Chinese vs Japanese Narratives about Matcha

Ryan · 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is Zongjun Li, who also goes by Sam. Hello, hello. And with the cofounders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, matcha, share startup stories and interview experts.

Zongjun · 0:20

How's it going? Doing well, doing well. I'm currently sitting in Changsha and we just did a very interesting trip up north into Hubei and Hunan to see some Chinese matcha. I wish I could have been there. It was unfortunate timing on my side.

Ryan · 0:38

I'm, I'm here in France, but I was just at the Paris Tea Festival and coincidentally around the same time as your trip, went to a very interesting talk at the Paris Tea Festival on Chinese matcha. And, you know, you were telling me about your trip and I was like, hold, like, wait, wait, wait. Let's just do an episode because you have such interesting fresh takes that I've just never heard before. It's quite a 3rd deputy in a way. Yeah, and actually I think we've we've learned enough that it's sort of warranted to record another episode on Chinese matcha.

Ryan · 1:11

Before I do that, I actually came up with a very interesting observation. So I recently been drinking a lot of zairai tea. In particular, I bought some zairai sencha from Oscar Breckel's company Senchaism through Marcel who has unearthed gallery in Munich.

Ryan · 1:29

And I've been experimenting with water temperature for his 100 year old zairai sencha. And I've actually discovered that it tastes like much better at like just off boil, like 98°. Like the fragrance is so nice. It's not a very umami tea to begin with. And you know, does it express some bitterness? Yes, but like not really either.

Ryan · 1:53

Like it's much more in like a Chinese tea spirit. You know, where they say that the best green tea can take boiling water. What I'm realizing is. Yeah, for Chinese green tea. Like in Chinese, in China, you know, or Taiwan, you meet people and they're like, yeah, if you need to use like low temperature water, it's like not good tea to begin with. You don't want to extract all that stuff. You know, if you have high enough quality tea, it's OK. And I've heard a similar sentiment echoed by Anna from Global Japanese Tea Association and one of their online meetups, saying that some of the more naturally produced Japanese teas, you know, zairai or more

Ryan · 2:32

natural farming in general can take much higher heat. And that she also prefers them with sort of just off boil or much warmer water than standard convention requires. So at the moment I'm deep in some research for a new topic that I want to record both the podcast about that I'm writing a research piece about what happened to all of Uji's old tea trees. I have discovered that through looking at some documentation for about 100 years ago, I found 100 year old like Uji Tea Guide on like what makes good GT and how to spot fakes and this kind of thing, as well as some really old agricultural reports. And I keep seeing over and over

Ryan · 3:15

and over that old trees were preferred. That old trees, like over 100 years old actually made the best matcha, which is like the exact opposite sentiment we hear not only in Uji but sort of across Japan from all the people we've talked to. That's very interesting.

Zongjun · 3:33

I I must wonder like how consumer the preference on flavor also changed throughout all these years. What people consider are high quality matchas nowadays must not be a thing or of the consideration of you know what people evaluate matcha back in the days.

Ryan · 3:51

Yeah, exactly like what happened. Why did the scorecard change and how did it change? It's like, you know, like people's reasoning about all these umami bomb matcha is that, you know, it's baked in into the dietary preference of of Japanese people.

Ryan · 4:05

Like people like fish, like kombu, like all these umami stuff. But that preference I don't think has changed that much throughout history in Japan. Like people has been eating sushi and sashimi and kombu and making dashi for so many years. And that didn't necessarily crystallized into the flavor of matcha back in the days, but somehow you end up crystallizing right now in modern days for matcha. So that's very interesting.

Ryan · 4:32

I'm trying to map out that journey, like the structural reasons why it happened, because it's a really weird disconnect. Because when we interviewed Kungan from Teism Explorer, who works at Bison Nakamura and who is the first Thai national Nihoncha instructor, at the very end of the interview he said he had read a book. Because I went back and listened to this interview. He'd recently read a book written by the iemoto of Omotesenke in 1955, had written that the best tea for koicha is made with trees over 100 years old.

Ryan · 5:03

And I was like, wow, that's like, that makes so much sense If you come in with the tea contacts from China or from Taiwan or from Korea, right? Like, old trees are really revered, generally speaking. But like, what happened?

Ryan · 5:16

Like, so. And I think, you know, it ties into this larger story about the shift from zairai to the cultivars. But also like, just like modern farming limitations in Japan. Interesting. And weirdly enough, so I'm drinking this sencha with nearly boiling water and it tastes just unbelievably delicious.

