Latest / Specialty Matcha Podcast / Interview with Tezumi, David

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Interview with Tezumi, David · Specialty Matcha Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast.
• 0:02
  My name is Ryan. This is Michael Ho Sungjun.
• 0:04
  Hello. Hello.
• 0:05
  Who also goes by Sam and we're the cofounders of Sanko Matcha
• 0:09
  Products. Yeah.
• 0:10
  We launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey and
• 0:12
  matcha, share startup stories and interview experts.
• 0:15
  And today we have David from Tizumi joining our podcast.
• 0:18
  Hello, David. Hello.
• 0:21
  Thank you for having me on. Thank you for agreeing to come
• 0:23
  on. We've been fans of your content
• 0:26
  for for quite a while. And even in the early days of
• 0:28
  starting this company, your blog was one of the first places I
• 0:31
  went to go read because you really were one of the few
• 0:34
  companies that I could find that were treating matcha like
• 0:38
  through a specialty lens with single cultivars, single
• 0:41
  origins, sort of unique takes. So you guys were a super early
• 0:44
  player to that. I'd love to learn a little bit
• 0:46
  more around the founding inspiration of Tizumi and and
• 0:50
  how you've grown the company well.
• 0:51
  Maybe first of all, thank you for reading my blogs.
• 0:54
  It feels like on my end I just type stuff and it goes on the
• 0:57
  website and I have no idea if anyone sees it like those
• 0:59
  metrics. But still, it's nice to know
• 1:01
  that people actually read what I spend hours typing.
• 1:06
  So I think like a lot of people, I approach Matcha from a
• 1:09
  specialty lens first, from like a specialty coffee perspective.
• 1:15
  I got into March 2018 and I was into like Kong Future and stuff
• 1:20
  at the same time. Oh, nice, nice.
• 1:23
  And so seeing the way that people were treating specialty
• 1:26
  in Kong Future and there wasn't quite the same level of
• 1:31
  specificity of transparency on the matcha side.
• 1:36
  Fast forward a year and Tessani was sort of being birthed
• 1:41
  towards the second-half of 2019 when I as a broke college
• 1:46
  student, wanted AQ sue for seeping Zentia.
• 1:49
  And you can find, you know, affordable guy one easily.
• 1:54
  But finding an affordable Q sue that isn't shipped from Japan or
• 1:58
  isn't like second hand and really dirty was a bit of a
• 2:00
  stretch for me. So after finding some for
• 2:04
  myself, I thought, well, I can I can sell some off to make some
• 2:07
  cash as a as a broke college student.
• 2:10
  And then my brother got involved and we started formalizing it at
• 2:13
  an Etsy store. And then a few months later my
• 2:17
  brother's friend Ryan got involved.
• 2:19
  And then from there things really took off.
• 2:21
  So the three of us really started TASMI in full steam in
• 2:25
  the beginning of 2020, which is which is funny considering what
• 2:29
  happened the rest of that year. Great timing.
• 2:32
  Yeah, yeah, fantastic timing. So we were all in on on vintage
• 2:37
  tea Ware originally because vintage tea Ware is more
• 2:39
  affordable for, you know, the budding Japanese tea
• 2:42
  connoisseur. So it's vintage kusu, vintage
• 2:44
  chowan. And then we started talking to
• 2:48
  artists and Potters in Japan, sourcing the new tea Ware.
• 2:51
  And then in 2021, we decided it's finally time to do what we
• 2:55
  wanted to do from the start and start selling tea.
• 2:58
  And we approached it from a small farm, small batch, single
• 3:02
  origin, single cultivar sort of approach because these are
• 3:06
  things that I thought were sort of missing from the US domestic
• 3:11
  tea market, Japanese tea market. There's, you know, a lot of
• 3:16
  nameless censure from who knows where in Kyoto.
• 3:19
  But I wanted to know, you know, this is an unshaded censure from
• 3:23
  Mozka of the Ocho Midori cultivar.
• 3:25
  I'm going at so and so elevation, etcetera.
• 3:28
  And so that was my mindset going into it.
• 3:31
  Five years later on the other side, it's having had some time
• 3:34
  steeping in the industry, I've learned that it's more
• 3:36
  complicated than just that. But I still want to maintain all
• 3:40
  of the transparency that we strive to from the start.
• 3:43
  And what were those like early sourcing philosophies like where
• 3:47
  would you guys make compromises? Where were their hard lines and
• 3:50
  sort of like what were you looking for, like products that
• 3:54
  met your own taste preferences or really diverse range of
• 3:58
  flavors or like what was the philosophy there?
• 4:01
  And how did you start it in the first place?
• 4:04
  Yeah. Yeah, we're.
• 4:06
  Curious about that actually. In the beginning, it was a
• 4:09
  little bit of both. I wanted to get teas that
• 4:11
  captured sort of the classic flavor profiles while still
• 4:14
  being single origin, single cultivar.
• 4:16
  And then also try and highlight some of the more innovative
• 4:19
  players in the field. I guess literally in the fields
• 4:22
  making Japanese ulongs and black teas, but black teas of a
• 4:26
  different style than they were making in the, you know, 1800s,
• 4:30
  early 1900s, which was in those days.
• 4:32
  The black teas were like second flush, a second thought for
• 4:35
  export only. But in recent years, as some
• 4:38
  farmers have travelled to China and Taiwan and learned different
• 4:41
  production methods, I wanted to sort of highlight those teas as
• 4:45
  well as people making white tea in Japan.
• 4:47
  Because there's a handful of people who do that and sort of
• 4:52
  try and catch the whole gamut, the whole spectrum of Japanese
• 4:55
  tea in the present day, from the classics to the more sort of
• 4:59
  specialty stuff. And that's how we originally
• 5:01
  sort of envisioned our tea lineup.
• 5:03
  We had our classics and we still do these stuff that I think is
• 5:08
  representative of, or at least a, a classic style or taste of a
• 5:12
  type of tea or region. So we have a sencha from Wasaka.
• 5:15
  We have a Fukamuchi sencha from Yame that's full of roasty,
• 5:19
  toasty notes. We have a matcher from Yame and
• 5:23
  a matcher from Kyoto when we started.
• 5:25
  So getting into contact with farms was fun.
• 5:28
  I will say I owe a lot of it to the Global Japanese Tea
• 5:32
  Organization's Neoncha Marathon. They did work in 2021, which was
• 5:37
  highlighting producers from different regions.
• 5:39
  So some of those producers are who we started working with.
• 5:43
  And then I also sort of discovered some more when I was
• 5:46
  doing my, my sourcing research on the Internet, just seeing
• 5:50
  what the product offerings were and then going from there, the
• 5:55
  barrier to entry because I, I speak more Japanese now than I
• 5:59
  did then. But then I had enough to get by
• 6:01
  contacting farmers. So it was a little bit that made
• 6:04
  it easier so I didn't have to only talk to suppliers who could
• 6:07
  only speak English, which allowed me to read some who were
• 6:11
  not as familiar with the whole export process, but still had
• 6:14
  some fantastic teas. Cool.
• 6:16
  Actually I had no idea about the cross cultural inspiration.
• 6:21
  I I forget where I was listening to this, but you said I think it
• 6:24
  was one of the producers was making Tina Baojong style.
• 6:27
  It's like a northern Taiwanese stranded Oolong style.
• 6:30
  But that's interesting. I I'd never thought of
• 6:33
  contemporary cross culture inspiration.
• 6:38
  And Japanese mita. Yeah, Japanese buy Chad.
• 6:41
  That's and that's an interesting one as well, because most of
• 6:44
  the, the Japanese buy Chad had been tasting tasted distinctly
• 6:48
  Japanese like it was. It didn't taste at all like a, a
• 6:52
  Chinese white tea of any type. But there was 1 producer who I
• 6:56
  don't know, I think he went to, he went over there to, he might
• 6:59
  have gone to Fujian, I forget. But his white tea was distinctly
• 7:04
  more Chinese tasting. The way he picked it, the way he
• 7:07
  withered and processed it. Interesting.
• 7:10
  So that's something that I, I would like to continue to
• 7:13
  support. So one of our like early
• 7:15
  founding statement mission ideas that is written down somewhere
• 7:20
  was that we'd want to support farmers who are innovating, but
• 7:23
  also support those who are preserving and perfecting the
• 7:26
  age-old traditions, because those are sort of the two ends
• 7:29
  of the spectrum. And like, one of those age-old
• 7:32
  traditions is Zaidai, like seed grown teas.
• 7:34
  And I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I love Zai,
• 7:37
  right? I know some of the farmers
• 7:38
  absolutely hate working with Zai, right?
• 7:40
  Because it's a pain because it, you know, you have to do a lot
• 7:43
  more work with it and it doesn't yield quite as much.
• 7:45
  One of the farmers we work with, Mori Sakisan in Mazuka, he's a
• 7:49
  big passionate about Zai and he's been taking over the fields
• 7:52
  of farmers who no longer want to take care of their own Zai to
• 7:56
  say, I'll do it for you. Cool.
• 7:58
  Yeah, it's definitely a pain working with, you know,
• 8:01
  vegetations that doesn't necessarily have.
• 8:04
  You can't really make any predictions.
• 8:07
  Yeah, but that's also what's interesting about it, right?
• 8:11
  Like 'cause it's really, you know, representing its own
• 8:16
  flavor and also the flavor of the tawa.
• 8:18
  And I think that's very beautiful about Zara.
• 8:21
  Yeah, and that zai is seen as like this casual term for all
• 8:24
  seed grown plants. But Uji zai and Shizuoka zai
• 8:27
  tastes quite different because they are descended from
• 8:30
  different lineages of plants in different Chihuahua.
• 8:33
  So this one side I found that I went to him last year and he was
• 8:36
  saying that this field over here is actually Shizuoka Zionai that
• 8:41
  was brought from Shizuoka. And I think it was actually
• 8:44
  seedlings of the yabuquita back in the sort of 70s when the
• 8:49
  yabuquita was all the craze. But getting cultivars was more
• 8:54
  expensive than getting seeds. So if you wanted to get
• 8:57
  something that was like avuquita, instead of buying
• 8:59
  avuquita, you bought the seeds of someone's avuquita plant.
• 9:03
  Interesting. So like, there's a lot of depth
• 9:06
  and intrigue within Zaidai that sort of gets, you know, washed
• 9:11
  when you just call it Zaidai. Because.
• 9:14
  Even our favorite Uji cultivars, your Asahi's Uji Khadi, those
• 9:17
  came purely from Uji Zaidai and Nadi knows as well.
• 9:23
  When Hoodi Ichi team A and cut down all their old fields, they
• 9:26
  picked like 2 plants. These two are fantastic.
• 9:30
  This one's. Got in Okuno yama I think.
• 9:32
  Exactly. Yeah, that's the other one.
• 9:33
  That's interesting, what is the SO?
• 9:35
  I've heard I've had like 2 Zyrai machos.
• 9:40
  My understand. My understanding I think is what
• 9:42
  most people's is. What you said is like a very
• 9:44
  reductive idea. It's like a monolith to me.
• 9:47
  It usually means it's more bitter and astringent and can be
• 9:50
  very floral or fragrant. But like what are some of the
• 9:53
  other? How would you segment some of
• 9:55
  the other variations? Like, what's the nuance within
• 9:58
  Xyride that you've had in a matcha context?
• 10:01
  In a matcha context, it's very limiting because no one makes it
• 10:05
  and it's like a handful of producers who want to experiment
• 10:08
  with this because it's very labour intensive, low yield and
• 10:12
  low demand. Because it makes sense.
• 10:14
  It makes sense. Like it's purely a passion
• 10:16
  project, right? And the other thing that goes
• 10:18
  with that passion project is usually because Zaidai is
• 10:21
  representative of an older style of farming.
• 10:24
  You're sort of getting an older style of taste without as much
• 10:28
  of the intensive fertilization that you'd expect in a super
• 10:30
  modern umami rich matcha. So yeah, it would lean towards
• 10:35
  more aromatics, more florals and more bitterness because of it.
• 10:39
  I think there's an untapped potential here to see what could
• 10:42
  happen if you selected Uji Zaire in the same way that we used to,
• 10:47
  as opposed to just using what Zaire plants are left.
• 10:49
  But again, no one really wants to do this work.
• 10:51
  So we'll see if this passionate farmers who have some spare time
• 10:56
  and some spare fields to see what they can do with it.
• 10:58
  But I'm assuming if if you gave it the same fertilization that
• 11:01
  you give your asahis and you can get something similar because it
• 11:06
  has that potential. And because of the other thing
• 11:09
  with Zaidai, because each plant sort of floods at a different
• 11:12
  time, it encourages hand picking.
• 11:16
  But again, that's more labour intensive than your machine
• 11:18
  picking, so it will. Because it's on a plant to plant
• 11:23
  basis, what organizing labor to do all of that is probably a
• 11:27
  nightmare. Exactly.
• 11:29
  Especially because you basically have to go out each morning and
• 11:32
  go, all right, this plant's ready.
• 11:34
  We'll pick that one today, this one maybe tomorrow, and this one
• 11:36
  maybe next week, which is how it used to be done only like 50 to
• 11:41
  60 years ago. There is.
• 11:43
  I was reading someone's blog about what the that farming
• 11:48
  situation was like in Wasaka in the 70s before the the Haagen
• 11:53
  Dazs boom of culinary matcha export to the West and it was
• 11:57
  like 90% plus of all the plants in in Kyoto prefecture was
• 12:01
  Xilai. Wow, wow.
• 12:04
  And that's that's a huge. Shift in in such a short amount
• 12:07
  of time. At this point, Wazaka didn't
• 12:09
  make any matcha, only sentcha. OK.
• 12:13
  And the majority of it was handpicked actually, and it was
• 12:16
  all handpicked. They didn't even bring over the
• 12:18
  mechanical like hedge trimmer scissor harvesters from and they
• 12:23
  were being used and she's a worker and over in Nishio and
• 12:25
  Aiki but in Wazaki and Kyoto Prefecture in general no one was
• 12:30
  using them because it was handpicked from Zilai.
• 12:34
  Interesting. I had no idea.
• 12:36
  It's just the the state of change, like the tea industry
• 12:40
  has changed a lot behind the scenes, but of course this stuff
• 12:44
  doesn't even get seen as much by the consumers either in Japan or
• 12:48
  outside of Japan because people don't know what zai is.
• 12:51
  What cultivars are open? Till relatively recently, this
• 12:53
  has been a agricultural sphere only terminology.
• 12:58
  I've heard of this Haagen Dazs town that popped up out of
• 13:01
  nowhere that industrialized quickly but I kept searching and
• 13:05
  I could not find if it was Fuji Tawara or if it was Bazooka or
• 13:09
  one of these other regions. It it was it Wazooka?
• 13:12
  I don't think it was was like it was somewhere in in Kyoto
• 13:16
  Prefecture. I'm not sure where it was that
• 13:20
  got the deal with Haagen Dazs. The story goes that then, like
• 13:23
  the next year, attention prices shot up 150% and everyone rushed
• 13:28
  to industrialize and mechanize their attention production to
• 13:32
  scale to meet this new growing demand.
• 13:35
  I'd love to meet the people who were there, like, they're
• 13:37
  probably still alive. It's only still alive.
• 13:40
  Yeah, they're still writing about it.
• 13:41
  This this farmer I mentioned, he's got a, A blog.
• 13:43
  He was just like reminiscing about what it was like in in the
• 13:46
  70s before the there was like a internal push for
• 13:50
  industrialization of I'm going to say industrialization, by
• 13:53
  which I mean like bead milling and machine harvesting of
• 13:58
  tensor. There was a push towards that
• 14:00
  in, I'm going to say 85. And then the Haagen Dazs shock
• 14:03
  came in 96. And then there was like a second
• 14:06
  push to continue doing this. This is when you're starting to
• 14:09
  see Second Harvest Tensure being used for the first time in Kyoto
• 14:15
  ever. Interesting.
• 14:17
  And people starting adopting mechanical picking for the first
• 14:19
  time in in Kyoto. And then this is bolstered by
• 14:22
  the Starbucks shock of of 2006 with the spread of the Starbucks
• 14:26
  matcha latte. And of course, that just
• 14:28
  continued the trend towards this.
• 14:30
  And do you know that like the initial shift of, you know,
• 14:34
  farming methods and also the shift of, you know, from Zyride
• 14:38
  to more mono crop kind of growing practice, did that come
• 14:43
  from like like Haagen Dazs or like Starbucks or was it like
• 14:48
  kind of started from within? Or like a municipality
• 14:51
  government like push? All right, this is actually it's
• 14:57
  going to be in my next video that I've already filmed, but
• 14:59
  this goes back to the 19. I just do the little industry
• 15:04
  recap here or thereabouts. So industrialization came to the
• 15:07
  tea industry matcha and censure beginning in the 19 tens 1920s.
• 15:12
  We have the first machine electric powered issue you see
• 15:15
  with stone mills. Of course, there was still a
• 15:18
  transition period. So in like 19 O 6 there's still
• 15:20
  stories of all women at tea shops grinding everything by
• 15:23
  hand to order for customers as we transition from the tenture
• 15:28
  buying period where you'd buy tenture and grant it yourself.
• 15:31
  To. The matcha buying period where
• 15:34
  you buy finished ground matcha. So that was I think 19121916
• 15:39
  thereabouts where the electric Ishiyusu was born.
• 15:43
  And at the same time sencha was being turned into a mechanized
• 15:48
  thing. So instead of tem almi hand
• 15:49
  rolled sencha, you have the machines that basically try and
• 15:52
  copy all these steps. Mechanical tension or the
• 15:55
  tension furnace was developed again in the early, early 1900s
• 16:01
  and this allowed factories to produce more tea than ever
• 16:07
  before. So we're looking at like 20 tons
• 16:10
  of finished matcha, not 20 tons, 200 tons.
