Green with Milk and Sugar

Reviewed by: Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups by Robert Hellyer Catherine L. Phipps (bio) Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups. By Robert Hellyer. Columbia University Press, 2021. xiv, 283 pages. $32.00, cloth; $31.99, E-book. In Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups, Robert Hellyer skillfully interweaves the history of two countries by focusing on a product that is iconic of one and has a forgotten past in the other. In recovering the story of how green tea came to be a popular beverage in the United States in the late nineteenth century, before it was replaced by black teas following World War II, Hellyer traces the commodity from its planting in Japanese fields to its consumption in American homes and then shows how the exchange shaped Japanese tea-drinking habits in turn. Throughout, Hellyer brings his own family's participation in this trade to light. The result is a commercial, social, and personal account of the complex ways that Americans and Japanese have long influenced one another's everyday lives. [End Page 221] Although Hellyer does not refer to this book as a global history, it clearly reflects a "global imaginary," which The Global Turn explains is a sensibility that "includes nation-states, but also a huge array of nonstate actors, organizations, collectivities, processes, relations, ways of knowing, and modes of interaction across, between, and within national and transnational contexts." More simply, "[a]dopting a global imaginary means appreciating that what happens in one part of the world affects and influences what happens in other parts of the world." 1 Green with Milk and Sugar displays an inherent understanding of such global thinking. This book is Hellyer's second monograph, coming more than a decade after his first, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640–1868 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). In timing, content, and contribution to the field, these two works can serve to bookend the trajectory of the global turn in Japan studies to date. Defining Engagement helped to move the field past longstanding myths of Tokugawa Japan's seclusion to demonstrate the country had a greater level of engagement with the world than was previously understood. It examined Tokugawa-era foreign relations and economies from the vantage of two domains at the country's margins: Satsuma, at the southeastern end of Kyushu, and the island of Tsushima, located between Japan and Korea. By examining the structure and practice of Japan's foreign relations and trade through these largely independent domains, the book demonstrated that the country's engagement with the emerging global economy began at least a century before the treaty port era. The book did what it claimed to do, which was put this story in "global context." Hellyer's main focus was on the internal dynamics of the domains and the shogunate as they related to external challenges and opportunities rather than their interactions with the outside world per se. As Ryūtō Shimada wrote in his 2012 review of Defining Engagement: to be "fully global," the book would need to provide "a reciprocal investigation of the ways in which changes in Japan impacted foreign countries—how, for example, changes in local and central government policy in Japan affected the composition of items traded internationally." Shimada recognized that "widening a national history to the point where it qualifies as global history requires extremely time-consuming research and a sophisticated methodology." 2 Shimada further stated that Hellyer would be better poised to do this in the transnational tea study he was already formulating. [End Page 222] As discussions about "globalization" were starting to take place, many scholars, including in the Japan field, spent much of the 1990s (when Hellyer was a graduate student and writing the dissertation that would become his first book) questioning national frameworks and identities, rethinking area studies and Asian regionalism, using new interdisciplinary methods, and employing alternative geographies, such as situating studies around ocean basins. It was not until the end of the decade that articles and book reviews in this journal, for example, were regularly employing terms like "global," "globalization

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