Ryan · 5:36

If anyone, I highly recommend all of our listeners to try Oscar Breckel Senchaism, especially as zairai products and and if you're in Europe, you can get them from Marcel very easily and unearth gallery and it's just so worth trying.

Ryan · 5:48

I it really, I actually don't like sencha, but I love these teas. I keep going back to them in the same way that I go back to like kind of a young sheng pu'er. There's just like structure and minerality and fragrance and a little bitterness, but it's like additive bitterness.

Ryan · 6:06

It's, and then I had this flashback when we did this interview with David from Tezumi and, and he was making the observation that back in the days, if you look at the development of tea ceremony, there is no step to cool your water, right? It's coming straight off the kama and the kama is over charcoal.

Ryan · 6:25

And that water should be pretty hot, probably much hotter than what is generally recommended for tea nowadays, right, where people say around 7080°C, but you know, straight off the kama, there's no structural step to cool down that water.

Ryan · 6:40

But then I had this realization, well, probably, you know, hundreds of years ago when this was developed, they were using much older trees. And it might have been able to take the heat in the same way that these zairai, you know, senchas could totally take the seat because they come from plants with like, a real taproot because cultivars can't have taproots and that it's just a different ball game and that the base material is just so different.

Zongjun · 7:07

Yeah, most likely. It's really hard to make the judgement on if it's people's preference changed or drift that led to the creation of the modern flavor of matcha, or it was the practice of agriculture changed and just people end up making a different product and end up shifting people's preference. I think that's the latter.

Zongjun · 7:29

And in my research journey, and it certainly helped the by the fact that tea ceremony practitioners generally don't know anything about the product that they're drinking, right? That's not like modern wine consumers or even wine consumers from 100 years ago that were obsessed with terroir and the different locations and what they were drinking, right throughout the 20th century, these tea ceremony practitioners, you know, were basically had to be told what was good. They weren't forming their own preference references based on objective realities of the product. This transition is probably much

Ryan · 8:02

easier. Yeah, you and I have both participated in chanoyu schools before. And for everything that we learned about much, it's one thing that we don't really learned about is the product itself is the agriculture is how the product is being made and being prepared into its very unique form.

Ryan · 8:22

You know, and how basically everything before the powder being put into a natsume that gets served during a tea ceremony. I think that's really a good lens of looking into the traditional Japanese society is that there is really, really rigid class segregations between the different, you know, demographic cohorts and tea practitioners. And participants of tea practitioner are just so systematically insulated from the farmers, which are historical, has been historically considered as lower class of the society.

Zongjun · 8:55

They don't really want to touch or learn about them. I think that was the reality. Yeah. And you know, some of what our previous guests have said, I think it was David, is a part of the role of the Tashi or the tea blender, the tea purveyor, the brand that you were buying from was kind of bridge that gap from the agriculture.

Zongjun · 9:14

They need to understand the agriculture in order to create a consistently tasting product, but then they also need to understand down the insurance and outs of high society and sort of, you know, insulate them exactly as you said, almost and learn how to sell it to the scoop of people.

Ryan · 9:30

It's it's fascinating. The whole, the whole story is fascinating, but I'm, I'm just so intrigued that in about 100 year times span a little bit less actually. We went from treasuring old trees and maybe they didn't have the language at the time, but the net genetic diversity of seed propagated teas to a handful of of genetically identical clones. Like there's like Attack of the Clones on Japan that will happen systematically from the 1960s to like the 1980s. And it's like wiped out a lot of inherent genetic diversity. I'm sure some of it was saved at the T research institutes, but 100% not all of it was saved.

Zongjun · 10:10

I mean, after picking zairai and picking cultivars ourselves, we really had come to the understanding of how much easier to deal with cultivars versus zairai cultivation, harvest. Everything is just so much easier with cultivar.

Zongjun · 10:27

And I believe it's really a financial and economical decision for people to make at the time to switch from zairai to cultivar. And for anyone that didn't wanted to switch, they probably end up just getting out compete and died by all these other tea farmers or tea companies.

Zongjun · 10:45

And and I think similar things happened in China too. It's just that China is so vast that so many of these gushu and zairai just end up getting forgotten in the mountain. And you know, for so many years really in China too, gushu was not priced. It can be sold for a slightly higher price, but like there's no collectors or connoisseurs chasing after them with big money.

Zongjun · 11:09

It was really until the 1st puer bubble that the people start to notice this concept and, you know, value this concept. And China was just so lucky that there's so many of these zairai with Tai Cha that's, you know, or Chun Tijong.

