Korean Tea Bowls ( Kōrai chawan ) and Japanese Wabicha : A Story of Acculturation in Premodern Northeast Asia

Abstract

For more than two centuries from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, one particular item dominated the fashion of wabicha , a form of tea ceremony, in Japan: tea bowls obtained from Korea, commonly called Kōrai chawan (高麗茶碗), or Korean tea bowls. Korean tea bowls held the key to the evolving aesthetic of wabicha , which was highly refined by Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591) and inherited by other eminent tea masters in Tokugawa Japan. Despite their prominence in the world of wabicha , Korean tea bowls have not often been studied. This article traces the cultural trajectory of Korean tea bowls from the perspective of trade and piracy, border-crossing cultural flow, classification, and acculturation. It then explores the question of what made Korean tea bowls so popular in the world of Japanese wabicha by focusing on four factors: the culture of the upper-class samurai, tea, and Zen Buddhism; the exoticism of Korean tea bowls; commercialism and political power; and the household profession of tea masters. Korean tea bowls, which symbolized the beauty of wabicha , served as a catalyst for a move away from a Chinese-centered aesthetics of tea culture in medieval times and toward a Japan-centered aesthetics of tea culture from the mid-eighteenth century onward.