• 16:13
  I have to get my numbers right, but the match industry basically
• 16:16
  tripled from the pre industrial period to the beginning of the
• 16:19
  industrial period. It actually had a low point in
• 16:22
  1874 tons of matcha produced total, which is the lowest it's
• 16:26
  ever been on record. Oh wow, interesting.
• 16:29
  That's nothing. We're roughly like, what, 4000
• 16:31
  tons this past year? Yeah, something like that.
• 16:36
  So the Japanese government put out a research project basically
• 16:40
  in somewhere in the 30s to produce what is called moga.
• 16:45
  And this is the beginning of culinary or like less than
• 16:48
  traditional air quotes here for those who aren't seeing the
• 16:52
  matcha. And this was the idea of
• 16:55
  modifying censure equipment to produce tensure traditionally.
• 17:00
  To leverage existing capital equipment.
• 17:03
  Exactly. So these are already there.
• 17:04
  You just have to skip some steps, turn off the rolling and
• 17:07
  you get something that resembles tensure.
• 17:10
  And then you put that into they didn't have the emails yet, but
• 17:13
  some sort of early non issue yuzu grinding machine.
• 17:18
  They're somewhere that yeah, someone calls Kyoto Prefecture,
• 17:22
  the area of the grinding graveyard because they've been
• 17:25
  trying so many different technologies to mass grind
• 17:28
  tension. That's.
• 17:29
  Like a lab, Ryan. Yeah, it's just a list of all
• 17:34
  the different technologies they've tried and you know,
• 17:36
  we've settled on on bead and four mills as the best way to do
• 17:39
  it on on a grand scale. And they were trying like
• 17:42
  different size issues as well. There was because now we're at
• 17:45
  the one shaku 33 centimetre wide issuesu for the mechanical stone
• 17:51
  mills, but they had some that were five times as wide and like
• 17:54
  again five times as heavy. Oh, wow.
• 17:56
  Interesting. OK.
• 17:58
  And they were trying to spin them even faster to get more
• 18:01
  tea. And they just finally found
• 18:03
  we've settled at like 40 grams an hour thereabouts at the one
• 18:08
  shaku 23 centimetre size is our golden area.
• 18:13
  A little faster, a little slower, depending on what you
• 18:15
  want to do, but that's where we've settled.
• 18:17
  But they were playing with a lot to see what happens and see if
• 18:21
  it works at a larger scale. And the problem with grinding
• 18:24
  too fine is that you lose some of the texture and flavour they
• 18:26
  found for the the larger issues and you get more friction and
• 18:29
  more heat. Makes sense?
• 18:30
  So it was this research was started in the 30s and then it
• 18:34
  sort of SAT for a while, slowly grew, but then the big boom, the
• 18:38
  push was in the 80s and then 90s with Heigenbaz.
• 18:41
  Interesting. Very.
• 18:42
  Cool. Yeah, very cool.
• 18:43
  Wow, I. Had no idea.
• 18:46
  Hey me too this. Probably won't be published for
• 18:48
  like another month so we can we'll we'll put in a link if
• 18:51
  it's live, hopefully in the next.
• 18:53
  Week or so I'll put this one out.
• 18:54
  So awesome. Yeah, I'll.
• 18:57
  Send you guys the link, just speaking.
• 18:58
  Of all this industrialization, it's led to a pretty interesting
• 19:02
  range of match of products both from Kyoto Prefecture and in
• 19:06
  other tea producing regions in Japan.
• 19:09
  And you have these traditional companies marketing traditional
• 19:11
  products, you have incoming Western companies with a wide
• 19:15
  range of, of marketing and product positioning.
• 19:19
  Like what's your take on the existing macho landscape, both
• 19:22
  as an industry person and as a on the consumer side?
• 19:27
  Like how do you view both sides of that equation around the way
• 19:33
  quality is communicated, the way value is communicated and and
• 19:37
  things like that? I think it's something.
• 19:39
  That has been changing and it's hard to predict where that
• 19:43
  change will continue to go. So like rewind 5 to 10 years.
• 19:47
  Ceremonial grade kind of meant something.
• 19:50
  It didn't mean anything specifically, but it meant that
• 19:53
  at least it was potentially from Japan and maybe first watch or
• 19:57
  something, I don't know. It's.
• 20:00
  A low barge. It's a low bar, but that's kind
• 20:02
  of where we were the early days. Like when I first encountered, I
• 20:06
  think that was at my parents at Costco and saw the giant Costco
• 20:08
  bag of matcha. And that's, that is not a good
• 20:11
  introduction to matcha for anyone because that doesn't
• 20:13
  taste like matcha. And so I think we've we've moved
• 20:16
  a little past that. And for the past ten years or
• 20:20
  so, we've been seeing everyone get told to buy a ceremonial
• 20:23
  grade. And only recently, I mean, in
• 20:25
  the background of all this, the specialty tea connoisseurs or
• 20:28
  people even doing China U had some deeper knowledge of what
• 20:31
  was going on. So like in my China U circles,
• 20:34
  the term ceremonial grade has been a red flag for years.
• 20:38
  But I think only only recently has that sort of mindset.
• 20:42
  I want to say recently in the past year or two being the past
• 20:44
  few months has the term has that concept of ceremonial grade
• 20:48
  being a bad sign beginning to influence like the main sector
• 20:55
  of the international market, which is more casual consumers
• 20:58
  and and latte drinkers. So that's been a shift I think,
• 21:04
  and an increase towards transparency where it's
• 21:07
  available is something that I think we're beginning to see
• 21:11
  more of and something that I've been trying to champion the
• 21:15
  entire time with Tessimi. But of course the other part of
• 21:18
  it is that people are now getting a taste of all the
• 21:22
  lovely blends from traditional blend houses in in Kyoto and
• 21:26
  elsewhere. Of course, there's there's no
• 21:28
  transparency there. You're not going to get any
• 21:30
  information from that. But at the same time, they taste
• 21:32
  fantastic. And so you as a consumer, you
• 21:34
  have to sort of reckon with that.
• 21:36
  It doesn't say ceremonial grade. It doesn't tell me what cultivar
• 21:39
  it is. And yet this is some.
• 21:41
  Of the best. Match I've ever had potentially
• 21:43
  and at a pretty good price point as well for compared to where
• 21:48
  we're seeing some teas sold at super premium ceremonial grade
• 21:52
  with a price tag attached that doesn't match the flavour.
• 21:55
  So I think from like a consumer standpoint, at the end of the
• 21:58
  day, it's a sort of value for flavour.
• 22:03
  But unfortunately, without transparency or familiarity with
• 22:08
  with brands and blend houses, it just comes to trying a lot of
• 22:11
  tea and finding what you like. And so it's I think that's
• 22:15
  currently where we are. I think we're also seeing more
• 22:18
  single origin stuff coming. So there's myself and a few
• 22:20
  other companies who have been sourcing like Suji San is a name
• 22:25
  that everyone recognizes when it comes to to Tensor.
• 22:27
  He's a superstar farmer and there are a few others that have
• 22:32
  begun to garner that sort of recognition.
• 22:34
  So that's now a mark of of value across the industry.
• 22:39
  You can recognize certain farmers names.
• 22:41
  Yeah. Do what do you think the?
• 22:42
  Desire is of other tea farmers that could have similar status
• 22:47
  to have that type of status. Is this a replicable playbook
• 22:51
  and be like a little cold objective capitalist?
• 22:54
  Like, is this an economic model that's that would work well for
• 22:58
  other macho farmers? I think it.
• 23:00
  Really depends on a on a personal basis because I've met
• 23:04
  some farmers who are like, I want this much of craze to end.
• 23:09
  Even though. Like there's all that demand and
• 23:11
  push for it and they could grow. At the same time, they kind of
• 23:14
  want the lifestyle that they've been having.
• 23:15
  So I think some of them would, you know, love the family
• 23:18
  recognition. They put in a lot of hard work
• 23:21
  and seeing it back, seeing that, you know, customers loving it
• 23:25
  and also getting the sort of formal recognition from awards
• 23:28
  and that sort of stuff. They enjoy that.
• 23:30
  But I think other people are perfectly fine putting in their
• 23:33
  day's work and you know, knowing that it's going to Koyama and
• 23:38
  potentially and being used in something, being served to the
• 23:41
  EMO or something. And that's that's all they want.
• 23:44
  So it's hard to see how scalable or replicable this model is,
• 23:48
  because I think Suji San is quite a particular individual.
• 23:52
  In this case. But you're seeing especially as
• 23:55
  there's these the newer awards because the city stands mostly
• 23:58
  been winning the traditional like regional and national
• 24:01
  awards. But there are more consumer
• 24:04
  voted or consumer judged awards even within Japan and outside of
• 24:10
  Japan where you're seeing the farmers that have already tried
• 24:15
  and are trying to sell directly to customers get more
• 24:18
  recognition because that's something that already is
• 24:21
  decided by the farmers. A lot of farmers will not sell
• 24:23
  directly to to retail customers. They only produce for wholesale.
• 24:28
  And those are ones that like as people outside of the industry,
• 24:31
  you're not going to find them. You're not going to find ways to
• 24:33
  contact them because they don't want to be contacted.
• 24:36
  They don't have a, they don't have a web store, even in
• 24:38
  Japanese, they don't have that sort of presence on online.
• 24:42
  Or maybe there's only in person at a small shop near their farm.
• 24:46
  But there are farmers who have their web stores who are trying
• 24:49
  to create their own brand. And I think in that case it
• 24:52
  could be replicable that their names and their tastes and their
• 24:57
  styles are seen as desirable. We kind of see this in the the
• 25:04
  Black Tea World. There is Yoshidaian up up north
• 25:09
  of of Kyoto. I think they're in Saitama.
• 25:11
  There's like a dozen farms named Yoshidaian because Yoshida is a
• 25:14
  very common Japanese last name, but I think it's Yoshida Chayan
• 25:20
  is actually their official name and they're really famous for
• 25:23
  their black teas. But they're a single origin,
• 25:27
  single cultivar style producer with a desire to be known on the
• 25:34
  market and especially by the international market.
• 25:36
  So it really depends I think on the on the farmers and farmers
• 25:40
  individual preferences on what they want to do with that at
• 25:43
  that time. Here's a question.
• 25:45
  For you, David, so we we've been talking mostly on matcha, but
• 25:48
  it's my personal curiosity, I guess.
• 25:51
  So has this whole craze of, you know, matcha being cascade down
• 25:56
  to other Japanese tea. Have you seen that happening or
• 25:59
  if so, like in what, which sector do you see are happening
• 26:02
  the most? It's interesting.
• 26:04
  Because when we started, we knew that matcha was popular, but it
• 26:07
  wasn't. It was actually not our best
• 26:09
  sellers. For a long time, Fukumichi
• 26:11
  Sancha and Sancha in general was of our top movers.
• 26:15
  This sort of changed top with your last year and as much has
• 26:19
  taken off in the populist sphere, we've seen a big shift
• 26:22
  towards matcha. I think it's hard for people to,
• 26:26
  especially for like latte drinkers or people who make
• 26:30
  mixed drinks to get into other Japanese teas because they
• 26:33
  aren't swappable in the same way.
• 26:35
  They don't function as well as ingredients in a larger hole,
• 26:38
  with the singular exception of hojicha.
• 26:41
  Hojicha and hojicha powder are easier to work into the same
• 26:45
  sort of mindset of using tea as either a secondary or like
• 26:49
  tertiary ingredient in in crafting something.
• 26:51
  Accenture's flavor doesn't cut through a mix the same way as
• 26:56
  much as does, and especially in like the the single origin way
• 26:59
  where a caution Sanchez florality will get sort of lost
• 27:03
  in a mix of of any other flavours.
• 27:05
  So I think the rise in Japanese tea in general is just due to
• 27:11
  the increasing interest of people in the West.
• 27:14
  I'm using the West in quotation marks as well.
• 27:16
  I mean, outside of Japan, sort of how Japan uses the term
• 27:19
  overseas in teas in general, but also in Japanese culture because
• 27:22
  that's seeing a rise in interest again.
• 27:25
  You know, there was a big rise in tea, so many practitioners
• 27:28
  and interest in Japanese culture in the 80s during Japan's
• 27:31
  economic boom. And that's led a huge wave of
• 27:36
  tea, so many practitioners in the US and overseas.
• 27:39
  And that was like they brought the idea of drinking matcha with
• 27:43
  them. And that sort of popularity has
• 27:45
  declined and now we're at another influx of interest in
• 27:48
  Japanese culture and interest in Japan in general.
• 27:50
  So I think more so than the explosion and much of
• 27:54
  popularity, if anything's going to drive an interest in loose
• 27:58
  leaf Japanese teas, it might be that interesting.
• 28:00
  I hope it does because my suspicion is that sencha is in
• 28:03
  trouble, particularly because the domestic market is 1
• 28:07
  drinking drastically less prepared tea.
• 28:09
  But two, the quality of ready to drink tea in these PET bottles
• 28:15
  is so high. Last time Sam and I went to
• 28:18
  Japan, we kind of, we were at all these tea places, All the
• 28:21
  sunshine was available. We were like, OK, on the side,
• 28:24
  we're just going to try a bunch of stuff because we're just
• 28:26
  curious and we're tea people. And honestly, I we had a lot of
• 28:29
  trouble getting any of it to taste good.
• 28:32
  We have a gumfur background. We have like a pretty decent
• 28:35
  understanding of the variables that go into making tea taste
• 28:38
  good. And honestly, I think some of
• 28:42
  the PETRTD stuff is way better than we were making and we were
• 28:48
  buying some of the stuff at like a dollar a gram like it was, you
• 28:53
  know, like some hand rolled stuff like it it's challenging
• 28:57
  and then you have to all this mess to clean up.
• 29:00
  That's and like, so not, not only is it tradition, which, you
• 29:03
  know, the Japanese people aren't so interested in, especially
• 29:06
  young people and there's mess and the other stuff tastes good
• 29:09
  and it's probably cheaper and you know, it's as easy as just
• 29:12
  going to the Family Mart or something.
• 29:14
  I think without the West. Like, would you agree with that?
• 29:17
  Like understanding or projecting?
• 29:20
  That's right. And that's the concern of the
• 29:22
  Japanese industry and sort of like a a top down perspective
• 29:25
  and that's kind of been how they've been thinking about the
• 29:27
  industry for a while. They see domestic consumption,
• 29:29
  especially as census decreasing, there's consumption of ready to
• 29:34
  drink pet bottle tea is increasing.
• 29:36
  But that doesn't make nearly as much money for the farmers
• 29:38
  because for the most part they're using either like
• 29:42
  tractor harvested, machine harvested or second flush leaves
• 29:45
  to make the majority of these ready to drink bottle products.
• 29:49
  And price per kilo on those is much lower than price per kilo
• 29:52
  on the first part censure. So there's been a push to try
• 29:56
  and create censures that are more appealing to the younger
• 30:00
  market domestically. This has been a push towards
• 30:03
  floral Sanchez that are moving away from the Super umami
• 30:07
  associations. So this is your Koshin Sanchez
• 30:10
  or the withered Sanchez that are still quite rare.
• 30:14
  But that's been an attempt to create those, which again, by
• 30:17
  withering a green tea, you get a more floral flavor out of it.
• 30:20
  This is seen as a response to people drinking like Jasmine tea
• 30:24
  in these PET bottles as well, but.
• 30:28
  I. As is typical, I think of the
• 30:30
  Japanese tea industry from a top down perspective, they sort of
• 30:33
  didn't look at the overseas market all that much when it
• 30:35
  comes to sencha. And I think there's a lot of
• 30:37
  interest in in high quality sencha from overseas.
• 30:41
  And there's the thing with sencha is that it's such a wide
• 30:45
  variety of styles and qualities that it's all under one label.
• 30:49
  But Fukimushi sencha from Kagoshima tastes wildly
• 30:52
  different to a Fukimushi sencha from from Yami, which will taste
• 30:55
  completely different from a super light steam sentra from
• 30:58
  the top of a mountain in Pon Yami or Kawani.
• 31:01
  And communicating these differences to consumers is a
• 31:05
  bit of a challenge if they've never tried any of them before
• 31:07
  or had a negative experience with sencha the first time
• 31:10
  because it tasted bitter or astringent or or grassy or was
• 31:14
  otherwise unpleasant. And yeah, there are some really
• 31:16
  good bottled ones. My favorite was at the Lawson in
• 31:20
  Wasaka. There's one combini in Wasaka
• 31:23
  and I'm pretty sure it's a Lawson.
• 31:25
  They had like a locally made Wasaka bottled sencha and that
• 31:30
  was by far the best one I've ever had as far as ready to
• 31:32
  interesting, I didn't know. They had like local selections
• 31:36
  that that that's really cool. They even have.
• 31:39
  Like Wasaka tea flavored potato chips at the local Lawson in
• 31:42
  Wasaka. Oh wow, cool.
• 31:47
  That's great, Great. So.
• 31:48
  Speaking or I guess transitioning off what I would
• 31:51
  say is the most innovative thing in in tea being these ready to
• 31:54
  drink teas and the more traditional side being
• 31:57
  ceremonial practice. You're a member of a pretty
• 32:00
  obscure school of chanoyu or Japanese tea ceremony, which is
• 32:05
  different than the Sun Senke. I'd love to learn more about
• 32:08
  your tea practice and and how it might differ from like tea that
• 32:12
  an emoto senke or or a senke tea practitioner would be doing.