Zongjun · 11:22

That's the names that they use here. And obviously those trees gets past 100 years old will, you know, gets called gushu that just end up surviving because they got forgotten and. Well, China's at a unique case, right? Like, you know, in the 1800s, you had the century of humiliation right after the war, right? Like China went to Cultural Revolution and collectivized agriculture, right?

Zongjun · 11:47

There are a lot of external forces too that were preventing, you know, high society from enjoying 100 year old trees. I was just in Laos earlier this year and but the northern part of Laos is basically you're not. It's the same mountain, it's the same climate, it's the same tree.

Zongjun · 12:08

And they share a lot of similarities. But the difference between the Laotian side of the mountain is that teas are not making as much money as, you know, teas being harvest on the Chinese side. They have less commercial outlets to sell their tea. And it makes much better economical sense to plant bananas and rubber trees in the mountain versus saving all the gushu.

Zongjun · 12:32

So it was really unfortunate and saddening to see that in some facades of some very beautiful mountains, trees are getting eradicated. It was a desert of banana trees in all those places. It was really, really sad to see. But on the other hand, people needs to eat. People needs to survive.

Zongjun · 12:51

Laos is in much worse economical state than China. And people need to find ways to, you know, fill up their stomach. Yeah. So it's, it's the sad reality about tea being a business, right, Being a human activity. And people need to survive. And if people doesn't survive, you know, the tea trees won't survive either because, you know, the lands need to be repurposed for other, you know, agriculture activities. No business, no tea.

Ryan · 13:20

Yeah, I mean, no business, no tea. And even with a lot of these, you know, with a lot of these old trees, with the fall of the Shogun and the Meiji Restoration, right, a lot of these macho farmers who were basically, you know, you know, benefactors of a state controlled monopoly on shaded cultivation and during the Edo period completely lost their pay patrons and they went out of business. I actually, it's probably a more existential, the most existential event that ever happened to matcha was this Meiji Restoration, right?

Ryan · 13:51

And then even, you know, you know, even 100 years ago in the, the early 20th century, you know, the, the practitioner base thankfully shifted to girls schools and, you know, the good wives and wives mothers policy that, you know, made a whole new generation of, of matcha practitioners to support that industry. Like the, the demand for matcha has really ebbed and flowed and waxed and waned and gone through these cycles. And you know, it's as we moved into the mid 20th century, that shift from seed propagated zairai trees just probably wasn't enough of a market and enough people making quality distinctions on tree age

Ryan · 14:28

anymore. You know, people stopped caring and, you know, yields matters, frost resistance matters. And even like the secondary implications, right? Like how do you value a zairai plot when you produce, I don't know, 100 KGS of Okumidori or Samidori, right?

Ryan · 14:47

It has a commodity, right? People generally know know what the yield is. That can be tons of research dumped into how to best fertilize those cultivars, how to best, how to do pest control for those cultivars, how those get valued on the market and traded between people, right?

Ryan · 15:05

Like I don't think anyone's paying like $600 a KG for Okumidori wholesale, right? Like but people would do that for Asahi right? Like it's so much easier to value, right? And even the job of these chashis probably drastically changed.

Ryan · 15:20

This is my dream research project, but I I think it's a little ambitious given my language skills is to document the skill difference and transition from zairai to cultivars. All of these blending masters, how do you go from blending like 10,000 unique plots of tea from genetically diverse places grown all over Japan and blending them into a product into a few dozen cultivars, right?

Ryan · 15:48

Like the mental model and the shift, Like, how did that happen? It was from using, you know, mixing paint, essentially what they're doing now from a few primary colors to like dealing with like, I don't know, all of the natural pigments of the natural world and trying to blend them into colors. Like there must have been some skill that was lost or much. Easier job for everybody switching from zairai to cultivar.

Ryan · 16:14

Everyone so many benefits too. And of course there's loss in genetic diversity, which I want to get into in the piece anyway, that's not what this episode is about. Although we every time we talk about Chinese matcha, I feel like we have to sort of front load our our Japanese matcha nerdness because it sometimes Chinese matcha feels like a little bit of a taboo topic. But recently we both got some very interesting context as to what's going on in the matcha world. And this will be released after we release the rise of Chinese matcha.

Ryan · 16:44

But we're learning even more. And you know, a large part of this podcast is to document our learning journey. And we both independently have had some really interesting experience and knowledge with Chinese matcha. So Sam, you just came back from a very interesting trip into two different places, doing matcha cultivation or part of the matcha cultivation supply chain in China.

Zongjun · 17:06

Yeah, so my friend and I actually went to two places, one in Hubei and the other one is in Henan, which are geographically pretty close to each other. The one in Hubei was actually a farm set up by a Japanese farmer working with local governments and local farmers that are making some pretty interesting tea on the menu. Not on the menu on the introduction, a panel. They actually set up a ginormous panel that that shows their company information in the middle of the tea field. And they didn't, they did, they did. It was just some generic information about, you know, the, the, the size of the farm.

