From Tea Houses to Izakayas: Social Interaction in Japanese Hospitality Establishments

Purpose– Recent discussions of value-in-use from the perspective of service dominant logic have focused on the customer’s determination of value and control of the value creation process. The purpose of this paper is to extend these discussions by exploring the value creation process in the Japanese tea ceremony and in thekaiseki ryoristyle of Japanese cuisine, which is based on the Japanese tea ceremony.Design/methodology/approach– A historical analysis is used to describe the history of the Japanese tea ceremony in Japan and its influence on Japanese culture. key principles underlying the Japanese tea ceremony and their relationship to Zen Buddhism are summarized and the ways in which these principles are reflected in the service provided by Japanese restaurants are explored.Findings– The two elite restaurants examined in this analysis have designed their service experience to reflect four principles of the tea ceremony: the expression of seasonal feelings, the use of everyday items, ritualized social interactions, and the equality of host and guest. Given these principles, we argue that the tea ceremony and restaurants based on this ceremony imply a co-creation process that is different in three important ways from the process discussed in the co-creation literature. First, the tea ceremony involves dual experiential-value-creation processes. Both the master and the customer experience value-in-use during the delivery ofkaisekicuisine, and the value-in-use each receives is critically dependent on that received by the other. Second, the degree to which value-in-use is created for both parties (the customer and the master) depends on the master’s customization of the service experience based on his knowledge of the customer and that customer’s with the tea ceremony,kaiseki ryoricuisine and Japanese culture.Research limitations/implications– We hypothesize that the dual experiential-value-creation model is potentially relevant whenever the service process contains an element of artistic creation. Potential examples include concerts, recitals, theatre performances and art exhibitions, as well as more mundane situations in which the service provider derives value-in-use from aesthetic appreciations of the service provider’s art.Originality/value– Recent discussions of value co-creation argue that the customer controls the value creation process and the determination of value. The authors argue that the tea ceremony can serve as a metaphor for value co-creation in service contexts where the customer’s value creation process depends on the creation of value-in-use by the service provider.