• 32:16
  Yeah, this is. My like personal, the what I'm
• 32:20
  most intrigued in is is tea practice and especially
• 32:23
  contemporary tea practice, because Japanese tea ceremony is
• 32:26
  seen as a vestige of something that was lost 500 years ago, but
• 32:32
  it's still a living contemporary art.
• 32:35
  And I think that gets lost a lot in translation and lost in
• 32:39
  practice as well. For those who don't know, the
• 32:42
  largest 3 tea ceremony schools in Japan are the Sansenke.
• 32:46
  They are ODA Senke, Mota Senke, and Mushenkoji Senke, in that
• 32:50
  order. ODA Senke is by far the largest.
• 32:52
  I think there's about a million in Japan ODA Senke
• 32:55
  practitioners. There's about 100 tea schools in
• 32:57
  Japan and I think the total number of practitioners is
• 32:59
  around 2 million. So 50% of them do ODA Senke.
• 33:03
  My guess is like another 30% of them do Omoto Senke and other 10
• 33:07
  do Oji, and then the rest is divvied up into the 100.
• 33:11
  Also local smaller schools. The San Sanke are descended from
• 33:17
  the three great grandchildren of Sano Riku.
• 33:21
  So Riku's grandson, adopted grandson Sano Sultan had three
• 33:25
  kids. I think he actually had 4, but
• 33:27
  he had three that he gave his property to.
• 33:29
  There's the house in the front Monte Sanke, the house in the
• 33:32
  back of Sanke and then the property on the street over by
• 33:35
  Mushana Koji, and that's Mushana Koji Sanke.
• 33:37
  And so those 3 became the most popular throughout the Edo
• 33:42
  period. This is sort of the the 16 to 18
• 33:45
  fifties, 1500s to 1850. This is the time where Japan's
• 33:50
  borders were closed, the time where hierarchy became the the
• 33:56
  mainstay of Japanese culture. Tea ceremony existed before this
• 34:00
  and existed in a very different cultural sphere.
• 34:02
  Senoriki was living in a time known as the Sengkoji died the
• 34:06
  Warring States period for Japan civil war it was a time of
• 34:09
  extreme violence and unrest and a concept known as kekokujo
• 34:14
  Gekokujo, which is the lower classes overthrowing the
• 34:19
  hierarchy. So upwards mobility has never
• 34:22
  been higher in Japan before this and it was a time of social
• 34:25
  flux. And so in this chaotic time tea
• 34:28
  ceremony flourished as a contemporary art.
• 34:31
  I mean it has been practiced in Japan since the 12/13/14
• 34:35
  hundreds at least drinking matcha.
• 34:37
  And in it's early days tea ceremony was kind of about
• 34:40
  flaunting your wealth of Chinese goods.
• 34:43
  Back in the 1314 hundreds having imported goods from Song and is
• 34:49
  Yun Dynasty, China was seen as like, wow, you've made it.
• 34:53
  You're rich, you're cultured, you know things and you have
• 34:56
  things and you can show them off and you know how to use them.
• 35:00
  And China you was was originally kind of like this.
• 35:03
  And so when Wabicha, which eventually got taken up by
• 35:07
  Rikyu, came along, it was sort of a pushback or at least an
• 35:12
  antithesis of this where it was instead of having to use
• 35:14
  expensive imported wares, you could use locally made ceramics.
• 35:17
  Or instead of in this beautiful painted, gilded, wallpapered
• 35:21
  Japanese space, you can do it in a little thatched Hut using
• 35:25
  whatever you had. And that's kind of in a very
• 35:30
  roundabout way what Wabicha is. And it was Audibe's student for
• 35:35
  the sorry, it was Rick, Hugh's student for the audibe who took
• 35:38
  this to another level. And he actually took prized
• 35:42
  utensils and broke them into pieces and glued them back
• 35:45
  together different sizes and took centuries old scrolls and
• 35:48
  cut them in half so they would fit in the alcove, which is a
• 35:52
  very radical approach. He was a samurai warrior and one
• 35:55
  of his students and one of Ricky's students, that was Ueida
• 35:57
  Sorco. And that's the T school that I
• 36:00
  practice the way that's all called you.
• 36:01
  Oh, so it's a? Super early split.
• 36:04
  It's a super. Early split so he was a student
• 36:06
  of Riku and then later a student of Audibe in the late 15 early
• 36:11
  1600s. And before I forget to mention
• 36:16
  this, T schools are a relatively new idea.
• 36:19
  Back then. You learned from your teacher,
• 36:21
  you mastered what they taught you, and you developed your new
• 36:24
  style on top of that. And that's how it had been going
• 36:26
  for a few centuries at this point.
• 36:28
  Once the Edo period settled in and social hierarchy became,
• 36:32
  with a little bit of neo Confucianism shoved in there,
• 36:34
  the norm, then T became something that had to be
• 36:39
  hierarchical, that had to be a single source of truth at the
• 36:41
  top, and that became the Iyamoto.
• 36:43
  T didn't have Iyamoto before this.
• 36:45
  This was a relatively new invention in the 1700s where
• 36:48
  this started. So by formalizing it, you now
• 36:53
  have a formal head of a school. You have the way that this
• 36:57
  person does T is the way that you do T if you learn from them,
• 36:59
  and it becomes much more rigid and strict, whereas in the
• 37:02
  earlier days it was a little more free and expressive.
• 37:07
  So differences, I guess, between the samurai schools and the
• 37:11
  Sansanke is that the samurai schools tried to marry the sort
• 37:17
  of rusticity of wabicha, of using, you know, more rustic
• 37:21
  objects with the dignity that comes with being a samurai or a
• 37:26
  daimyo or a feudal Lord. So you see a mix of of more
• 37:32
  stately and flashy wares and styles of movement mixed with
• 37:38
  the rustic and humbleness that came from Rick you.
• 37:40
  And I think that's a really interesting combination.
• 37:43
  A lot of these early samurai practitioners were very
• 37:46
  expressive in the tea ceremony. I think that has been carried
• 37:49
  down through the lineage where especially with my teacher, very
• 37:54
  much emphasizes expression and creativity and innovation in the
• 37:57
  tea room while upholding what is 400 years of direct lineage.
• 38:03
  So I think in that mix is where tea ceremony has its power.
• 38:06
  Still combining what is a really deep and interesting traditional
• 38:11
  art with the idea of it being a contemporary performance art or
• 38:15
  contemporary art that can speak to something that is happening
• 38:18
  now, currently and adapt to the times is what makes it
• 38:21
  intriguing to me. And how much?
• 38:23
  Flexibility do you have as a practitioner?
• 38:26
  Because like we're both a Moto Senke students, so like maybe
• 38:30
  when we never got to the point of hosting anything.
• 38:32
  But if we did, I'm sure we could pick out maybe the flour and the
• 38:36
  tea that we were serving and maybe some of the utensils to
• 38:39
  make a theme. Like, that's about as much
• 38:41
  creative freedom to my knowledge.
• 38:43
  At least my. Eyeglasses.
• 38:45
  I had the freedom to choose that before the fact.
• 38:49
  But. You know, we're still getting
• 38:50
  yelled at to move something 2cm to the left and we should go
• 38:53
  under the ball, not over the ball.
• 38:55
  How much liberty does your school have?
• 38:57
  Is it similar to this Unsanke or is there it's a quite a bit more
• 39:01
  open like something like Kung Fu Cha Chinese tea ceremony.
• 39:04
  There's, it's less codified, like there's no one's going to
• 39:07
  tell you you're doing something wrong.
• 39:10
  I think it's, it's, I mean it's at the end of the day, it's
• 39:13
  still Channel U and it's still the same sort of codified
• 39:16
  movements and ideas that exist in the other schools.
• 39:19
  But I think the difference is not in how codified the
• 39:24
  movements are, but it's in how much emphasis is placed on
• 39:29
  expression and innovation. And that that kind of comes both
• 39:34
  from the practitioners, but also from the top.
• 39:36
  Like our Iyamoto, we're a small school.
• 39:38
  There's about 2000 of us total. So the power gap between your
• 39:42
  everyday practitioner and the Iyamoto is much smaller.
• 39:45
  Like in Odasenki and Odasenki, you have to climb through a lot
• 39:48
  of branks to even maybe meet Iyamoto, whereas we're a little
• 39:53
  bit smaller. And I've said hi to him so and
• 39:58
  because my branch under my teachers overseas.
• 40:02
  We're kind of a little outside the oversight where I know by I
• 40:06
  have some Odyssey friends where like if you want to label
• 40:09
  something as Odyssey, you have to be stamped of approval.
• 40:12
  You have to be at a certain level to, you know, dare to
• 40:15
  represent the school. Whereas I think it's a little
• 40:19
  different in my case, especially with with my teacher who's
• 40:24
  basically been given the go ahead by emoto to do whatever he
• 40:27
  wants as long as he's got some historical and textual
• 40:30
  inspiration for it, which leads to some interesting and and
• 40:34
  powerful expressions. And because the TS ceremony
• 40:38
  wasn't nearly as codified back when it was at its heyday in the
• 40:41
  161516 hundreds. And so there's a lot more
• 40:44
  innovation and expression that was happening then.
• 40:46
  So using that as inspiration to do something now.
• 40:49
  And it's like citing your sources, if you would, can, can
• 40:53
  lead to some some powerful stuff.
• 40:55
  It's almost like that. As a kind.
• 40:57
  Of yeah. And I think some people will say
• 40:59
  that, like, tea ceremony is a dying art in Japan as the number
• 41:02
  of practitioners as like, halved in the past 10 years.
• 41:05
  We were down from like 4 million in the 20 tens to about
• 41:08
  2,000,000 now. And that's mostly because the
• 41:11
  bulk of tea ceremony practitioners in Japan are older
• 41:14
  women who took it up when it was part of formal education in 30s,
• 41:19
  forties, fifties, 60s, the good. Wives, wives, mothers.
• 41:24
  Exactly without. Getting too much into Japanese
• 41:26
  politics, this was sort of a push back of of rapid
• 41:30
  Westernization and, you know, the move of the populace away
• 41:35
  from traditional Japanese culture.
• 41:37
  And so by putting it in the good wives education air quotes here,
• 41:41
  it was trying to pull that back. And I guess the idea was again
• 41:46
  for Japan in the 90s, get all the industrialization from the
• 41:48
  West for, to keep all of Japanese culture.
• 41:50
  So as you know, we're at a very different time period now where
• 41:53
  that sort of generation is no longer the future of tea
• 41:58
  ceremonies. So we're looking, I think,
• 42:01
  overseas for inspiration and trying to see how tea ceremony
• 42:05
  fits into different contexts. Like I do it here in New York,
• 42:09
  NY, there's, there's what, 3 formal traditional Japanese tea
• 42:14
  rooms in New York. There's the Odasenke compound
• 42:17
  there, there's a private room in some teacher's house, and then
• 42:20
  there's Globus Vashitsu on, on Broadway down like 19th St.
• 42:24
  And that's it. So we have to get creative with
• 42:26
  how you want to do tea in New York.
• 42:29
  You can do it on the streets, you can do it in Central Park,
• 42:31
  and you have to adapt to your surroundings.
• 42:33
  And that leads to some, some innovation and some some fun and
• 42:36
  creativity and spontaneity. And I think the, the true fun of
• 42:41
  China U comes in the moments of spontaneity and creativity where
• 42:44
  you have to adapt to situations. And you know, you won't have
• 42:47
  that access to all the traditional utensils.
• 42:49
  So you have to do something known as mitate and take
• 42:52
  something and use it for a purpose other than it was
• 42:55
  intended to. And it's like traditionally.
• 42:58
  We. Have some objects that are now
• 43:00
  like they were mitate objects 500 years ago and now they are
• 43:03
  the standard normal objects. Like Ito Chowan was a Korean
• 43:07
  rice bowl, but now it's very much a tea ball.
• 43:10
  It's been a tea ball for 600 years.
• 43:12
  But being forced to do that today and get creative with it,
• 43:15
  like my friend, there's there's a type of candle stand we use in
• 43:18
  the tea room that has three legs and a spike pointing out to hold
• 43:21
  the candle. And those are hard to get
• 43:24
  outside Japan. So he took a big fork and bent
• 43:26
  one of its tines up. So the handle is one leg, 2 fork
• 43:30
  tines of the other leg, and the middle tine is where you shove
• 43:32
  the candle on. I think that's brilliantly
• 43:34
  creative. I love it.
• 43:36
  You. Know, especially in a in a
• 43:38
  context where no one's seen a fork be used like that before.
• 43:41
  You're forcing people to see things with different eyes.
• 43:45
  Like I never knew a fork could be a candle stand.
• 43:47
  You're like using a large seashell as a as a tea bowl.
• 43:51
  I never thought it could be used that way.
• 43:55
  So there's a lot of. Room for the creativity in the
• 43:57
  tea room. In that sense, I guess inside
• 43:59
  the tea room. Very cool.
• 44:01
  Well, this is like exactly what contemporary matcha needs.
• 44:05
  Like this, this spirit like you be more innovative, more
• 44:08
  adaptive to the scenarios and situations that you are drinking
• 44:14
  or consuming much a while, you know, stay relevant and
• 44:16
  connected with the tradition, I think, I think.
• 44:19
  In many ways, it's more true. It's a more true preservation of
• 44:23
  tradition because instead of preserving the forms
• 44:27
  exclusively, you're preserving the spirit you know?
• 44:32
  People what have been. Innovative in the past, matcha
• 44:34
  only exists as we know it today because of innovation.
• 44:37
  We had, you know, the innovation of shading in the mid 1500s
• 44:41
  completely changed the taste of matcha, but they didn't stop
• 44:45
  innovating there. We had Oribe and Enshu, who are
• 44:48
  the leading tea masters in the early edit period, continuing to
• 44:52
  have the farmers innovate with production and we've lost some
• 44:55
  of their production methods. There was one where instead of
• 44:57
  steaming the tea leaves they would boil them in alkaline like
• 45:00
  live water because it made them even greener.
• 45:04
  Interesting. And that's.
• 45:06
  Entirely lost like alternate processing methods for matcha
• 45:10
  other than, you know, steam devein and grind.
• 45:14
  They're experimenting with ways to improve the taste.
• 45:16
  Oh, I'm sure they would all be on board with breeding new
• 45:20
  cultivars and trying new fertilization and new shading
• 45:23
  and all this stuff. And that's the sort of the
• 45:26
  double edged sword of of tradition is are you preserving
• 45:29
  things the way they are just for preservation?
• 45:33
  I mean, in that case, you're sort of you're a museum as my
• 45:36
  teacher. That sort of exactly.
• 45:40
  But then it's now out of context, right?
• 45:42
  You've taken. Something that was this way for
• 45:45
  a reason and now it is this way because it has been this way for
• 45:49
  a few 100 years. As my teacher says, that sort of
• 45:51
  Channel U is Museum T it's sort of dead.
• 45:54
  There's no, there's no spirit left.
• 45:57
  And I think it's important that someone does this because that
• 46:00
  sort of preservation for documentation purposes alone is
• 46:03
  important. But at the same time, we need to
• 46:06
  be preserving the the spirit and philosophies.
• 46:09
  And those I think are more interesting than purely, this is
• 46:14
  what a tea room looked like in 1612.
• 46:17
  So this is what a tea room looks like today.
• 46:18
  Because that doesn't make any sense.
• 46:20
  Lobby was sort of an expression of sort of can't say dignified
• 46:25
  poverty, artistic poverty. You're using a thatched mud
• 46:29
  walls because I'm sure Rick, you could afford to put wallpaper
• 46:32
  up, but he chose not to. But erecting A wobby style tea
• 46:36
  house outside of Japan, or even in Japan is quite expensive.
• 46:40
  There's. There's.
• 46:42
  Nothing wobby about importing to timing mats and hiring a
• 46:47
  Japanese Carpenter to do the type of joinery that no one else
• 46:50
  knows how to do. There's nothing resourceful.
• 46:52
  Or or. Humble about that.
• 46:55
  And while I absolutely love the aesthetic of that stuff, it's
• 46:58
  more interesting to sort of challenge yourself to to fit
• 47:01
  into a different space. And what does the philosophy of
• 47:05
  Wabi or the philosophy of your game mean in your setting, in
• 47:08
  your time period to you, in your cultural context?
• 47:12
  So totally great. Tea had its.
• 47:14
  Golden Age in a time of political and civil unrest.
• 47:18
  I wonder what that means for the Yeah.
• 47:20
  For. Contemporary Time A.
• 47:22
  Contemporary channel you I think we need we need a good ricu in
• 47:26
  in times like these to show us the way.
• 47:31
  Yeah. The discourse is unfortunately,
• 47:35
  I can, I, I want to characterize as low intelligence where people
• 47:40
  are questioning who has the license to make these changes
• 47:43
  and the agency. And if you're not Japanese and
• 47:47
  it's cultural appropriation, it's just some weird toxic soup
• 47:51
  of Internet dialogue. Yeah, if only it was.
• 47:55
  Limited to the Internet, this stuff happens in the tea room
• 47:57
  too. This is what we affectionately
• 47:59
  dubbed the the Tea Police. And it's sort of sort of an
• 48:03
  understandable thing. You see it in in every spheres.
• 48:05
  Like as soon as you know a little bit more than someone
• 48:07
  else, there's the tendency to have people sort of look down on
• 48:10
  everyone else and say, oh, you're doing this wrong or who
• 48:12
  are you to do this? And of course that has been
• 48:15
  encouraged by the very top down hierarchical structure of
• 48:19
  Japanese society since the end of period where like of course
• 48:22
  that would breed that sort of behaviour.