Zongjun · 17:44

It was 30 acre, which is pretty large actually, and also the cultivar. So on the panel, they said they planned launching 43 Zhongcha 10108. And then there was a #1, which is a kind of like a Hubei Tea Institute cultivar that were historically all used for green tea. And now they're planning them to get turned into tencha. But we've heard that they were planting Japanese cultivar too. And it was pretty obvious when we visit the farm because there was this like little plot of land out of a seed of green Trent bushes that was sitting underneath raised tana. And everything else was either unshaded or direct shaded with white cloth to actually one

Zongjun · 18:33

layer of white cloth and one layer of black cloth. But there was this like little plot of land sitting right next to the tea processing factory that has raised tana. And by the thin shape of the tea leaf, we think it's probably Yabukita. But that it's not that much.

Zongjun · 18:51

It's not a lot of tea, I tell you that. I think the reason why they're not saying that they're planning Yabukita is because I don't think those bushes were legally imported into China. And which, you know, comes a very interesting question like where they get their tea from.

Zongjun · 19:11

And that leads to our second visit in this farm in Xinyang. So my friend and I was were thinking about setting an experimental plot in Guangzhou and we were looking for some, you know, seedlings from all over China. And we, you know, during our research, we end up encountering this tea farmer selling tea breeders selling seedlings in this place in Xinyang that supposedly selling Yabukita and Okumidori. And we were like, oh wow, that's interesting. So we decided to visit them and it turns out that they were supplier for this Hubei farm.

Zongjun · 19:45

In the early days, they were selling them seedlings of Japanese cultivar. And how they end up getting those cultivar was even more interesting. So back in the 90s, there was this honeymoon period between China and in Japan. And, you know, China was just, you know, trying to walk out from the devastation of Cultural Revolution and collectivization. And there were a lot of these poverty elevation project and they were attracting a lot of these foreign capitals to trying to elevate, you know, different areas of people from poverty. And one of the project in Xinyang was that the local government was working with a

Zongjun · 20:22

Japanese tea company trying to set up Japanese tea farms. Japanese style tea farms in the local area and they brought in Japanese tea cultivars. They brought in Japanese tea processing equipment. There was a, we didn't actually see it, but supposedly there were two lines of very old timer Japanese tea steamers on being set up in one of the the tea factories. And at the time they were trying to produce Sencha and Gyokuro, but later on they're repurposing them for producing a tencha. But I've heard that, you know, it was not very high quality tencha.

Zongjun · 20:57

The setup was not tuned to make tencha to begin with, but people were trying anyways. It was super interesting. So Xinyang is famous for making a very specific and reputable type of green tea called Xinyang Maojian that can be sold for actually pretty high price within China.

Zongjun · 21:15

And when we arrived at the farm, the tea farmer brought me a part of Xinyang and brewed green tea. And the tea has this very weird tingly spice kind of flavor in it. And that didn't taste like, you know, other Japanese or other Chinese green tea that I've tried before.

Zongjun · 21:37

And he told us that this was 80% Yabukita. They used Yabukita just as it is, as any other Chinese tea being grown in the area. And they, they used Chinese method to process that into green tea. And that was super interesting. Anyway, so we, we end up visiting the tea farms. I sawed a lot of these actually very old trees, and so they were planted there in the 90s.

Zongjun · 22:05

So they're about 20-30 years old by now. And they were supposedly all yabukita, and they look like yabukita from afar. They all have these like very thin kind of narrow shape of tea leaves. But when you look up close, some trees definitely look different than the others. Like they plan a lot of these Aspen trees in the tea farm as kind of like a natural coverage or to boost, you know, biodiversity.

Zongjun · 22:33

But underneath some of these tree canopies, some leaves, some yabukita just look significantly more like shaded tea leaves than others. Like some Yabukita really developed these like very glossy fat sheen on the surface of the leaf versus some other, you know, tea bushes just sitting right next to it. And none of these tea bushes are shaded. Now these, this is a seedling propagation facility, a garden. They're not, you know, turning out of these tea into tension. They're just trying to produce more seedlings. So that's when I asked them like how how come they look so different?

Zongjun · 23:12

And the tea farmer was telling me that, oh, some of these are actually seed propagated. So they were, yeah, they were using Yabukita seeds and then replant them into the local area. So that was super interesting. Apparently that's how a lot of the Wazuka zairai came from were from Yabukita seeds, and it's sort of not zairai lineage comes from a cult of our seed. Yeah, yeah.

