Presented by Penguin

This Penguin Classic is performed by Japanese actor Sadao Ueda, known for his appearances in Spectre, London has Fallen and What We Did on Our Vacation.

For a generation adjusting painfully towards the needs of today’s industrial and commercial society, Asia came to represent an alternative vision of the good life: aesthetically austere, socially aristocratic, and imbued with spirituality. The Publication of Tea was originally written in British and sought to address the inchoate yearnings of disaffected Westerners. In a flash of motivation, Okakura saw the fact that formal tea party as applied in New England was a distant cousin of japan tea ceremony, which East and Western world had thus “met in the tea-cup.”