• 48:24
  So it's going to be hard to transition out of that.
• 48:27
  But we are, we're seeing it slowly in the tea space.
• 48:29
  And I think we'll see that reflected in how teach culture
• 48:34
  is presented outside of Japan. But it, it is a bit of a catch
• 48:38
  because I'm, I'm not Japanese, so I don't feel the pressure to
• 48:44
  represent traditional Japan in the same way as say, I have a, a
• 48:48
  friend here in New York who teaches a way to so-called you.
• 48:51
  He's not my teacher, but he's a fantastic teacher nonetheless.
• 48:55
  He's Japanese. And while in Japan he might do
• 48:57
  something a little more avant-garde, a little more
• 48:59
  artistically expressive. Here in New York he is sort of
• 49:03
  reduced to, oh, he's Japanese. So he has to do the Japanese tea
• 49:06
  ceremony the traditional Japanese way.
• 49:09
  And I think that can be limiting to both Japanese and non
• 49:13
  practitioners that sort of view of authenticity as it were,
• 49:17
  whatever that means. Yeah, we actually wrote an
• 49:21
  article about it. What exactly is authenticity and
• 49:25
  what exactly is tradition? Is older, is more traditional,
• 49:29
  and that's never. We should all be doing Song
• 49:33
  dynasty, Dien cha and call it a day.
• 49:35
  Yeah, Dien cha. The real.
• 49:37
  Shame is that at least for like on premise exposure to matcha in
• 49:41
  the way that people get exposed to it, It's a beverage, it's a
• 49:44
  cafes and like the stereotype of an average barista, someone
• 49:47
  who's typically very liberal, very sensitive to these ideas of
• 49:51
  neo colonialism, cultural appropriation, doing things
• 49:54
  respectfully. Of course, that's not everybody,
• 49:57
  but that's the stereotype. So they look to doing things
• 50:01
  properly and respecting it the way it is.
• 50:03
  And when you only go one inch deep and realize that chana Yu
• 50:07
  and traditional practices and authenticity is this endless
• 50:10
  well of requiring more context than any one person could ever
• 50:15
  have. You end up in this very weird
• 50:17
  state of like the the matcha practices that we see today
• 50:22
  where the vast majority of consumption and introduction of
• 50:26
  this product is being done to new consumers.
• 50:29
  What's your take on like the way coffee companies and tea
• 50:33
  companies are like that own physical stores are presenting
• 50:38
  the product to new consumers and how they fall into this
• 50:44
  authenticity trap right I. Mean, of course, it's, it's
• 50:47
  usually done as they usually with with good intentions,
• 50:50
  right. You're trying to give a little
• 50:52
  bit of cultural background to this, this new beverage.
• 50:55
  But as you said, it's, it's a, it's a never ending rabbit hole
• 50:59
  if you want to go into it. So like if someone's never had
• 51:04
  much before, they're at a cafe and they ask barista, what is
• 51:06
  this? You'll get something along the
• 51:08
  lines of, oh, this is a type of tea that's been used in the
• 51:11
  Japanese tea ceremony for a few 100 years.
• 51:14
  Here. Is it in a, in a latte?
• 51:17
  I guess this isn't, this isn't remotely the setting or the
• 51:21
  environment of how it's been served for a few 100 years, but
• 51:25
  this is tangentially related to that.
• 51:28
  It's a, you know, this great of tea might not actually be used
• 51:31
  in a tea setting, whatever. But there's not enough time for
• 51:35
  a, for a barista in a, they've got a queue of, of customers out
• 51:38
  the door is often the case to you in New York to go through
• 51:41
  that sort of of explanation. And I'm not sure what the, the
• 51:44
  solution to that is because people are familiar with coffee.
• 51:49
  Coffee has been, you know, taken out of North Africa and spread
• 51:54
  around the world for a few centuries.
• 51:56
  But matcha is relatively recent and it's, you know, divulgence
• 52:00
  out of Japan. And so in many ways, it's still
• 52:03
  incredibly tied to the culture, even though it's increasingly
• 52:08
  less so these days. And sort of one of my operating
• 52:11
  ideas, both as a as a person interacting with tea and
• 52:14
  interacting with tea people and as a vendor is the notion that
• 52:19
  you don't have to study China, you or be a tea master to
• 52:23
  appreciate matcha. And in the same way, you don't
• 52:26
  have to understand the agricultural sides of matcha to
• 52:29
  be a good cha gene. However, it is much more
• 52:33
  interesting when you understand a little bit of the other side
• 52:36
  of the sphere. And I think it's a much more
• 52:39
  holistically enjoyable practice to to understand either side of
• 52:43
  the spectrum Because in the tea room, people don't know enough
• 52:46
  about how much has grown. I think today is something that
• 52:49
  I would say definitively, they don't know how much work goes
• 52:52
  into managing a farm, how much work goes into selecting
• 52:55
  cultivars and blending tensure and shading things or what any
• 53:01
  of that means because they've never been taught that and I
• 53:05
  think it would enrich their experiences if they did.
• 53:08
  At the same time, if you're drinking matcha latte, maybe
• 53:11
  understanding a tiny bit of the philosophies of Shana Yu, of
• 53:14
  maybe Ichigo Ichi as a really easy one to try and get people
• 53:17
  to to understand. That's that's a reason.
• 53:21
  That's like a a very good marketing tool for the Japanese
• 53:24
  tea ceremony because it's quite easy to sort of take that idea
• 53:30
  and and link it to something that everyone can practice.
• 53:33
  Makes sense, actually. I really like that, that
• 53:36
  comparison, because the tea people, tea ceremony
• 53:39
  practitioners, know very little about the product and average
• 53:43
  consumers know very little about the ceremony.
• 53:45
  It's an interesting contradiction, yeah.
• 53:47
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 53:48
  Historically, I mean you know, people drinking and serving
• 53:52
  matcha and participating in Chalo you, they are pretty far
• 53:56
  away from the day-to-day farmers in the social hierarchy setting
• 53:59
  of Japan naturally. And historically that part of
• 54:03
  education has never been built into the tea ceremony education.
• 54:07
  Exactly. And I feel like in in older, I'm
• 54:10
  going way back 16/15/14 hundreds, that gap was shorter
• 54:14
  because the industry hadn't quite developed yet.
• 54:17
  So if you are buying tensha, you necessarily have to interact
• 54:22
  more closely closer to the source of of tea production.
• 54:27
  And you see again, people like Oribe and Enshu in the 1516
• 54:32
  hundreds trying to experiment with tea production.
• 54:37
  They're at the one end. They are, you know, the highest
• 54:40
  tea practitioner in Japan and yet they're still having an
• 54:42
  interest in how this tea is produced because it's important
• 54:45
  to them and important to their practice.
• 54:46
  And we're not really seeing that same way today.
• 54:48
  And but these, as you said, are two opposite ends of the social
• 54:52
  hierarchy. And there is one person
• 54:54
  traditionally who is the go between.
• 54:57
  And this is where the modern blend house comes from.
• 55:00
  They're known as chashi or, or tea purveyors.
• 55:02
  I guess it's a good translation. And they are the ones who buy
• 55:05
  attention from the farms and then they are the ones who would
• 55:08
  pack it into the chatsubo that would then be given to the
• 55:11
  feudal Lord. So they have to exist on both
• 55:14
  ends of the social hierarchy. We have to understand the
• 55:16
  agricultural practices of matcha farming, but also understand the
• 55:21
  social nuances of Japanese high society because they are and to
• 55:26
  this day are on very different ends of the spectrum.
• 55:28
  You know, some Japanese farmers are the most down to earth,
• 55:32
  relaxed, enjoyable people to spend time with, but having also
• 55:36
  interacted in the the upper echelons of Japanese society.
• 55:41
  This is where Chenowyu has been raised.
• 55:43
  It's very. Different.
• 55:44
  Everyone is much more indirect in their communication.
• 55:48
  There's expectations, all this stuff that happens silently,
• 55:51
  it's a completely different sphere to operate in and
• 55:55
  unfortunately that gap gets gets ever wider.
• 55:57
  These these go betweens the Tashi have now developed into
• 56:00
  something as giant as Maruku, Koyama and Koyama and knows a
• 56:04
  lot about agricultural practices.
• 56:07
  But that doesn't make it through to the front where?
• 56:11
  The. Consumer kid and hence.
• 56:13
  Poetic names, hence poetic. Names, I know you hate them
• 56:16
  because I listened to that episode, but it's, it's, it's a
• 56:20
  very recent trend that consumers, at least some of
• 56:23
  them, some of us have been interested in the agricultural
• 56:26
  practices. So and I guess as I mentioned,
• 56:30
  it's only been recently that we've changed over to using
• 56:32
  cultivars in the 1st place. So that's a good point.
• 56:37
  The. The beauty of poetic names is
• 56:40
  that it presents a as stable as physically possible product for
• 56:44
  someone to depend on. If you're throwing a Chaji and
• 56:48
  you're worried about the flowers and the, the, the bowls, the the
• 56:53
  rooms, the guest order, you've got all this stuff in your hair.
• 56:57
  The last thing you need to think about is, is this year's harvest
• 57:00
  of, of Asahi Matte as good as last year's, I forget.
• 57:04
  And which farm is that from? If you know that Hatsu Mukashi
• 57:07
  from this vendor was good last time you had it, it's probably
• 57:09
  going to be just about as good as it was that time.
• 57:12
  So in that case, it's, it's consistency, it's dependability.
• 57:16
  Unfortunately, I think like while I want to raise the, the
• 57:19
  craft of the farmer, the craft of the blender gets sort of
• 57:23
  lost. But it's an incredibly important
• 57:25
  and incredibly complicated and difficult task 'cause you as a
• 57:30
  Tashi, as a matcha tensure blender, you have to taste the
• 57:35
  fresh year's tensure. Imagine how it's going to taste
• 57:38
  in like 6 months time when it's aged a bit.
• 57:42
  Also imagine how it's going to taste when it's ground.
• 57:44
  Because all this tensure blending happens as tensure and
• 57:47
  it doesn't get tasted as matcha. And you have to think, how do I
• 57:50
  blend this year's Tensure to get the exact same flavor profile as
• 57:54
  last year's Tensure? And the Tashi, the Tantra
• 57:58
  purveyor for my school has like said that the current EE Moto
• 58:01
  corn on me, the one that the emoto says is his favorite
• 58:04
  matcha, has like 33 different Tantra in it.
• 58:07
  Oh wow, that's a lot. Wow.
• 58:09
  That is a lot that. That's a lot.
• 58:12
  It's like it's mostly these cultivars, but it changes as
• 58:15
  certain Tantra go out of stock or this year's harvest from this
• 58:19
  farm wasn't as good as last year's.
• 58:20
  You have to adapt as a blender because at the end of the day,
• 58:23
  you can't disappoint your customer.
• 58:25
  If your customer is the emoto of a school or is the head Abbot of
• 58:30
  a a shrine or temple, you know these they have very high
• 58:34
  pressure to maintain consistency and supply.
• 58:37
  And so it's a very tough job. And I think it's sort of
• 58:41
  underrated the role that these blenders play.
• 58:45
  Because it's not. Celebrated enough, I think
• 58:47
  'cause, you know, as a specialty industry, we're looking mostly
• 58:52
  at single origin, single cultivar and extolling the
• 58:55
  virtues of that. But blending is in and of itself
• 58:58
  a very sort of specialty craft. It is absolutely a craft to be
• 59:03
  able to create a intentional mix of flavors from disparate
• 59:08
  cultivars and disparate sources and create something new,
• 59:12
  interesting, unique, but also consistent.
• 59:14
  Because I will say some of the best matches I've ever had are
• 59:18
  blended and I have no idea what they're blended from.
• 59:21
  And some of the most memorable matches I had have been single
• 59:24
  Origin. But these are both valuable
• 59:26
  parts I think of of the industry.
• 59:28
  And moving forward, I want to see both of them celebrated for
• 59:31
  the different and unique styles that they are.
• 59:34
  Because with with single Origin, you get the idea of a like
• 59:37
  strong Terawar presence and a strong cult of our presence that
• 59:41
  is detectable and like you can, you can taste every step of the
• 59:46
  processing. You know, this is Fuji Hikaru.
• 59:49
  It has this taste profile. I can see how it's expressed
• 59:52
  here. I can see that it's from, you
• 59:55
  know, Fuji and I expect these flavour profiles out of it.
• 59:58
  And it's honzu shaded. So it's slightly lighter in
• 1:00:01
  colour than if it were like synthetically shaded, those sort
• 1:00:03
  of things where? It's less of a rounded flavour
• 1:00:07
  profile, but you get a more distinct note.
• 1:00:09
  With blends you get the concept of intentionally crafting every
• 1:00:13
  single note in a flavour profile, which I think is is
• 1:00:17
  incredibly it's. Intention.
• 1:00:20
  Yeah, it it's all about intention.
• 1:00:22
  You can craft a top note like I want this sort of creamy top
• 1:00:25
  note, but I would also like a sort of nuttiness in rounding it
• 1:00:29
  out. And you can do that as a
• 1:00:31
  temperature blender. Sounds like the way.
• 1:00:32
  Fragrances get made when you use words like top, note, right
• 1:00:36
  body. Yeah.
• 1:00:38
  And this is reminds me of the difficulty of conveying taste.
• 1:00:42
  Every food industry has this issue and mache is difficult
• 1:00:46
  because a lot of the flavours are foreign to an overseas
• 1:00:50
  market. You see some people using words
• 1:00:52
  like seaweed or marine or nori. But like if you've never had
• 1:00:55
  Nori, this is not a useful, if you've never had matcha, you
• 1:00:59
  might also have never had Nouri. So it's it's a difficult
• 1:01:02
  capillary. Of flavor doesn't necessarily
• 1:01:04
  translate from one culture to another.
• 1:01:06
  Well, the other problem is that these blend houses, I think
• 1:01:09
  Maruku, I think I was looking on their website, I was counting, I
• 1:01:12
  think they have 54 unique matchas including everything
• 1:01:18
  that they make for the schools, etcetera.
• 1:01:21
  I don't know how anyone can know what that portfolio tastes like.
• 1:01:25
  I bet the people who work there don't know what all of those
• 1:01:29
  products taste like. Probably not I.
• 1:01:31
  Mean like I don't sure how many tension blenders they have, but
• 1:01:34
  it's in their heads somewhere what everything tastes like.
• 1:01:37
  But I'm sure the people who work the shops haven't tried all 54.
• 1:01:41
  I mean we're tomorrow. I think our matcha lineup will
• 1:01:45
  increase to 31 matches that aren't all currently in stock.
• 1:01:50
  Thanks shortage, but. I'm.
• 1:01:54
  Struggling to try and keep all of those in my head and that's
• 1:01:57
  not nearly as many as they have to deal with.
• 1:02:01
  But we, we would love to talk to some of these Chachi, I mean
• 1:02:04
  like, because from all the information you have shared,
• 1:02:09
  David, it sounds like they historically were and are
• 1:02:14
  probably the people that had the most contacts of everything,
• 1:02:18
  right? The most contacts about the
• 1:02:20
  farmers, the agriculture and the usage of their product and the
• 1:02:24
  intention and reason why they end up creating these products
• 1:02:28
  to begin with. So yeah, we will love to speak
• 1:02:32
  to these people and maybe have them on the podcast too, but
• 1:02:34
  that that would be. Great, seems to be.
• 1:02:36
  A little bit hard to to to talk to someone like that.
• 1:02:40
  You know why? They're so secretive.
• 1:02:42
  Why do do you know if they talk to each other across the
• 1:02:46
  company, It's very weird. It's so like, I have no mental
• 1:02:53
  model of, of these people as A and this profession other than
• 1:02:58
  what other people say about them.
• 1:03:00
  Yeah. I've met 2 chashi in my life and
• 1:03:04
  they're both incredibly interesting people, but they
• 1:03:07
  both work for smaller. Well, I guess they both own
• 1:03:09
  smaller blend houses, so it's hard for me to extrapolate from
• 1:03:13
  those experiences what it's like working at Koyama and and the
• 1:03:17
  transparency there. I think part of it in this sort
• 1:03:20
  of cynical way is protection. They don't want to out all of
• 1:03:23
  their suppliers and all of their sources, especially if you're
• 1:03:26
  one of the larger plant houses and you want to keep everything
• 1:03:29
  a little more proprietary, a little more in house.
• 1:03:31
  Yeah, makes. Sense, but I think part.
• 1:03:33
  Of it is just not expecting consumers to care.
• 1:03:37
  And I think slowly we'll see that change, especially the
• 1:03:40
  influx of people outside of Japan and a little bit of people
• 1:03:43
  inside Japan adopting the specialty mindset and thinking
• 1:03:47
  more about the, the chain that gets your tea from the soil to
• 1:03:50
  your bowl. I think we might see a change in
• 1:03:52
  that. But like to one of the chashi I
• 1:03:54
  work with for Visio and one of our suppliers, you'll tell me
• 1:03:58
  what cultivars generally are in the blend as best as like,
• 1:04:02
  because it changes from year to year, but generally it's like
• 1:04:05
  these cultivars. And this one contains Nadino
• 1:04:08
  from Hori Shichimayan. And this one contains some Sami
• 1:04:11
  Dodi from Zigisan, along with some other stuff to round out
• 1:04:15
  the flavour profile. So like the top three
• 1:04:17
  ingredients I might know. And then the rest will be like
• 1:04:19
  it's a blend of of stuff to sort of round up the flavour.
• 1:04:23
  But that's, I guess, in my experience, a little bit of an
• 1:04:25
  exception to the rule where it's still seen as a bit of a trade
• 1:04:29
  secret what they're doing in in the blending room.
• 1:04:33
  Yeah. They're probably kind of like
• 1:04:34
  the head formulators of larger flavour houses.
• 1:04:37
  Exactly. Yeah, they're like flavours.
• 1:04:39
  Yeah, yes, and. Also like they have their own
• 1:04:42
  ranking system, they have a karate dam system, they have
• 1:04:45
  levels I've heard. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:46
  And that it's like it's a competition or something.
• 1:04:49
  It's not like a license or a test.
• 1:04:51
  It's like when you have like A10 belt or something.
• 1:04:54
  I I was asking someone about that recently.
• 1:04:56
  It's AI wonder how that's structured.
• 1:04:58
  I would die to know like. I think that the first.
• 1:05:02
  Three done are are more like a test and after that it gets a
• 1:05:07
  little different in how it's structured.
• 1:05:09
  I would love to learn more about that.
• 1:05:10
  I have a friend in Japan, he is an American.
• 1:05:14
  He's one of the few American nihonchi instructors.
• 1:05:16
  If you're familiar with the term and he wants to pursue that
• 1:05:20
  route in his career, cool. OK, if he does.
• 1:05:24
  I'll, I'll get some insider knowledge on, on how that works
• 1:05:27
  because I think that's, that's interesting.
• 1:05:28
  It's, it's a sort of behind the scenes thing in the tea world.
• 1:05:32
  And I think that's sort of my intuition, and I might be wrong
• 1:05:36
  here, is that all the stuff is behind the scenes because they
• 1:05:39
  don't think that people care. And it's not because it's not
• 1:05:43
  primarily because they're trying to keep everything secret and
• 1:05:45
  keep the customer in the dark. It's just purely because it
• 1:05:48
  hasn't been what the customer has cared about before.
• 1:05:52
  And now that's changing at least a little bit.
• 1:05:55
  So hopefully we see more transparency into this and we
• 1:05:57
  see more celebration of the people who are who are good at
• 1:06:00
  their job or are passionate about blending tension because
• 1:06:04
  it would. Be I think.
• 1:06:05
  It would be sad to lose that part of the industry in a
• 1:06:10
  specialty mindset because it is such a interesting and
• 1:06:13
  historical aspect of it. And there's there's crash to it.
• 1:06:18
  I. I feel naive in saying this
• 1:06:20
  'cause I I'm wondering if I'm stumbling in with no context,
• 1:06:23
  but it would be very cool to see more foreigners trained by these
• 1:06:26
  people in a similar way that like someone might come to
• 1:06:29
  France to learn about wine making or cheese making and
• 1:06:31
  bring it back to their country. Because I like those tea
• 1:06:35
  blenders. Well, as skilled as they are,
• 1:06:38
  they're incredibly narrow demographic profile that have
• 1:06:42
  extremely limited like world experience compared to the
• 1:06:47
  people of the world. Where like.
• 1:06:50
  Someone from the Middle East or from South America or from the
• 1:06:53
  States or from Europe or for Southeast Asia, like all these
• 1:06:56
  places where we see much of booming, understand at a very
• 1:06:59
  fundamental level what people in their country will like.
• 1:07:03
  It can blend to meet their preferences.
• 1:07:06
  And that like it would be inconceivable probably to pretty
• 1:07:09
  much every blender alive what someone in Mexico would love
• 1:07:13
  versus Saudi versus Philippines, right because.
• 1:07:17
  They don't have those markets in mind and they don't have the
• 1:07:20
  contacts in those markets to fill out what they possibly
• 1:07:23
  could want. So it's, I mean, anyone can
• 1:07:27
  blend tension if you just buy tension and blend it yourself.
• 1:07:30
  But without access to a mill, you, you can't grind it.
• 1:07:33
  And without access to the generational and centuries of
• 1:07:37
  knowledge that goes into it, you might have a hard time of doing
• 1:07:40
  a good job of it. So I'm not sure if we'll see
• 1:07:45
  anytime soon that get opened up because Japan.
• 1:07:49
  Culture. Will change, but it does change
• 1:07:51
  at a glacial pace and the rest of the world moves a lot faster
• 1:07:56
  when it comes to cultural change.
• 1:07:58
  And because Japan, I'm speaking in very broad terms here,
• 1:08:02
  generally is especially in the traditional cultural sectors
• 1:08:05
  where NACHA has lived, is about preservation and is about taking
• 1:08:09
  things slowly, that it'll be a slow change if we do see it.
• 1:08:14
  I don't know if there are any non Japanese tension blenders at
• 1:08:18
  the moment. And if my friend goes down that
• 1:08:20
  path, he might be one of the first if not the first to get
• 1:08:23
  into the system. He's been living in Japan for
• 1:08:25
  quite a long time now. The barrier to entry is not just
• 1:08:29
  language, it's, it's culture, it's connections.
• 1:08:32
  It's a very hard to reach sector of the industry.
• 1:08:35
  If you know, people say that Japan's difficult as a tourist
• 1:08:38
  because of the language barrier, You can imagine in these
• 1:08:41
  centuries old industries how much more difficult it is in
• 1:08:44
  these, in these institutions where there is a lot of power
• 1:08:48
  and there is a lot of cultural baggage.
• 1:08:50
  And it's difficult to navigate that stuff unless you've had
• 1:08:53
  time to let it. So it it'll be a while, I think
• 1:08:57
  if before we see this open up if we do.
• 1:09:00
  But it's something that I think should be explored even outside
• 1:09:03
  of the traditional blending practices.
• 1:09:06
  If people want to get hands on on tension and try and try and
• 1:09:09
  blend it themselves, or if companies who work with tension
• 1:09:12
  blenders want to start trying to craft or ask them to craft
• 1:09:16
  blends to meet their own customer expectations.
• 1:09:19
  Because we see this in the coffee industry.
• 1:09:20
  It's very common for a coffee start up who knows nothing about
• 1:09:24
  coffee blending to go to one of the giant blenders.
• 1:09:26
  There's this like James Hoffman did a video on this.
• 1:09:30
  Yeah, yeah. And like asked like, I want
• 1:09:32
  something that's kind of has these notes and they'll go, Oh
• 1:09:34
  yeah, we'll make a blend for you.
• 1:09:35
  Boom. And like that is in theory the
• 1:09:40
  idea behind ear motor economy like.
• 1:09:44
  Oh, it's like all white labels. It's.
• 1:09:47
  All yeah, like in theory, this depends on the size of the
• 1:09:51
  school because Odesenke's Iyamoto have like 20 different
• 1:09:55
  matches that say, oh, their preferred matcher.
• 1:09:57
  Like a lot of different blend houses, like will have one that
• 1:10:00
  says, Oh yeah, the 16th generation Grandmaster Odesenke
• 1:10:03
  has said that this is a preferred matcher, but he has
• 1:10:07
  one from Kuyama. And there's multi from Kuyama
• 1:10:09
  and some from, yeah, Master Kuyama and some from even
• 1:10:12
  smaller producers like say who and who we work with.
• 1:10:15
  So I don't know how it actually works.
• 1:10:18
  They just blend tea, give it to the emoto and say, is it any
• 1:10:22
  good? But yeah, it's fine.
• 1:10:23
  Cool, great. We'll put your endorsement on
• 1:10:25
  it. I know in the case of my school,
• 1:10:27
  because we're smaller and the tea supplier that we work with
• 1:10:29
  is smaller, the emoto and the chashi actually have some back
• 1:10:33
  and forth about crafting these blends because yeah, it's it's
• 1:10:37
  cool to see this at the small scale kind of the way it used to
• 1:10:41
  be or the way that it works on paper in theory, actually done
• 1:10:44
  in practice, where the Tashi actually manually packs the
• 1:10:49
  chatsu bowl with the tensure for the entire year for our emoto.
• 1:10:53
  And that's a very like, I guess the listeners who who don't know
• 1:10:57
  the way that T used to be delivered is you get tensure,
• 1:11:01
  you blend it, sort it into different grades and you put
• 1:11:04
  them into little paper bags. And on these paper bags, you
• 1:11:07
  write the poetic name. These paper bags get put into a
• 1:11:11
  giant ceramic jar called a Tatsu ball.
• 1:11:14
  The space around these bags is filled with some more
• 1:11:16
  temperature as padding, and then the entire thing is sealed with
• 1:11:19
  paper and glue. And that's shoved underground
• 1:11:22
  for six months. And that's where the concept of
• 1:11:24
  aging your tea. For like the six?
• 1:11:27
  Months after harvest, before drinking it, before releasing it
• 1:11:30
  from the warehouses in November thereabouts, September, October,
• 1:11:35
  November, the drinking, that's where that was originally done.
• 1:11:39
  And then in November you'd take the jar, cut it open and drink
• 1:11:43
  the New Year's tea. The stuff that's in the paper
• 1:11:44
  bags would be poetically named. That would be your koicha.
• 1:11:48
  And everything that was used as padding that is lower quality
• 1:11:50
  temperature would be your usager is how it used to work.
• 1:11:54
  So with that tradition still happens a little bit, but that's
• 1:11:57
  kind of the root of the Usucha Kocha divide in quality.
• 1:12:01
  That's kind of the root of poetic names.
• 1:12:04
  And it's fun to see that this still actually happens and these
• 1:12:06
  things aren't just relics of the past and people are still
• 1:12:10
  practicing the forms and practices that this all
• 1:12:14
  originated from, but people don't know this.
• 1:12:16
  There's very little education and communication of these
• 1:12:18
  practices outside of Japan or even in Japan.
• 1:12:21
  So I think this goes for much in general, The the learning curve
• 1:12:27
  is steep outside of Japan. It's slightly less steep in
• 1:12:30
  Japan. And So what I've been trying to
• 1:12:32
  do with my blog and my videos is just get information that is
• 1:12:36
  readily available in Japanese or even like slightly less readily
• 1:12:40
  available and make it in English so that people outside of Japan
• 1:12:44
  have access to it. And I noticed.
• 1:12:46
  Too your AI dubbing that was cool.
• 1:12:48
  Yeah, that's a. That's a new feature that that
• 1:12:52
  YouTube has put on me. So now I apparently can speak in
• 1:12:54
  in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese.
• 1:12:59
  So you. Didn't just learn those
• 1:13:00
  languages. I can get by a little bit in
• 1:13:03
  French and German, but not that well.
• 1:13:06
  I think it's a good segue into what can be a a last question
• 1:13:10
  and I'm sure people are like really interested in your
• 1:13:12
  process of creating content, especially for YouTube.
• 1:13:16
  Because. I think of the people who are on
• 1:13:19
  we talked about matcha on YouTube.
• 1:13:21
  You are by far one of the most prolific and Japanese tea in
• 1:13:23
  general. I really enjoy your videos and
• 1:13:25
  the graphics and the animations. Like how is how do you decide
• 1:13:30
  what to talk about too? I wonder how you like narrow
• 1:13:32
  down the topic the. That's actually probably the
• 1:13:35
  hardest part of it, at least from a creative standpoint, is
• 1:13:38
  picking what to talk about, especially now that I've covered
• 1:13:41
  a lot of the basics. I've wanted to when like a year
• 1:13:44
  or two ago when I had the finally, because I've been
• 1:13:47
  wanting to do the YouTube for a long time.
• 1:13:49
  And I finally started doing it last year and I had a lot of
• 1:13:51
  video topics in mind. And now that I've sort of
• 1:13:54
  reached the end of those original topic ideas, it's sort
• 1:13:56
  of, oh, now what do I make a video about?
• 1:13:58
  So a little. Bit comes from from comments of
• 1:14:01
  what people want to hear and a little bit comes from seeing
• 1:14:04
  where the the gap is in informational videos on YouTube
• 1:14:08
  about this in practice. So my mindset has generally been
• 1:14:12
  do all the basic information 1st and then dive deep.
• 1:14:16
  So I'm still covering some basics.
• 1:14:18
  I want to do some basic videos about Channel U and history of
• 1:14:21
  Tea in Japan because once I get those basics covered, I can dive
• 1:14:24
  deeper into these topics and I've done and how Sanchez made
• 1:14:28
  video, but I'm still waiting to get a little more information
• 1:14:32
  and footage to do the how much is made one, which I think we
• 1:14:35
  should be able to get out this year.
• 1:14:36
  So picking topics is a little bit based on what I want to talk
• 1:14:39
  about, what my commenters and customers have asked me to talk
• 1:14:43
  about and where I think there is an informational gap that I
• 1:14:47
  think I have the ability to fill.
• 1:14:49
  If I have enough knowledge or or resources to do it, then I'll
• 1:14:52
  try and do it. As far as the creative process
• 1:14:54
  goes, I've I'm generally unscripted which.
• 1:14:58
  Really, I wouldn't have guessed that much to my.
• 1:15:00
  Brother's dismay because my brother who is one of the Co
• 1:15:03
  founders of Tesimi and is the cameraman for these YouTube
• 1:15:06
  videos and one of the editors. I'm the other editor.
• 1:15:09
  He has the unfortunate job of taking my ramblings and cutting
• 1:15:14
  them down into a editable, watchable format, especially in
• 1:15:19
  the early days during these videos unscripted, it would be
• 1:15:22
  like a three hour session to get a 20 minute video out of it.
• 1:15:25
  That's just. Comfortable.
• 1:15:27
  Yeah, me being uncomfortable in front of a camera, me forgetting
• 1:15:30
  what I said 5 seconds ago and how to segue onto that to the
• 1:15:33
  next topic. I guess slightly relatable ideas
• 1:15:36
  here. So I think I'm getting a bit
• 1:15:38
  better at that. But once the footage is filmed
• 1:15:40
  and I've, you know, talked about, wanted to talk about on
• 1:15:42
  the camera and I've used the utensils and stuff that's sent
• 1:15:46
  to my brother, my brother Will will edit it down.
• 1:15:48
  And then I'm the sole graphics department for Tesimi and for
• 1:15:51
  the videos. So it's up to me to make the
• 1:15:54
  graphics, the animations, and then all the texts and
• 1:15:57
  translations. And that's, that's basically it.
• 1:15:59
  As it comes to making these videos, it's a bit of time
• 1:16:03
  consuming and I'd like to have more time to do it so I can
• 1:16:06
  cover more diverse topics and go deeper.
• 1:16:10
  So hopefully this year we'll see some.
• 1:16:12
  I have a lot of videos planned for the next few months, which
• 1:16:16
  will be interesting. I'll be in Japan in May and I'll
• 1:16:19
  be doing a lot of filming over there, right?
• 1:16:22
  We have the same plan. It's it's like.
• 1:16:25
  As more people who have insider access to these sort of crafts
• 1:16:29
  and traditions, as much it gets more popular, it's the better it
• 1:16:32
  is that people actually see what happens behind the scenes.
• 1:16:34
  Because 10 years ago or even five years ago, videos of
• 1:16:39
  Tension production were very small and they're probably only
• 1:16:42
  on the Japanese side of YouTube. And so as more of that gets
• 1:16:45
  disseminated and we see a lot more of it, you can as a
• 1:16:49
  consumer understand a lot more and it's a lot easier to to
• 1:16:53
  learn from more readily available sources.
• 1:16:57
  Yeah, that makes sense. Cool.
• 1:17:00
  Is there anything that you wanted?
• 1:17:01
  I I know actually we didn't have much time to talk about much.
• 1:17:04
  And I know that we're running super late.
• 1:17:06
  I hope you don't have a hard stop.
• 1:17:07
  Oh no. It's fine.
• 1:17:09
  I'm, I'm relatively open today, so I can go for as, as long as
• 1:17:13
  you need me to, OK? Cool.
• 1:17:15
  Thank you. Sorry we.
• 1:17:16
  Indulged a little bit too much in some of the the lines of
• 1:17:19
  questions that's. Fine.
• 1:17:21
  I I enjoy the the natural flow of conversation.
• 1:17:24
  Is there anything that you wanted to talk about
• 1:17:25
  specifically that we didn't touch on?
• 1:17:27
  Yeah. But then this recording might be
• 1:17:31
  a long time, right? But yeah, the the stuff that I
• 1:17:36
  have open and maybe we can just select the shortage is
• 1:17:38
  interesting where you want to see things go in the future,
• 1:17:41
  like how you want to see the industry evolve and like what
• 1:17:45
  what end state would you be happy with in like 10 years?
• 1:17:49
  And like how we would get there is interesting.
• 1:17:54
  I'm really interested to in like getting to a world where much it
• 1:17:57
  just doesn't suck at most places where it's served.
• 1:18:01
  Curious to see like what knowledge, infrastructure and
• 1:18:05
  sourcing gaps other much of businesses too that are
• 1:18:08
  listening can help solve especially in their local
• 1:18:11
  markets and how. Your perspective and experience
• 1:18:14
  change year after year, you know, after you keep going back
• 1:18:17
  to Japan, OK. People.
• 1:18:20
  Maybe we should do a second episode.
• 1:18:22
  Yeah, maybe. Like.
• 1:18:24
  David went to Japan and then we can all gather together into a
• 1:18:27
  second. How did?
• 1:18:28
  You learn a lot of reading, and this is the trick of running a
• 1:18:36
  business while also trying to continue to learn about it
• 1:18:39
  because there's stuff that I will learn on the fly as I do
• 1:18:42
  match a business. You know, I'm getting better at
• 1:18:44
  Japanese business communication. I'm learning a bit more, but a
• 1:18:47
  lot of it does come from reading because there is a lot of
• 1:18:51
  published literature in Japanese about T production and
• 1:18:58
  unfortunately it's just not available in English or people
• 1:19:01
  don't know where to look. Even if they know Japanese, they
• 1:19:03
  don't know where to look. So a lot of it is published in
• 1:19:07
  like scientific journals where they've done the studies of like
• 1:19:09
  how long when you steep matcha or steep tensure does it get
• 1:19:13
  better? That sort of stuff that's
• 1:19:15
  published in scientific journals in Japanese.
