Books published by publisher Charles E.Tuttle

The true folk legend, as distinguished from fairy tale or literary embellishment is one of the sure keys to a peoples beliefs, customs and way of thinking. This volume presents a representative collection of over one hundred Japanese folk legends. Each legend is carefully annotated for the student and scholar and a full bibliography is provided. Fortunately, the scholarly attributes of the book are not allowed to intrude between the general reader and his enjoyment of the legends themselves. The authentically Japanese illustrations by Miss Yoshie Nuguchi provide yet another delightful aspect of a book that is sure to please both the scholar and the general reader alike. Endlessly engrossing, and done with elegance and comprehension, anyone interested in mythology and the legends of Japan should have this book.

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism--Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste...