Benn, James A. “Tea Comes to Japan: Eisai’s Kissa Yōjōki.” In Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History, 145–71. University of Hawai’i Press, 2015.
Chapter(s) from Hellyer, Robert I. Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
Holtzman, Jon. 2018. “The Weakness of Sweetness: Masculinity and Confectionary in Japan.” Food, Culture & Society 21 (3): 280–95. doi:10.1080/15528014.2018.1451037.
Holtzman, Jon. 2018. “The Weakness of Sweetness: Masculinity and Confectionary in Japan.” Food, Culture & Society 21 (3): 280–95. doi:10.1080/15528014.2018.1451037.
Kushner, B. (2012). “Sweetness and Empire: Sugar Consumption in Imperial Japan.” In Francks, P., Hunter, J., eds., The Historical Consumer. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230367340_6
Okakura Kakuzō. The Book of Tea. 1906.
Souza, George Bryan. “Hinterlands, Commodity Chains, and Circuits in Early Modern Asian History: Sugar in Qing China and Tokugawa Japan.” In Mizushima et al, eds. Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2015
Surak, Kristin. “Making Tea, Making Japan.” YouTube.
Tsay, Lillian. “Feminising the ‘Modern’ Sweetness: Gender and Western‐Style Confectionery in Interwar Japan.” Gender & History 34, no. 3 (2022): 859-880.
Yang, Timothy M. A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.
Cotton/Denim/Indigo/Silk
Cliffe, Sheila. The Social Life of Kimono: Japanese Fashion Past and Present. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Gluckman, Dale Carolyn and Sharon Sadako Takeda. When Art became Fashion: Kosoda in Edo-period Japan. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992. [good general introduction to developments of textile culture in Edo period, including sumptuary codes and their effects]
Hall, Jenny. Japan Beyond the Kimono: Innovation and Tradition in the Textile Industry. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
Hanley, Susan. “The Material Culture: Stability in Transition.” In Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, 447-469. Princeton University Press, 1986.
Hanley, Susan B. Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Hauser, William B. Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Ōsaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Keet, Philomena. “Making New Vintage Jeans in Japan: Relocating Authenticity.” In Luvaas and Eicher, eds. The Anthropology of Dress and Fashion: A Reader. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts 2019.
LeCain, Timothy J. “The Silkworm: The Innovative Insects behind Japanese Modernization.” In The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Namba, T. (2018). School Uniform Reforms in Modern Japan. In: Pyun, K., Wong, A. (eds) Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi-org.wooster.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97199-5_5
Osakabe, Y. (2018). Dressing Up During the Meiji Restoration: A Perspective on Fukusei (Clothing Reform). In: Pyun, K., Wong, A. (eds) Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi-org.wooster.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97199-5_2
Riello, Giorgio and Prasannan Parthasarathi. The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. (2 chapters focus on cotton production in early modern Japan)
Tanimoto, Masayuki. “Introduction and Diffusion: Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Early Modern Industrial Japan.” Technology and Culture 62, no. 2 (2021): 423-441. (useful comparison of silk and cotton technologies spreading in Japan)
Kayoko, Fujita. “Japan Indianized.” The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850 (2011): 181.
Tea
Hellyer, Robert I. Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.[1]
Sugar
Holtzman, Jon. “To Love Sugar One Does Not Have to Eat It.” Gastronomica 1 August 2016; 16 (3): 44–55. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2016.16.3.44
Ka, Chih-ming. Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan: Land Tenure, Development, and Dependency, 1895-1945. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. [has two chapters focused on sugar production in Taiwan]
Kō, Ochiai. “The Shift to Domestic Sugar and the Ideology of ‘The National Interest’”. In Economic Thought in Early Modern Japan. Leiden: Brill, 2010. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004183834.i-298.33
Kushner, B. (2012). “Sweetness and Empire: Sugar Consumption in Imperial Japan.” In Francks, P., Hunter, J., eds., The Historical Consumer. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230367340_6
Mitsuda, T. “‘Sweets Reimagined’: The Construction of Confectionary Identities, 1890–1930.” In Niehaus, A., Walravens, T. (eds) Feeding Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50553-4_3
Roberts, Luke Shepherd. “Cooking up a Country: Sugar, Eggs, and Gunpowder, 1759-1868.” In Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa, 177-197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Souza, George Bryan. “Hinterlands, Commodity Chains, and Circuits in Early Modern Asian History: Sugar in Qing China and Tokugawa Japan.” In Mizushima et al, eds. Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Tsay, Lilian. “The Empire’s Sweet Tooth: The Making of Western-Style Confectionery in Colonial Taiwan.” Gastronomica 1 November 2023; 23 (4): 42–54.
