Abstract: Domestic research on Japanese tea ceremony culture seems to lack two perspectives, namely, the perspective of Japanese history and the perspective of the overall structure of Japanese culture. Tea ceremony was formed from the middle and late Muromachi period to the Azuchi-Momoyama period in Japan. It is a product of troubled times and has an obvious tendency of seclusion. Tea ceremony has the characteristics of non-routine, sociability, etiquette, and spirituality. It occupies a non-mainstream position in the overall structure of Japanese culture. It is hard to call tea ceremony a representative of Japanese culture. It is also hard to say that “idle silence” and “dead silence” are the mainstream aesthetic consciousness of the Japanese. Nevertheless, tea ceremony still plays a special social role in Japanese social culture. The investigation of tea ceremony culture in this paper may have some enlightenment for the future study of Japanese culture.

Key words: tea ceremony culture, Warring States period, non-routine, bipolar structure