Japan as a Competing Commercial Empire: Japanese Green Tea & the US Market, 1860 to 1940

Abstract
In 1860, Japan became the first state to challenge China’s centuries-old monopoly of the world tea market by beginning to ship its teas to the United States. Over the subsequent three decades, Japanese green tea came to occupy half of the US market, proving especially popular in the US Midwest. In the 1890s, competition on the world tea market increased as large-scale production emerged in British colonial India and Ceylon, as well as in the Dutch East Indies. The United States, one of the largest tea consuming nations, became a key zone of competition, as Japanese merchants attempted to hold the market share of their green teas amidst a flood of black tea imports from India, Ceylon, and Java.

This presentation will examine how, at the expense of Chinese varieties, Japanese green tea came to capture much of the US market in the decades after 1860. It will detail the emergence of a defined “Japan Tea” brand and its subsequent competition with India, Ceylon and Javanese black teas for a place at American tables. It will also examine how Japan added Taiwanese teas to its export portfolio after the island became a part of the Japanese Empire in 1895. Finally, it will explore the factors within the United States and Japan that in the 1930s, led to the decline of Japanese tea exports to the United States and by implication, the diminished stature of Japan as a tea exporting empire.

About the Speaker
Robert Hellyer is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. A historian of early modern and modern Japan, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard before moving to Wake Forest University in 2005. His previous research on Edo period foreign relations includes the monograph, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).