• 1:19:17
  That's what research is out there.
• 1:19:19
  The industry side there's, I mean, the Japanese government
• 1:19:23
  puts out annual reports on the the state of the tea industry.
• 1:19:28
  This is on the Ministry for Agriculture's Forestry and
• 1:19:31
  fishing.gov. Yeah.
• 1:19:33
  Those decks. So they in there you see like
• 1:19:38
  the report on the industry, but also you can see how math is
• 1:19:43
  trying to promote certain things.
• 1:19:45
  So in there you see the push for organic, which I haven't talked
• 1:19:48
  about at all yet. You see the push towards pushing
• 1:19:53
  farmers into using more mechanical production to
• 1:19:57
  increase supply. There's like a graph on there
• 1:20:00
  where it's, it's just measuring the amount of riding style
• 1:20:03
  machines. But what's subtextually is that
• 1:20:05
  they're trying to get more farmers to use riding style
• 1:20:08
  harvesting machines. Otherwise they put that graph
• 1:20:12
  there. So reading like a little bit
• 1:20:14
  between the lines, you can see where the motives are, even if
• 1:20:17
  it's not overtly stated. And sometimes it is overtly
• 1:20:19
  stated. There's like the whole project
• 1:20:21
  for with its censure was. Like, yes, let's try making with
• 1:20:24
  it censure. They called it cowdy censure or
• 1:20:27
  aromatic censure to to, But like the fact that that's branded in
• 1:20:33
  Japanese and the fact that it's tells you that they're only
• 1:20:36
  looking at the domestic market. Like that's not branded as
• 1:20:39
  aromatic censure in English for export.
• 1:20:41
  That's cowdy censure because that's what they think younger
• 1:20:45
  people in Tokyo want to drink. And it's very like that's what
• 1:20:49
  they think. I'm not sure where they're
• 1:20:51
  getting their data from. Yeah.
• 1:20:52
  We used to work in consumer insights and I have some sense
• 1:20:55
  that was probably just some old guy looking at young Japanese
• 1:20:59
  girls thinking this is what they should like.
• 1:21:03
  They. They they put flowers on their
• 1:21:05
  purse. They like, they like floral
• 1:21:06
  things. Therefore we should make them
• 1:21:08
  floral. Of course, you can see the dots
• 1:21:12
  in in their heads. They're a little.
• 1:21:14
  Too obvious, yeah. So that's the sort of that's the
• 1:21:19
  sort of state of the industry. There's the sort of that side of
• 1:21:23
  it along with the craft side and the specialty side.
• 1:21:26
  And somewhere in between there we can get to a future where we
• 1:21:30
  have high quality match up for everyone because I this.
• 1:21:34
  Is sort of. I guess goes back to my take on
• 1:21:36
  the match marketplace, but also on the industry.
• 1:21:39
  There's the two sort of approaches to marketing tea to
• 1:21:42
  customers, and that is the meeting customers where they're
• 1:21:45
  at, which is what I think people have been trying to do for the
• 1:21:48
  past 10 years of dumbing things down.
• 1:21:50
  Can I? Wait, before I can I set you up
• 1:21:53
  for this, I'll cut that part because this this is getting
• 1:21:57
  really good We. Can just use all of these
• 1:22:00
  conversations. Keep it.
• 1:22:01
  Really. Behind the scenes, yeah.
• 1:22:03
  Like just keep it the you know the natural way.
• 1:22:07
  Are you able to? Jump right back in.
• 1:22:09
  Sorry, I shouldn't. Yeah, I think I can get.
• 1:22:11
  That, yeah. OK, OK, OK.
• 1:22:13
  Sorry, yeah. So this.
• 1:22:14
  Is like the two different ways, at least in my head of how I
• 1:22:17
  think about it of marketing to customers or approaching
• 1:22:21
  marketing to customers. And one of them is meeting the
• 1:22:24
  customer where they're at. And I think this is what some
• 1:22:26
  people have been trying to do for the past 10 years with.
• 1:22:30
  Without lack. Of a better term, dumbing things
• 1:22:32
  down, putting ceremonial grade on it because.
• 1:22:35
  That's what they know the. Customers are looking for.
• 1:22:37
  That's what they know the customers know about and
• 1:22:39
  therefore that's where they're at knowledge base wise.
• 1:22:43
  And then you can convert them into buy and do a ceremonial
• 1:22:45
  grade matcha. My philosophy has been sort of
• 1:22:48
  the other end and that is trying to raise the bar and hoping I
• 1:22:52
  raise everyone else with it. I was sort of, that's something
• 1:22:56
  that my T ceremony teacher has said in some context that's sort
• 1:22:58
  of been inspired by that sense of setting the example and
• 1:23:03
  trying to bring everyone with you and hoping that in doing so
• 1:23:06
  you can just raise the base level of everyone.
• 1:23:11
  So that's in my case, not using the word ceremonial grade and
• 1:23:14
  trying to be as transparent as possible when it comes to all
• 1:23:17
  the details about the matcha and teas that we sell.
• 1:23:20
  But on top of that, it's doing the outreach and education work
• 1:23:23
  into telling people what all of these things mean.
• 1:23:26
  Like I can put in the cultivars and the shading period and Hansu
• 1:23:31
  shading, but if I don't explain what Hansu shading is, that
• 1:23:34
  doesn't do anything. That's just more Japanese
• 1:23:36
  jargon. It's as as a poetic name, and if
• 1:23:39
  you don't know Japanese, Okumidori and Matsunomidori are
• 1:23:43
  the same thing. They'd make no difference
• 1:23:45
  whether it's. I didn't know that.
• 1:23:47
  Yeah. I mean.
• 1:23:48
  Matsunomidori means pine green and okumidori means deep green.
• 1:23:52
  Like if you don't, even if you know Japanese, it doesn't
• 1:23:54
  recognize what is a cultivar name and what is the poetic
• 1:23:57
  name. It's just not.
• 1:23:59
  It's not there so I will try my best to, you know, provide
• 1:24:03
  translations for the poetic renamed T that we sell.
• 1:24:05
  Try and explain the shiro and mukashi nonsense because no one
• 1:24:09
  actually knows what's going on there.
• 1:24:10
  There's like 3 different theories and all of them must
• 1:24:13
  have been true at one point in history, but none of them are
• 1:24:15
  true today, I learned. Something very interesting about
• 1:24:18
  that. Maybe you can either confirm or
• 1:24:19
  deny. Back when it was all Zyri, you'd
• 1:24:22
  have different colored leaves naturally and some would be more
• 1:24:25
  pale or not pale. And it was like the job of the
• 1:24:28
  tea blender to go into the field and label the Shiro bushes
• 1:24:33
  because they naturally produced lighter leaves.
• 1:24:37
  Is that is that one of those three that you were talking
• 1:24:39
  about? I think.
• 1:24:39
  I think. That's one of them, yeah.
• 1:24:41
  Because we see something similar back in like Song Dynasty tea
• 1:24:46
  records where like their ideal tea is white.
• 1:24:49
  And I think that somehow has got the.
• 1:24:52
  And I think that somehow got distilled through tea knowledge
• 1:24:56
  in the transmission with ASI and through traditional tea
• 1:25:00
  practice. Of course, it's kind of lost
• 1:25:02
  today unless you're doing hakuyocha the like.
• 1:25:05
  Have you seen like the white leaf teas where they shade the
• 1:25:08
  tea plants beyond normal shading?
• 1:25:10
  We just learned. About that, yeah.
• 1:25:13
  Sam. You were reading a paper in
• 1:25:14
  Japanese about this? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:16
  Yeah, that's all very interesting.
• 1:25:18
  And I think someone did an experiment of trying to turn
• 1:25:21
  those tea into matcha years ago, because I didn't know if that
• 1:25:25
  started or. Something turning to.
• 1:25:27
  Something commercial. It's.
• 1:25:29
  Hard to scale because when you shade the tea bushes that
• 1:25:31
  intensely the yield just plummets.
• 1:25:34
  Makes sense? Like, yeah.
• 1:25:35
  They've, they've got no more sunlight, so they can't do
• 1:25:37
  anything. But I think that might be one of
• 1:25:39
  them trying to put it briefly. Another one is that Shiro
• 1:25:42
  Mukashi refers to which side of the 88th day of the year.
• 1:25:47
  So traditionally, Hachiduhachiya, the 88th night
• 1:25:49
  is the picking day. This is the 88th day counted
• 1:25:53
  from the start of spring addition, the start of the new
• 1:25:55
  year. So traditionally you'd count 88
• 1:25:58
  days from the start of spring and that's the tea picking day.
• 1:26:01
  But of course, tea picking isn't that simple.
• 1:26:03
  So you kind of put 20 days on either side of it and say if it
• 1:26:06
  was before the 88th of the night, then it's I think it's
• 1:26:09
  Mukashi and then it's after then it's Hero one of those.
• 1:26:12
  That's one of the theories, OK, and.
• 1:26:14
  Then the last is the koicha usicha thing.
• 1:26:17
  I think that's like. Kind of how it is now kind of
• 1:26:19
  and it depends on the suppliers. Some of them I know have like
• 1:26:22
  everything is something no shadow in the Usucha range
• 1:26:25
  except for their hatsu mukashi because they put their hatsu
• 1:26:27
  mukashi down there. But for other blenders, they put
• 1:26:29
  their hatsu mukashi because for some reason everyone has to have
• 1:26:32
  a hatsu mukashi. They put it at like the top of
• 1:26:34
  their Kocha range. So but the other one goes back
• 1:26:36
  to that Odebee and Enshu idea of boiling tea leaves in it lie
• 1:26:42
  because it made them greener. And that was known as the blue
• 1:26:46
  production method. Of course, Japanese language
• 1:26:49
  blue and green are kind of the same thing, yeah.
• 1:26:52
  Yeah. It's, it's very confusing if you
• 1:26:54
  don't know that traffic lights in Japan turn blue instead of
• 1:26:57
  green. Yeah, it's.
• 1:26:59
  It's in Chinese too. That character means a lot of
• 1:27:01
  different things, ranging from Gray to blue to green, depending
• 1:27:06
  on the context. Really.
• 1:27:07
  Wow, that's confusing. It's yeah.
• 1:27:10
  It's a. It's very interesting, but.
• 1:27:12
  If you don't know, if you don't know yo kanji, then it's.
• 1:27:14
  It's very confusing, but I think that was then contrasted with
• 1:27:19
  the old production method, which produces a lighter color of tea
• 1:27:23
  leaves, which was shiro. But it also could have been that
• 1:27:26
  the older production method is mukashi, because mukashi means
• 1:27:29
  ancient old times. So at this point, at this point,
• 1:27:35
  I don't think anyone really knows.
• 1:27:36
  I think everyone has their own version and that's what they
• 1:27:38
  use. But moving back to where I was,
• 1:27:44
  Oh yeah, talking about raising the bar and raising the field
• 1:27:46
  for everyone trying to do this sort of education because the
• 1:27:49
  knowledge base to enter the specialty match world is
• 1:27:53
  relatively high. And because a lot of that is in
• 1:27:55
  Japanese, it's doubly harder by trying to make this information
• 1:27:59
  readily available on the products we have, but also just
• 1:28:02
  to consumers in general in the blogs and the videos.
• 1:28:05
  I've been too busy making videos to write more blogs, but I'll
• 1:28:08
  get back on it at some point, I promise.
• 1:28:10
  I'm hopefully encouraging other people to do the same and write
• 1:28:14
  about tea and get information that only exists in Japanese or
• 1:28:18
  in small sections of long abandoned forums more readily
• 1:28:22
  available. Yeah, in many ways it is also
• 1:28:24
  meeting people where they're at because if they don't have the
• 1:28:26
  education, just providing it for them is at multiple levels of
• 1:28:30
  the of the spectrum. Because if if I go to someone
• 1:28:33
  who's never had tea before, I've only had matcha for like, you
• 1:28:36
  know, a few weeks and had a few lattes saying kumidori tenta
• 1:28:40
  blending honza, shaving, it then means nothing.
• 1:28:42
  You have to like, you know, create the almost like a course
• 1:28:46
  developed my online course yet, but sort of the idea of
• 1:28:49
  introducing them to every step of the production in an order
• 1:28:51
  that makes it easy to understand, but not intimidating
• 1:28:54
  because it is intimidating. Japanese tea or specialty
• 1:28:58
  industries in general can be intimidating and some people are
• 1:29:00
  scared away because of that. And some people are drawn in and
• 1:29:04
  that type of person thing. But like if I see a hobby or an
• 1:29:08
  industry that has an incredibly deep rabbit hole, matcha for
• 1:29:12
  one, espresso for another, like wine, these are incredibly niche
• 1:29:17
  areas that have incredibly deep rabbit holes and relatively
• 1:29:21
  steep learning curves. So for some people that's
• 1:29:23
  attractive, but for other people it's you will push them away.
• 1:29:26
  So you kind of have to also develop a way of talking about
• 1:29:31
  tea that is not scary, but isn't talking down to consumers and
• 1:29:37
  treating them like idiots because they're not idiots.
• 1:29:39
  They just don't know anything yet.
• 1:29:41
  And therefore you have to tell them.
• 1:29:42
  But you have to tell them in a way that isn't just trying to
• 1:29:45
  show off your knowledge of Japanese.
• 1:29:46
  Yeah. I think it's.
• 1:29:48
  The biggest, it's the biggest problem, it's not enough.
• 1:29:51
  It's all top down positioning so it's quite a shame.
• 1:29:56
  And in many ways that is part of the culture of matcha, and it's
• 1:29:59
  something so it makes it. Doubly worse though, so it.
• 1:30:03
  Makes it doubly worse. Well, it's that side of Japanese
• 1:30:09
  that you don't really want, yeah.
• 1:30:11
  It's something that like I will, I will joke about it because
• 1:30:14
  I've been dealing with it. But yeah, it's not something
• 1:30:16
  that the average customer outside of Japan wants to deal
• 1:30:18
  with. But for people like myself in or
• 1:30:21
  have interacted with traditional Japanese culture in other
• 1:30:24
  aspects or just Japanese culture in general, it's something that
• 1:30:26
  you just sort of accept as part of it.
• 1:30:28
  And matcha is on the extreme side of that because for
• 1:30:31
  centuries it's been only if the rich people have it and they
• 1:30:34
  want to show it off to everyone else.
• 1:30:37
  In the current era of matcha shortage where only people who
• 1:30:39
  have the resources to obtain matcha and then flaunted on on
• 1:30:44
  social media, it's almost the same thing.
• 1:30:48
  Yeah, that's interesting. Parallel.
• 1:30:50
  Kind of, yeah. I mean, if you go back to Haiyan
• 1:30:54
  era Japan, where only the rich people had connections to China,
• 1:30:58
  could obtain fancy tea bowls, and had connections to nobles
• 1:31:02
  who could source the very, very limited supply of matcha that
• 1:31:05
  was ever produced in Japan during this time, It was a way
• 1:31:09
  of showing off wealth. And in the same way, in the
• 1:31:11
  early 90s when Japan westernized, using tea ceremony
• 1:31:14
  was a way of showing off culture.
• 1:31:16
  And this has been a thread for a while.
• 1:31:18
  If you come from a place that is outside of these traditionally
• 1:31:21
  wealthy or traditionally cultured air quotes, again,
• 1:31:25
  parts of society, these are tools that people have used for
• 1:31:29
  centuries to express I am wealthy and I am cultured and
• 1:31:32
  I'm better than you because of it.
• 1:31:35
  And unfortunately, we kind of see that a little bit in how
• 1:31:38
  people who are new to the industry and are new followers
• 1:31:41
  have been pushed away by the sort of toxicity around the
• 1:31:45
  shortage on multiple sides of the spectrum.
• 1:31:47
  Somehow this? Heritage of vanity stayed the
• 1:31:50
  same. It's a human condition.
• 1:31:53
  Is that not just? A human at some point, and how
• 1:31:55
  avoidable is that? Social distinction is almost a
• 1:32:01
  consumer need. Right.
• 1:32:03
  And like, as much as I want to try and be better than that,
• 1:32:07
  it's, it's a state of the things where they are right now.
• 1:32:11
  And I think we can all strive. We can all strive for you
• 1:32:12
  better. That's the sort of the point of
• 1:32:14
  tea ceremonies, continual self improvement and reflection and
• 1:32:18
  taking in the moment and thinking of how you're actually
• 1:32:21
  acting in it and interacting with the world.
• 1:32:23
  But we're in a very consumerist mindset right now.
• 1:32:27
  And that's it's led to online toxicity from multiple sides of
• 1:32:31
  the section. I think whereas, you know, some
• 1:32:34
  tea Tony practitioners are really hating on Instagram
• 1:32:37
  barely's air quotes again for flaunting the expensive matcha
• 1:32:43
  being put into mixed drinks. And but at the same time, these
• 1:32:46
  people are desperate for tea and wanted to so.
• 1:32:52
  We'll see how this. Evolves and new tension will
• 1:32:55
  come. I mean, this year is going to be
• 1:32:56
  rough because there's not going to be enough tentures to satisfy
• 1:33:00
  the demand. That's just the state of the
• 1:33:01
  industry because it's it's agriculture and things take time
• 1:33:04
  to grow. Tea is all about slowing down
• 1:33:06
  culturally. And while the industry is
• 1:33:09
  speeding up, it's going to take a while for the plants to grow.
