Early Japanese Visitor Describes “Competitive and Unhealthy” European World (1872, Iwakura Embassy)

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  1. *”The average Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea-ceremony but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields.”*

    Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906

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