Chanoyu, commonly known in the Anglophone world as the “tea ceremony,” was characterized by its most famous sixteenth-century practitioner Sen no Rikyû as nothing more than “boiling water for tea.” Yet like much writing on tea, such statements hide the true nature of a cultural practice that since the fifteenth century has been a driving force behind the production and consumption of both imported and domestic luxury goods in Japan. This paper examines the culture of tea from the perspective of import substitution and innovation. Import substitution, as Maxine Berg has defined it, refers to the replacement of like with like, a luxury article that becomes too scarce or costly being replaced by a domestic product that simulates its appearance, but not its mode of manufacture. But here I complicate the notion, first, by suggesting how it might involve the replacement of like with unlike, and, second, by considering the processes through which innovative goods are validated, in turn generating new imports and domestic substitutes that may come to assume the same luxury status as the articles they replaced.