Xu, “From the Atlantic to the Manchu: Taiwan Sugar and the Early Modern World, 1630s-1720s,” Journal of World History 2022
Indigo and dyes
Ricketts, Rowland. 2016. “The Blue Thread: Connecting Community through Indigo in the US and Japan.” TEXTILE 14 (1): 110–21. doi:10.1080/14759756.2016.1142789.
Goble, Andrew Edmund. “War and Injury: The Emergence of Wound Medicine in Medieval Japan.” Monumenta Nipponica 60, no. 3 (2005): 297–338. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25066385.
Masatoshi Amano, “Industrial development in the daimyô domain and economic modernization of Japan – With special references to the Awa indigo industry in the province of Awa-Tokushima from the Tokugawa period to the Meiji period,” Japan and the World Economy, Volume 11, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 225-241, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0922-1425(98)00049-8.
Yoshioka, S. (2010). History of Japanese colour: traditional natural dyeing methods. Colour: Design & Creativity, 5(4), 1-7.
Video – “In Japan, A Textile Dyer Sticks with Tradition” (Great Big Story, YouTube) [there’s also a Japanese documentary — https://youtu.be/SoGwk7OQ-DM?si=bzqAEwWHSc8BXc5r]
Rice
Francks, Penelope. “Rice and the Path of Economic Development in Japan.” In Bray, ed. Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Sources on Production
Guth, Christine. Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan: Materials, Makers, and Mastery. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.
On Economy and Culture
Andreeva, Anna. “Economies of the sacred in premodern Japan.” In Abu-Er-Rub et al, eds. Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Francks, Penelope. “The Path of Economic Development from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Economic Miracle.” In The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History. New York: Routledge, 2018. [a good brief overview – 12 pages]
Pitelka, Morgan. Spectacular accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016.
Generally Useful Works on Material Culture
Lubar, Steven and W. David Kingery, eds. History from Things: Essays on Material Culture. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
Documentary
Documentary on Kyoto https://youtu.be/y8AO98bkjQ0?si=PyoGkuqVYvyAfTaW
[1] “Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas. In Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. These national partialities, Robert Hellyer reveals, are deeply entwined. Tracing the trans-Pacific tea trade from the eighteenth century onward, Green with Milk and Sugar shows how the interconnections between Japan and the United States have influenced the daily habits of people in both countries. Hellyer explores the forgotten American penchant for Japanese green tea and how it shaped Japanese tastes. In the nineteenth century, Americans favored green teas, which were imported from China until Japan developed an export industry centered on the United States. The influx of Japanese imports democratized green tea: Americans of all classes, particularly Midwesterners, made it their daily beverage -which they drank hot, often with milk and sugar. In the 1920s, socioeconomic trends and racial prejudices pushed Americans toward black teas from Ceylon and India. Facing a glut, Japanese merchants aggressively marketed sencha on the home and imperial markets, transforming it into an icon of Japanese culture. Featuring lively stories of the people involved in the tea trade-including samurai turned tea farmers and Hellyer’s own ancestors-Green with Milk and Sugar offers not only a social and commodity history of tea in the United States and Japan but also new insight into how national customs have profound if often hidden international dimensions