Winner of the 2006 Shimada Prize from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, Kyoto, Japan

Winner of the 2006 John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies

Chikubushima, a sacred island north of the ancient capital of Kyoto, attracted the attention of Japan's rulers in the Momoyama period (1568-1615) and became a repository of their art, including a lavishly decorated building dedicated to the worship of Benzaiten. In this meticulous and lucid study, Andrew Watsky keenly illustrates how...

This innovative book narrates the history of a single object?a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries?and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed from a humble vessel into a celebrated object used in chanoyu (often translated in English as tea ceremony), renowned for its aesthetic and functional qualities, and awarded the name Chigusa.

Few extant tea utensils possess the...