Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups by Robert Hellyer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups by Robert Hellyer William Wayne Farris Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups. By Robert Hellyer. Columbia University Press, 2021. 304 pages. ISBN: 9780231199100 (hardcover, also available as e-book). Did you know that three early American presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln—drank green tea? This intriguing fact is only one small way by which master storyteller Robert Hellyer draws readers into Green with Milk and Sugar. This outstanding book chronicles the tea trade between Japan and the United States over more than a century, from 1858 to about 1960. The author's interest in the tea trade is personal, as his family acted as tea exporters from Japan to the United States from about 1880 until the 1970s. Yet at the same time that Hellyer makes contributions to Japanese and US history, he more importantly takes a significant step toward elucidating world tea commerce through a deft accounting of [End Page 400] events in China, India, and Great Britain as well. Green with Milk and Sugar is really a world history firmly anchored in sources spanning Europe, Asia, and North America. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to what Hellyer terms "teaways" (p. 3), meaning the methods in which the beverage was consumed and displayed in society. After a brief history of tea in premodern Japan, the author describes the tea trade between China and Great Britain and ultimately the American colonies. Under the Canton system, the British surrendered silver to Qing China in return for both black and green teas as well as silk and porcelain. Once the United States was formed in 1787, the new country took control of its own trade. Even at this initial stage, US consumers drank more green than black tea, despite the Chinese use of pigments and other additives (such as prussic acid) in the former. From 1830 to 1836, the amount of tea sent to the United States doubled. As the new nation expanded westward, pioneers took tea with them. Another surge in tea consumption followed the Opium Wars (1839–1842). In chapter 2, "Civil Wars," Hellyer constructs parallel narratives of the internal conflicts that wracked Japan and the United States in the 1860s. After the unequal treaties opened some Japanese ports beginning in 1858, American importers (including one William Alt, who would eventually hire the Hellyer brothers around 1868) worked with Japanese brokers to ship tea to the United States. The author describes the firing of tea leaves in pans or baskets in Japan to make ready for the long journey across the Pacific and beyond. Surprisingly, Chinese experts provided supervision for about a thousand Japanese workers—men, women, and children—at first in Nagasaki. During the US Civil War, Chicago became a major rail hub, shipping 1.5 million pounds of mostly Japanese green tea to the thirsty residents of Illinois. Tea was dispensed to Union soldiers as provisions, while tariffs on this commodity helped pay for the war effort. By 1865, Japanese green tea was so common that Americans dubbed it "Japan Tea" (p. 52). The parallel narratives continue in chapter 3, which covers the period until about 1880. After the US Civil War, the federal government lowered tariffs, and Japanese and Chinese teas were sold in the United States at near parity. Yet Japanese tea carried an image in advertisements and trading cards that was decidedly more positive than that of the Chinese beverage. Both countries used additives in their tea leaves, but the adverse publicity seems mostly to have afflicted the Chinese. Illustrations for "Japan Tea" showed Japanese women in traditional garb with scenes from the archipelago, while the US temperance movement portrayed what it called "the Heathen Chinee" (p. 61). The Page Act restricted Chinese immigration to the United States as early as 1875, even as the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado served to boost the Japanese image starting in 1885. Still, US imports of tea should be kept in perspective with those of coffee (only 59 million pounds for the former versus 363 million pounds for the latter in 1879). Hellyer argues...