Five Japanese war brides - Teruko MacKenzie, Chizue Juarez, Setsuko Banks, Atsuko Yamamoto and Himiko Hamilton - all emigrated to the United States with their American servicemen husbands. It is a virtually undocumented historial fact that communities totalling 100,00 native Japanese women emigrated with their husbands to remote outposts such as Fort Riley, Kansas after the war. Tea takes place in just such a community where the characters reflect and share their traumatic experiences of living in a country devastated by war, their courtship and marriages that brought them to new lives in a foreign country. With humor and sadness, they share their stories of struggle to create lives in this new country.