in both countries. It will be useful to scholars of food history and both Japanese and American studies, and it is very accessible to nonspecialists. In fact, I almost lost my copy to a house guest who tried to abscond with it after picking it up in my living room and handed it over only after I promised to pass it along to them after writing this review. Not only will I share the book with my visitor (as promised), I also recommend it to anyone interested in tea or the ways that international trade continually transforms local cultures.