• 1:33:11
  Like some of the suppliers I've known have planted vast new
• 1:33:14
  fields of Utah Hikaru, but it's going to take a while for those
• 1:33:18
  to three to five years for those to be harvestable.
• 1:33:21
  Some people are converting their censure production over to
• 1:33:23
  tensure production, another blow in the side of censure, but it's
• 1:33:27
  going to take a while for that to, you know, mature and
• 1:33:31
  actually feed the industry well. And then there's Kagoshima.
• 1:33:34
  For the entire time we've been talking about tea, at least,
• 1:33:38
  I've been mentioning Yami and Uji, primarily because that's
• 1:33:42
  the two most, I think, familiar flavor profiles for people who
• 1:33:45
  get into you do specialty matcha.
• 1:33:48
  You get the sort of bright vegetable, vibrant green green
• 1:33:52
  tasting tea from Uji, and you get the nutty, roasty, rounded,
• 1:33:56
  potentially creamy tea from Yame and Kagashima.
• 1:33:59
  As a new player to the game, they haven't been growing tea
• 1:34:01
  for nearly as long. The culture, the industry, for
• 1:34:04
  better or for worse, isn't there.
• 1:34:06
  So the entrenched top down hierarchy isn't there, but
• 1:34:10
  neither is the generational knowledge.
• 1:34:12
  So it's a bit of a mixed bag, but you have young
• 1:34:15
  entrepreneurial, innovative people who are trying things and
• 1:34:18
  that's exciting. And I think as time goes on and
• 1:34:22
  they learn more about tension production and continually hone
• 1:34:26
  their craft, we'll see a lot more high quality matcha out of
• 1:34:29
  Kagashima. One of the Tashi I was speaking
• 1:34:33
  to has been trying for a long time to to get good tension out
• 1:34:36
  of Kagashima because they are currently the largest tea
• 1:34:41
  producing region in Japan. That is a a switch that's
• 1:34:43
  happened in 2024. She's.
• 1:34:46
  Yeah. Finally outpaced she's Walker as
• 1:34:50
  the overseas demand for matcha is increasing in quantity but is
• 1:34:56
  also increasing in quality. People are demanding higher
• 1:34:59
  quality matcha across the board. We'll hopefully see that demand
• 1:35:03
  to get communicated to farms, but I think Uji currently is
• 1:35:08
  geographically limited and limited in manpower to respond
• 1:35:13
  entirely on their own to this demand.
• 1:35:15
  So we'll need help from the other two producing regions and
• 1:35:19
  maybe people will start to see them in their own right outside
• 1:35:23
  of just being supplemental like IG prefecture.
• 1:35:26
  Nishio Macha has a bit of a reputation of being good team,
• 1:35:29
  but it's not nearly as well known outside of Japan for its
• 1:35:31
  for its quality is Ujicha has Uji and Kyoto have long been
• 1:35:35
  both in and outside of Japan. A sort of marker of this is the
• 1:35:39
  this is the real stuff. This is the good stuff.
• 1:35:41
  So hopefully as chisel worker as well, chisel worker Koshima and
• 1:35:44
  and IG become more known. This will be because their
• 1:35:49
  quality has improved and more people can catch on to that.
• 1:35:54
  So when it comes to sort of marketing your tea, it's
• 1:35:58
  important to to communicate the region and everything so that
• 1:36:03
  there'll be more incentive life to produce better tea in the
• 1:36:05
  future. I think Kiboshi Macha will
• 1:36:08
  become a household name in the same way that, you know, Ujicha
• 1:36:12
  has been. I hope, I hope for all of us
• 1:36:14
  that that happens because then there'll be more good quality
• 1:36:17
  tea for us to enjoy and people will rave about, you know,
• 1:36:20
  Shizuoka cha or Kawane cha Matcha the same way we do about
• 1:36:24
  Fujicha and Yamicha. That'd be a great.
• 1:36:26
  Future. Yeah, yeah, because right now,
• 1:36:30
  you know, for the ugly secret of the industry, you know, like the
• 1:36:35
  people laundering Kagoshimati into Wuji and make it as
• 1:36:39
  Wujicha. And that's already happening.
• 1:36:42
  Right on the other. Hand you know it was it's
• 1:36:46
  happening because Kagoshimati is having such stigma in the
• 1:36:51
  market. So if that is that's going to be
• 1:36:54
  change in the future, I think that's a women's situation for
• 1:36:57
  everybody and I think that has. To come from both sides as
• 1:37:00
  people lose their stigma and the quality will have to rise to
• 1:37:04
  match it. And there are people producing
• 1:37:06
  good quality tension down there, but it's just the scale hasn't
• 1:37:09
  yet met the demand. And some of the, again, Tasha
• 1:37:12
  had mentioned just slowly waiting for things to get to the
• 1:37:15
  point where they can include them in there, the blends for
• 1:37:19
  for sale and blends for Yamoto and that sort of stuff.
• 1:37:21
  And speaking about laundering tea into uchicha, I'm not sure
• 1:37:24
  how well known this is, but uchicha on its own is kind of an
• 1:37:29
  unregulated term, the same way that ceremonial grade is.
• 1:37:33
  Like. There are guidelines put out by
• 1:37:36
  the Kyoto Tea Board, for lack of a better word, that uchicha
• 1:37:39
  should come from Kyoto Prefecture X percentage, or at
• 1:37:43
  least Kyoto Prefecture and then the surrounding 3 prefectures,
• 1:37:46
  Mia Mia Shiga and oh, I'm forgetting now.
• 1:37:50
  But like, these are guidelines and no one's bound by them, so
• 1:37:55
  just be wary of the importance of Fuji Cha I guess.
• 1:37:58
  Yeah. It's, I think we learned a
• 1:38:01
  number that only was under 1% of the T out in the market.
• 1:38:07
  That market as UJI Cha is actually grown from UJI.
• 1:38:12
  Right. It's a crazy number.
• 1:38:13
  It is a crazy number. And like even if you take Uji
• 1:38:16
  Cha at the slightly less specific designation that it's T
• 1:38:20
  from Kyoto Prefecture in general, even then you find a
• 1:38:24
  lot of it actually doesn't come from Kyoto Prefecture.
• 1:38:26
  It's from the neighboring prefectures like Chige and Mia.
• 1:38:29
  Because it's just there's a lot of demand and the supply in
• 1:38:32
  Kyoto Prefecture is limited and the supply in Uji is even more
• 1:38:35
  limited as over the past 200 years kind of see a.
• 1:38:38
  Gradient level exactly. Yeah.
• 1:38:42
  But like a lot of UGI has actually grown in Mosca because
• 1:38:45
  UGI is now a city. Like UGI used to be T Fields,
• 1:38:47
  but people moved there and there's no more space for T
• 1:38:50
  fields. One of the producers we work
• 1:38:52
  with, Yoshida MHN, they have pictures of their fields back in
• 1:38:56
  like the early 1900s where it was fields and their neighbors
• 1:38:59
  were also T fields and their other neighbors were also T
• 1:39:01
  fields. But now the neighbors are houses
• 1:39:03
  and businesses. So just the the space for
• 1:39:06
  agriculture in UGI is as evaporated.
• 1:39:09
  And so a lot of that's being shifted over to Uji Tawara and
• 1:39:13
  and Wazzuka. And I think we're seeing some of
• 1:39:16
  those names become more recognized in the specialty
• 1:39:19
  world, like people begin to recognize Wazzuka.
• 1:39:22
  People have recognized Shirakawa exclusively because of Sujiki of
• 1:39:27
  Suji. Sansti has developed a
• 1:39:29
  reputation for Shirakawa. I don't think anyone's heard of
• 1:39:32
  Shira Kawaji outside of him. So the sort of sub specificity
• 1:39:35
  within Uji is becoming slightly more known as Uji itself is very
• 1:39:40
  limited in what it can produce and is now just sort of the
• 1:39:43
  catch all cultural term for tea produce in that area.
• 1:39:46
  It's a bit of a shame. Because people drink it and they
• 1:39:49
  think they're tasting Gucci Cha. It's a lie.
• 1:39:53
  They're not tasting the place, no.
• 1:39:57
  And as like, as with grapes and wine, tawa is arguably more
• 1:40:02
  important than cultivar. And the tawa of Uji is different
• 1:40:05
  to that of Wazaka is different to that of Uji Tawada of
• 1:40:08
  Kyotanabe of Shirakawa. But all of these are relatively
• 1:40:11
  close geographically. But there is still quite big
• 1:40:13
  differences, like because Wazaka is up in the mountains, tea
• 1:40:17
  harvested there is roughly a week later than what actually
• 1:40:20
  happens. Interesting.
• 1:40:21
  I didn't know that. Uji Tawada and Uji.
• 1:40:24
  Yeah. So I've, I think you've had him
• 1:40:25
  on here. Pow.
• 1:40:26
  Oh yeah. Yeah.
• 1:40:28
  Yeah, my friend pal, he's the same T school as me.
• 1:40:30
  He has the same teacher as I do. Really.
• 1:40:32
  OK, Yeah, cool. Small world.
• 1:40:35
  Small world. Small world.
• 1:40:36
  After all, yeah. So when I was there last year,
• 1:40:38
  he drove me from his house in Kyoto into Wazaka, and we passed
• 1:40:44
  T fields in Yuji Tawada. I think it is.
• 1:40:46
  And he's like, oh, yeah, this is how I know what I'm doing for
• 1:40:48
  work next week because I see what they're doing here.
• 1:40:51
  And I know in a week's time I'll be doing the same thing.
• 1:40:54
  They're putting the shading on now.
• 1:40:55
  I think we'll be putting the shading on in a week's time.
• 1:40:57
  Oh, they're picking now. We'll probably be picking next
• 1:40:59
  week. It is quite a.
• 1:41:00
  Drive from Kyoto to to Wazuka because it's out in the
• 1:41:04
  mountains and you have to do all these little mountain passes to
• 1:41:06
  get there. They're building a tunnel which
• 1:41:08
  might make it easier. I think it just.
• 1:41:10
  Finished. Or at least it's just finished.
• 1:41:12
  OK the the drive is fun, little winding roads.
• 1:41:17
  How did mention to me that he sees people taking their rally
• 1:41:19
  cars and trying to do them like little race tracks?
• 1:41:23
  Because of these winding. Around the past, but he said
• 1:41:26
  that he saw someone in like a full race racing helmet and
• 1:41:29
  racing kit taking these corners really slowly because they're
• 1:41:32
  they're really quite tight and dangerous.
• 1:41:34
  Meanwhile, the farmers are just zipping by in their K trucks.
• 1:41:37
  They know the roads and they're just.
• 1:41:39
  I guess this also brings us another side tangent because I
• 1:41:41
  can't stop thinking of them to another difference in in how
• 1:41:45
  much it has changed taste wise over the the few the last
• 1:41:48
  century. I guess as more factories,
• 1:41:52
  additive factories, are being placed next to areas of
• 1:41:54
  production, the time between picking and steaming is getting
• 1:41:57
  ever shorter. Which.
• 1:41:59
  Is. The goal, what we've been
• 1:42:01
  thinking has been the goal is steam as fast as possible to
• 1:42:04
  lock in as much freshness and no oxidation.
• 1:42:07
  But back in the day, that wasn't how it was.
• 1:42:08
  You'd have to, you know, hike down the mountain on foot and it
• 1:42:12
  would take longer for the TV's that you picked to get to the
• 1:42:15
  steaming basket and they were steamed by hand in small
• 1:42:17
  batches. So you would take a little bit,
• 1:42:19
  steam it and be done with it and then the batch waiting would
• 1:42:22
  get, you know, would take longer.
• 1:42:25
  So there's probably a lot more withering happening in older
• 1:42:29
  styles of much production that we have moved away from.
• 1:42:33
  So as the industry has moved towards super umami, super
• 1:42:37
  fresh, super green and in Yami, we've moved towards nutty and
• 1:42:41
  and toasty. I think we're missing out on the
• 1:42:44
  floral and bright that came from probably withered Zyri being the
• 1:42:49
  slightly withered Zyri. But I'm not sure if the, I hope
• 1:42:53
  someone will choose to, to produce that again.
• 1:42:56
  And we see that expression of matcha as people innovate, but
• 1:43:00
  I'm not sure if that's where the the mainstay of the overseas
• 1:43:02
  industry is looking at the moment if they're just trying to
• 1:43:04
  get and ice cream, umami stuff and our and our drinks.
• 1:43:08
  But hopefully there's enough specialty demand that this sort
• 1:43:10
  of innovation continues. Yeah, and they start.
• 1:43:12
  Looking outside like the traditional buyers because I
• 1:43:15
  feel like I I have this theory that all of the incentives and
• 1:43:19
  feedback loop and setting prices are around flaw minimization,
• 1:43:23
  which are all set by these blenders.
• 1:43:24
  And it's just old Japanese men have set up the system of buying
• 1:43:28
  tea from each other based on what they understand to be
• 1:43:32
  quality, which quality to me is a pretty socially constructed
• 1:43:36
  construct. And that their ideas of what's
• 1:43:39
  good and bad, you know, is homogenizes the taste of matcha
• 1:43:43
  that the world is consuming, right?
• 1:43:45
  You see that? In in the, in the way the tea is
• 1:43:48
  evaluated and scored at the wholesale market and I guess
• 1:43:52
  also for competitions is that it'll take tea.
• 1:43:57
  This is, I think this is true of Ascension.
• 1:43:59
  It's probably also true for matcha brew it at boiling water
• 1:44:03
  temperatures to extract every single negative quality they can
• 1:44:06
  from it and expose it in all of its floors.
• 1:44:11
  Because if you brew it at lower temperatures, you don't see any
• 1:44:13
  of that. And then you basically score it
• 1:44:15
  and you say, oh, this is too oxidized or this was picked too
• 1:44:18
  late and that sort of stuff. So yeah, it's very definitely a
• 1:44:21
  floor minimization approach and that discourages innovation
• 1:44:25
  because the market is primed at stability and consistency and
• 1:44:31
  trying to push towards that. Where as if you get more farmers
• 1:44:35
  selling direct to customers, you get a little bit more of that
• 1:44:37
  innovation, especially outside of Sunshine matcha.
• 1:44:41
  You get all of the other types of tea.
• 1:44:42
  But even within Sunshine matcha, you start seeing more innovation
• 1:44:46
  when people are operating outside of this traditional
• 1:44:50
  wholesale market practice. That's good.
• 1:44:52
  And I think it'd. Be.
• 1:44:53
  Yeah, it's good. And it's more like direct
• 1:44:55
  consumption is important, but I'm not sure how scalable that
• 1:44:59
  is because the the majority of tea is put on the wholesale
• 1:45:03
  market. While it's good that a lot of
• 1:45:06
  producers are experimenting outside of the wholesale market,
• 1:45:09
  we need a change to the wholesale market itself and the
• 1:45:12
  guidelines that they set. If you want to see changes
• 1:45:15
  across the board that a lot more people can experience rather
• 1:45:19
  than just one or two producers and with very limited supply,
• 1:45:22
  makes sense. Big structural problem.
• 1:45:24
  I don't think that's going to get solved anytime soon.
• 1:45:27
  No, no. Probably not, but the push
• 1:45:29
  towards organic is interesting because like if we have a ideal
• 1:45:34
  flavor profile for matcha as being incredibly umami and
• 1:45:37
  green, that necessitates intense fertilization.
• 1:45:40
  Which is hard. To do purely with organic
• 1:45:43
  fertilizer. And that's where like, is this
• 1:45:45
  what matcha used to taste like? Have we moved so far away from
• 1:45:48
  the natural taste of the plant that it's unrecognizable as
• 1:45:52
  matcha? Because if you have some of the
• 1:45:53
  like lower quality again quotes organic matcha, it tastes quite
• 1:45:57
  different than yeah, for sure something you'd get out of the
• 1:46:00
  traditional Uji blend. And is that something that
• 1:46:04
  customers want, or is it something that they're trying to
• 1:46:06
  move away from because everyone wants vibrancy and umami, which
• 1:46:11
  you just simply have a hard time getting if all you've got is
• 1:46:15
  canola seeds and other organic fertilizers?
• 1:46:18
  Yeah, I mean. Like with that level of
• 1:46:20
  fertilizers being used, you know, you can base
• 1:46:23
  theoretically, like produce that tea like on the moon.
• 1:46:29
  So it's no to the soil. Yeah, yeah, it's all the
• 1:46:32
  nitrogen. That you pour on it, yeah.
• 1:46:35
  So we're seeing a. Little bit of push, that push
• 1:46:37
  back in the specialty industry against that sort of push
• 1:46:40
  towards the Super umami. And this is something that one
• 1:46:43
  of the chashi I spoke to Ed Rishuan has mentioned that like
• 1:46:46
  aroma is something that used to be the primary driving character
• 1:46:50
  of T blenders is all about aroma.
• 1:46:53
  And now that the push is towards umami suffers a little bit, but
• 1:46:57
  flavour is a lot more subjective.
• 1:46:59
  This is what he said than aroma and it's a lot harder to to
• 1:47:04
  judge quality wise as a as a tension blender.
• 1:47:07
  So they still operate a little bit on on the robot primarily
• 1:47:09
  rather than the flavour. But, and this is also something
• 1:47:14
  I've noticed, that the difference between how tea
• 1:47:15
  practitioners make tea and how casual drinkers, or I guess
• 1:47:20
  hobbyist drinkers drink matcha, is that for the longest time
• 1:47:24
  everyone's been telling everyone to brew matcha at like 60°,
• 1:47:27
  seventy degrees, 80° to minimize bitterness.
