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

Abstract

Narrating the history of Japanese green tea, once commonly consumed by Americans with “milk and sugar,” Robert Hellyer masterfully describes processes of transnational mercantile exchange spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where East Asian and Anglo-American capitalistic practices neatly intersected. Green with Milk and Sugar shines with vivid descriptions of individual American and Japanese merchants heavily invested in commerce and buffeted by vicissitudes in US-Japan relations during a volatile century of interactions. Illuminating photographs, descriptive advertisements, and product labels paint a striking picture of the brokers and marketing practices for Japanese green tea. Hellyer found inspiration in his great-great-grandfather Frederick, who profited from Chicago's centrality in the 1880s tea trade. Creating a US market for green tea mobilized transpacific and transatlantic networks of tea dealers, transporters, and producers; the text thus employs a “commodity chain” approach to “illuminate the intertwined domestic and international story of how Japanese green tea became so prevalent in American cups” from the nineteenth century until the 1940s, when World War II interrupted supply chains and rendered Japanese commodities unpatriotic (4).Hellyer's book echoes the global contexts of recent commodity histories, simultaneously showing how the American Midwest became “the center of Japanese green tea consumption” as lower prices helped “democratize” the commodity and how increased agricultural production of exportable green tea influenced Japanese consumer tastes that now associate sencha (a loose-leaf form of green tea) with Japanese national identity.Around 1870, Japanese diplomatic officials noted a puzzling fad—Americans expected color-enhanced tea. A new, US-centric commodity arose in Nagasaki, where Chinese experts prepared Japanese green tea on an industrial scale to suit American tastes by pan-firing leaves and adding Prussian Blue coloring in a Sino-Japanese coproduction catering to American consumer aesthetics. New York tea retailers then marketed the “Japan Tea” brand. Chicago, a commercial hub with rail networks reaching both coasts, fashioned the Midwest into “America's definite ‘green tea country’ . . . a place where green tea became ‘democratized,’ within the reach of all social classes” (92).Hellyer intriguingly claims that “the making of Japan Tea into a successful brand on the US market provides one explanation for how a diffuse political polity . . . emerged to become a more unified Japanese nation” (89). He argues that the “Japan-US commodity chain . . . brought fresh employment opportunities and thus avenues for personal reinvention across Japanese society, helping salve the socioeconomic and political wounds of the war and the dislocations brought by Meiji government reforms” (54). The city of Sunpu, later known as Shizuoka, featured intensive tea cultivation by former samurai elites, who lost status amid the new Meiji regime's reforms but now gained a source of wealth. Local wealthy elites provided capital for local tea farms, preventing the growth of large-scale monopolies in tea production and allowing a strong, regional process of capital accumulation. In 1874, Japan's government extended bureaucratic support to expand tea globally; the Ministry of Home Affairs created an Industrial Promotion Bureau with a Tea Office to diversify tea exports, including black tea.Darker factors emerged to threaten Japanese tea's global expansion as Anglo-American rivalries grew in tea industries. Since the late nineteenth century, US newspaper advertisements had proliferated racist imagery of “dirty” East Asian “coolies,” with British tea plantations in India and Ceylon marketing wares emphasizing white superiority, like the Monsoon brand, produced by “civilized labor and intelligence,” and the Blue Cross brand, “carefully prepared under white supervision—[while] China and Japan teas are not” (126–27). Racialized discourse in advertisements attempted to dissuade white American middle-class consumers from consuming green tea and to switch to “civilized” black tea. By the 1920s, Japanese tea suffered multiple setbacks in the US market, including perceptions of a lower-quality product, while South Asian black teas made inroads with lobbies promoting cheaper India and Ceylon black teas. Its near death knell arrived with imperial Japan's 1941 attack on the United States and its colonies.Deeper analyses of fraught American relationships with East Asian immigrant groups, especially laborers from China and Japan, would have been welcome, along with descriptions emphasizing social class for Japanese immigrants, who initially worked in agricultural professions or gardening and later developed small businesses, including groceries importing tea. However, Green with Milk and Sugar is a well-researched, immensely captivating story of a now commonplace Japanese commodity with deep historical roots enthusiastically rediscovered by Americans. Over a roughly century-long transnational history, Hellyer concludes that the emergence of new sencha tea production and consumption patterns in Japan was “intimately connected to major developments both within Japan and in the American market” (198).