• 1:47:30
  But in the tea room, as I'm sure you've known, you just take it
• 1:47:32
  straight out of the comma. Right out of the comma and.
• 1:47:37
  This is something that I think isn't explored enough because
• 1:47:40
  this has been done for centuries.
• 1:47:41
  And if it tastes better at lower temperatures, then why are we
• 1:47:44
  using boiling water? And of course, my theory here is
• 1:47:47
  that one at the higher ends of quality spectrum, you can use
• 1:47:52
  boiling water. You take one of the Suji San's
• 1:47:53
  teas, you can hit it with boiling water and you'll still
• 1:47:55
  get very little bitterness. But the other thing is that
• 1:47:58
  aroma is more important back then and higher temperatures
• 1:48:02
  extract more aromatic compounds and therefore you experience
• 1:48:05
  more of the aroma. And two, bitterness wasn't seen
• 1:48:09
  as the worst thing ever as it kind of is now where we are
• 1:48:12
  terrified of bitterness. We also kind of need it to cut
• 1:48:15
  through milk and a latte. But in Usucha and Kocha we hate
• 1:48:18
  bitterness as though as the the enemy, whereas it used to be
• 1:48:22
  seen as not only a part of matcha, but as an important part
• 1:48:26
  of matcha's flavour, like. Preferences have literally
• 1:48:29
  changed. Preferences have literally.
• 1:48:31
  Changed and like there's there's kind of a thing people say that
• 1:48:34
  Amorta Senke prefers slightly bitter matcha.
• 1:48:36
  I'm not sure how true that is. I've I haven't I haven't tasted
• 1:48:38
  all of the the blends of all the different corner meat.
• 1:48:40
  But like Acei writing and the tropics promoted matcha because
• 1:48:43
  it was bitter and taste of change.
• 1:48:45
  Yeah, because it lines as as part of traditional Chinese
• 1:48:48
  medicine. Yeah, and if you see examinate
• 1:48:52
  the record of how tea being made back in Sung dynasty, it will be
• 1:48:56
  very bitter. So probably closer to nowadays
• 1:49:00
  white tea and historically even to now, you know, Chinese tea
• 1:49:04
  doesn't necessarily assess bitterness as a negative
• 1:49:07
  component of the tea. Usually some tea with some
• 1:49:10
  exceptions. But yeah, it's an interesting
• 1:49:13
  phenomenon that we're seeing now that bitterness is so hostile in
• 1:49:18
  matcha. It's not just.
• 1:49:20
  Matcha, you see it in Sanchez as well.
• 1:49:21
  And I think Sanchez is something that Matcha can learn from where
• 1:49:25
  for a long time. Bitterness and a stringency with
• 1:49:27
  the enemy. And then we invented fuku mushi
• 1:49:29
  cha in the season 50s, deep steam censure to eliminate
• 1:49:32
  bitterness and a stringency. But the vast majority of cheap
• 1:49:36
  fuku mushi cha, and I'm being a bit mean here because a lot of
• 1:49:39
  the cheap ones I think taste kind of lifeless without the
• 1:49:43
  backbone of a stringency. Like that structure, I think is
• 1:49:47
  very important to a good censure, at least in my
• 1:49:49
  preferences. In the sort of mountainous
• 1:49:52
  censures from Shizuoka, you get that backbone.
• 1:49:54
  And from there you can structure the umami, you can structure the
• 1:49:59
  aromatics. So that's gone through multiple
• 1:50:01
  different waves of evolving taste preferences in censure.
• 1:50:06
  And I'm curious to see how this all exists in matcha.
• 1:50:09
  I don't think we'll see a return of bitterness as a positive, as
• 1:50:12
  a positive quality. But broadly speaking, I wonder
• 1:50:15
  in the long run how taste preferences will evolve over
• 1:50:18
  time or if we will continue to dive ever deeper into maximizing
• 1:50:23
  umami and greenness and see those amino acid percentages
• 1:50:26
  rise each year. And at some point, we're
• 1:50:28
  drinking straight LCM. It's baked.
• 1:50:30
  Into the incentive model at the auctions and the wholesale
• 1:50:33
  level, if you're if you know whether or not you're gonna sell
• 1:50:36
  something is based on the stupid score sheet that someone
• 1:50:39
  invented. And that was a flaw.
• 1:50:42
  How is it ever gonna change? Maybe we have to start seeing
• 1:50:45
  China and Korea coming into the game with higher quality tensha
• 1:50:49
  that aren't bound by any of these rules serving the
• 1:50:51
  specialty market abroad for matcha.
• 1:50:54
  Like it's because these I I don't know I I've worked with a
• 1:50:59
  lot of large Japanese companies in the past and there's an
• 1:51:02
  unusual amount of rigidity and hesitance for structural change,
• 1:51:06
  especially structural change. Maybe as a one off but like.
• 1:51:12
  Are the. Japanese gonna adapt fast enough
• 1:51:14
  to let 1000 flowers bloom and see what can be good, some
• 1:51:19
  newer. Farmers in Kagoshima, I mean,
• 1:51:22
  they seem to be very innovative. That's my.
• 1:51:25
  Bet the word of mouth. The idea is that the corporate
• 1:51:28
  rigidity is less so down South in Yame and Kagoshima like that
• 1:51:35
  sort of rigidity is very much seen in Tokyo and Kyoto.
• 1:51:38
  Kyoto is especially Kyoto is like, is kind of the cultural
• 1:51:42
  landmine of very rigid social structures and the importance of
• 1:51:47
  indirect communication. And as a foreigner, if you don't
• 1:51:50
  know the trappings, it's it's, it's a trap.
• 1:51:53
  People don't say exactly what they mean.
• 1:51:54
  And this is true of Japanese culture in general, broadly
• 1:51:57
  speaking, but it's even more so in Kyoto, where like centuries
• 1:52:00
  of culture and tradition have been steeped and people have,
• 1:52:05
  you know, generations of lineage to uphold.
• 1:52:08
  You see Potter's in Kyoto, Potter's like Asahiaki with like
• 1:52:12
  multiple generations and he's at 16 now, will destroy like 70% of
• 1:52:16
  their works because they have to upkeep their name.
• 1:52:18
  Whereas outside of Kyoto, the pressure isn't as strong to be
• 1:52:23
  upholding centuries of tradition.
• 1:52:26
  So I think people are a little more free, but I'm speaking very
• 1:52:30
  broadly here about. Regional.
• 1:52:32
  Differences in Japanese culture, I'm sure it's a lot more
• 1:52:35
  complicated and people have different opinions, but that's
• 1:52:37
  kind of the understanding is that that's how Kyoto is.
• 1:52:41
  And places further South, further away from Kyoto, a
• 1:52:43
  little less like that. That's good, yeah.
• 1:52:46
  The only place where people from Tokyo is going to get trolled
• 1:52:50
  and joke is in Kyoto. There's one reason why my T
• 1:52:55
  school, so I didn't mention this going back to my T school, but
• 1:52:58
  we're based in Hiroshima, OK? So the.
• 1:53:01
  Sansenke and the majority of T schools are based in Kyoto.
• 1:53:04
  We're based in Hiroshima because Oeda Soko was sort of kicked out
• 1:53:07
  of Kyoto and given land in Hiroshima to be the feudal Lord
• 1:53:11
  of. So being removed from the
• 1:53:14
  influences of the Sansenke and Kyoto and the ethno government
• 1:53:18
  just distance wise has LED it to sort of pursue a different path.
• 1:53:23
  And then being in Hiroshima, of course, it survived an atomic
• 1:53:27
  bomb. And that has had a profound
• 1:53:30
  impact on our tea school, because our tea school used to
• 1:53:35
  be centered in the castle. It's a New York car alarm right
• 1:53:39
  there, if you can hear that. It used to be centered in the
• 1:53:43
  castle at the center of Hiroshima.
• 1:53:45
  And just by luck, after the major restoration, after the
• 1:53:49
  samurai were disbanded, they moved out to the suburbs and
• 1:53:52
  moved the family and everything important with them.
• 1:53:54
  Otherwise the entire tradition would have been lost in World
• 1:53:57
  War 2. But while the lineage has
• 1:54:01
  survived, we lost a lot of people and obviously in in the
• 1:54:06
  blast and it's sort of been a survival story since then, a
• 1:54:09
  rebuilding story for the school, like our Iamoto lost, you know,
• 1:54:14
  very dear people to him during that is.
• 1:54:18
  Is the Iamoto? Did the Iamoto live through
• 1:54:21
  World War Two? Yes, I'm.
• 1:54:23
  Pretty sure he was very young though.
• 1:54:25
  Ogre and Iamoto. Wow.
• 1:54:26
  Interesting. Yeah.
• 1:54:27
  Interesting. And he was definitely succeeded
• 1:54:30
  in Yamoto. Our previous one lived through
• 1:54:33
  that for sure. So we're very tied to that, as
• 1:54:36
  well as to the idea of surviving the civil war of Japan.
• 1:54:40
  Like being a samurai school meant something different in the
• 1:54:45
  warring period, because samurai in the Edo period didn't do
• 1:54:48
  anything. It was a time of peace.
• 1:54:49
  Samurai just became a social class.
• 1:54:51
  You didn't actually fight. You carried your sword as a
• 1:54:54
  symbol of status and that's about it.
• 1:54:56
  During the Civil War period, these people were fighting.
• 1:54:58
  It was dangerous. Their lives could be lost at any
• 1:55:00
  moment. And Oedo Soko had been on the
• 1:55:03
  front lines of battle multiple times as Ichi Bangati, the first
• 1:55:06
  spear. So it's very much a story of
• 1:55:09
  survival and perseverance for the school.
• 1:55:11
  Not only did Oedo Soko survive the tumultuous period of civil
• 1:55:15
  war, but his descendants have survived nuclear war in
• 1:55:19
  Hiroshima. So I think that has also been a
• 1:55:22
  bit of a, a guiding spirit to push us forward into persevering
• 1:55:25
  and surviving and adapting to to new situations Makes sense.
• 1:55:28
  And it's. Very heavy.
• 1:55:29
  It's it's kind of crazy. Very.
• 1:55:31
  Interesting story, yeah, for sure.
• 1:55:34
  Maybe like. Definitely.
• 1:55:35
  I'm sure it lends into their adaptive spirit, yeah.
• 1:55:39
  And I tying this back to different regional cultures in
• 1:55:42
  Japan, Hiroshima has had is very different culturally, I think to
• 1:55:47
  Kyodo. I've only been there for like a
• 1:55:48
  week, but I felt a difference as people have just sort of had
• 1:55:52
  that shared experience of of, of trauma and horror and I've just
• 1:55:57
  sort of become friendlier and nicer and just more accepting.
• 1:56:01
  And so they're. They're.
• 1:56:03
  Tea blenders in Hiroshima and I think they might have a
• 1:56:05
  different outlook to tea blenders in Kyoto.
• 1:56:08
  But this is just my point that it's easy to think of Japan as a
• 1:56:13
  monolithic culture. And the cynicist in me would
• 1:56:16
  like to say that Japan wants you to think of Japan as a
• 1:56:18
  monolithic culture. This is something that they've
• 1:56:21
  tried to craft post major restoration, but the truth is
• 1:56:26
  that it's not. And I think we'll see hopefully
• 1:56:28
  more regional expression in different styles of tea, but
• 1:56:32
  also different styles of doing business and adapting to the
• 1:56:36
  changing world and the changing market of matcha.
• 1:56:39
  Maybe the? Tashi's are easier to talk to in
• 1:56:41
  Hiroshima, Ryan. But you're already there's.
• 1:56:45
  One, there's the one who provides to our school, he's
• 1:56:48
  actually in Onomici, which is like a 2 hour drive out of
• 1:56:50
  Hiroshima. OK, he's great.
• 1:56:53
  Super down to earth guy, very, very nice.
• 1:56:56
  But yeah, he's the one I mentioned who did like 30-3
• 1:56:58
  different tensions in his blend last year for Vyomoto.
• 1:57:01
  So crazy. They're out there.
• 1:57:03
  That's. Cool.
• 1:57:05
  Well. I guess we're coming up way past
• 1:57:07
  two hours, so it's sort of a final question.
• 1:57:09
  What can everyone expect of Tsumi into the future?
• 1:57:13
  Like where, where are you guys headed and what what's your your
• 1:57:17
  plans into the future? I think.
• 1:57:20
  What we've been trying to do is highlight producers and
• 1:57:23
  highlight Craftsman both in the TNT West Side.
• 1:57:26
  And we're basically trying to continue to do that, but just
• 1:57:29
  expand more into areas that we haven't covered before.
• 1:57:32
  So this is looking at more matcha outside of where we've
• 1:57:36
  been originally forcing in the matcha side.
• 1:57:39
  So we've been very heavy on single origin from Kyoto from
• 1:57:44
  the start. We're looking a little more into
• 1:57:47
  sourcing blended teas from there and maybe some single origin
• 1:57:51
  outside of Kyoto. We've had some from Yame, we
• 1:57:53
  have a few in Shizuoka, but more of that so we can better
• 1:57:58
  represent the of wide variety, the spectrum of matcha flavors.
• 1:58:02
  As I've said, we're currently at about 30 different matches and
• 1:58:05
  we're probably going to see that number increase if everything
• 1:58:07
  goes well. And my goal there is just to
• 1:58:10
  show people that matcha exists in such a wide spectrum of
• 1:58:14
  quality and style. And style's something I want to
• 1:58:17
  focus on here because we talk a lot about quality as if it's
• 1:58:20
  linear. Oh yeah.
• 1:58:22
  It's not at all. It's huge variation and it's so
• 1:58:25
  much. Down to personal preference and
• 1:58:27
  once you're at the point of quality, as drinkable as usage,
• 1:58:30
  then your world opens to now what I want to do, you know, I
• 1:58:34
  can pursue tea in this style if I want single origin, super
• 1:58:38
  focus tasting profiles, if I want something crafted and
• 1:58:40
  rounded. It's just different.
• 1:58:43
  So that's our goal there in the matcha sector at least, is to
• 1:58:47
  try and showcase more variety or continue to do that because
• 1:58:51
  that's what I've been trying to do from the start and that now
• 1:58:54
  as we're growing, we have the capacity to do that.
• 1:58:57
  So that's one side of it. And I guess the same is true
• 1:59:00
  across the board in our other sectors in NT where we've been
• 1:59:03
  focused on a certain area, the teapots to Konami, but you know,
• 1:59:08
  branch outside of that and showcase more of Japan's, you
• 1:59:11
  know, regional crafts. We're doing that slowly.
• 1:59:14
  We'll hopefully be doing even more of that in the coming
• 1:59:16
  years. And then on our content side, I
• 1:59:19
  hope to produce more and more and more and cover all of these
• 1:59:23
  different aspects, not just as products that we sell, but as
• 1:59:25
  stories that we can craft and bring to people.
• 1:59:28
  Because these are such interesting stories with such
• 1:59:30
  deep and interesting history, ancient or even recent history
• 1:59:33
  for some of these Potters and these tea producers, that I want
• 1:59:36
  to show everyone what's actually happening and not just show the
• 1:59:39
  end work of the product. So that's hopefully what's on
• 1:59:42
  the plan. Book has been in the talks for a
• 1:59:45
  while. Nice if I have the.
• 1:59:47
  Time to produce that. Maybe that's a project for the
• 1:59:49
  end of this year and moving into next year because and this is
• 1:59:54
  just the issue with running a company is that we're all too
• 1:59:57
  busy running the company to do. Even more stuff that we want to
• 2:00:01
  do. So I've been thinking about this
• 2:00:02
  for a long time and there's a lot of stuff that I can talk
• 2:00:06
  about in situations like this that I've not put down on paper.
• 2:00:09
  Like this thought of information I've shared today and my
• 2:00:12
  thoughts, they've not been put into my blogs or into my videos
• 2:00:14
  yet. And so hopefully I can coalesce
• 2:00:17
  all of this and put it into a book that'd.
• 2:00:20
  Be awesome. It's a book that thank you.
• 2:00:23
  For doing this, yeah. Thank you.
• 2:00:25
  For all the content, we've learned a lot.
• 2:00:28
  It's very helpful and it's context too.
• 2:00:30
  You're not telling anyone what to think or how to think or that
• 2:00:34
  this is good or that's good. It's just really the foundations
• 2:00:38
  to make your own judgement as a consumer, at least when I'm
• 2:00:41
  consuming that content. So really appreciate it.
• 2:00:44
  I'm glad to. Hear that, that's definitely my
• 2:00:45
  intention and I hope that people see it that way.
• 2:00:49
  And I mean, from a business perspective, that's sort of the,
• 2:00:51
  the ethos I want to build that I'm not being telling you to buy
• 2:00:56
  our tea. I'm not telling you that this is
• 2:00:58
  good. I'm just trying to give you the
• 2:00:59
  information to show you why the tea that we sell is good, that
• 2:01:04
  the people who've put all the work into it have put in all
• 2:01:06
  this work and how it turns into what you get in the cup or in
• 2:01:10
  the bowl if it's matcha. But I hope that, you know, this
• 2:01:13
  sort of education can use to to spread and I can make more of
• 2:01:17
  it. We hope so.
• 2:01:21
  But thank you so much, I think it's a great place to stop.
• 2:01:26
  So thank you so much for listening.
• 2:01:28
  I think it's the longest episode ever, just over 2 hours.
• 2:01:32
  But it's great actually. Personally, I love long form
• 2:01:35
  content. I hope our audience feels the
• 2:01:37
  same. And if you enjoyed it, please
• 2:01:39
  consider sharing with friend and we'll see you in the next one.
• 2:01:42
  See you in the future. Thanks.
• 2:01:43
  Thank you.