Zongjun · 23:38

And also the landscape really matters. This whole tea farm that we visit sitting on a once was a riverbed. So it's both very clay, clayish soil and sandy soil, which is very similar to soil conditions in Uji. And the farmer was telling me a very identical story that we heard from Sooji Song is that pure sandy soil is actually not good for planting Yabukita because it needs fertilizer and you need some clay soil to be able to retain the fertilizer in the land.

Zongjun · 24:12

And so they somehow independently discovered that too, because that's really not a criteria for you to to produce a high quality Chinese tea. You want more drainage versus, you know, less drainage, which was also very interesting.

Zongjun · 24:25

Wow. It's quite difficult to resist the urge of just trying to Commission a plot of land and, you know, trying to make some tensile out of it. So, so this is interesting. So it came in the 90s in the form of poverty alleviation where during the sort of golden era between golden period or honeymoon period, I think you guys call it, between China and Japan.

Zongjun · 24:49

And then they tried making sencha and gyokuro. And then later matcha imported some Japanese processing equipment. And then at some point, the Japanese kind of abandoned this project. There's all the Yabukita here, which they're turning into local green tea. And now we have this matcha explosion. I'm sure this guy has a very good business for like I was supposed to be so many producers all over China that want these Japanese cultivars or these plants with this Japanese heritage.

Zongjun · 25:18

I think he's underdiscovered in the sense that there are a lot of fakes, there are a lot of fake seedlings, propagation of being done in Japan, in China too. So he was telling me that it's apparently not that easy to tell a Yabukita or okumidori seedlings versus a Chinese cultivar. So sometimes some breeders were trying to sell you some, you know, like local Chinese cultivar or some other random cultivar they end up access has access to as as Japanese cultivar.

Zongjun · 25:51

So that happens a lot. This guy doesn't necessarily have direct control of all these tea gardens. These tea gardens are actually owned by separate farmers and he has to navigate through all these farmers to be able to cultivate all these tea bushes pending his criteria and doing all these politics underneath the table.

Zongjun · 26:13

Apparently it's very deep water and, and it's part of the reason why the Japanese pulled out in the early 2000. And what's also very interesting is that the Hubei tea farm, the Japanese owned tea farm that we visited earlier, actually tried to negotiate with this Xinjiang, with this Hunan tea farm and the local government to initially wanted to start their tea plantation and their tea processing facility in Henan versus Hubei. And somehow, you know, they didn't end up reaching to a deal.

Zongjun · 26:44

And this uncle was kind of hinting on, you know, it was the politics that let those Japanese end up choosing Hubei versus Henan. Yeah, it could be very different. And they could actually have a lot more access to Yabukita. And older Yabukita and all of these seed growth teas. It's at the Paris Tea Festival.

Zongjun · 27:04

There are a couple French producers of tea. Some of them were from Brittany and the West Coast of France. Some of them were in the Pyrenees down closer to Basque Country. And what's interesting is they're all kind of, I don't want to call them hippy dippy exactly, but they're much more like naturalistically minded people. And you know, it's easy to make judgments about European, you know, produce tea, but all of them or like when you talk to them, they're like, it's like super important to them that they're not using cuttings and that they've imported seeds and they're planting from seeds so that these seeds have a taproot and can access the local

Zongjun · 27:41

minerals, etcetera. And it's like much more important to them for the health of the land, etcetera. And it's interesting, I really feel like it's the future or you know, these seeds where you don't have perfect clones, but you know who the parents are. So you have some sense of what's coming, but you still let nature do do a little bit of mixing and matching, probably a lot more more labor.

Zongjun · 28:02

But I really like this kind of movement that's going on. And it'd be really cool if someone in China, you know, is doing it from this. Like we planted a seed propagated plot but from a known linear genetic lineage. So Ryan, you told me that you went to this talk in the Paris Tea Festival that was also about Chinese matcha.

Ryan · 28:23

So what about it? So yeah, it was very serendipitous. I literally went to the only talk that was going on at that time. I didn't even know what it was when I was entering. And it's like, oh wow, it's about Guejo matcha.

Ryan · 28:35

Unfortunately, the talk is in French and I can understand a decent amount of French, especially if this if it's about tea, because the words that were not in the French were from Chinese, which I recently vocabulary. But I've also learned that this Google live translation feature is pretty good. So I listened to the full talk basically with subtitles, which the side benefit of get, you know, live transcription and translation is that I was able to take screenshots in real time of sort of the narrative that was being presented to this French audience about Chinese matcha. So the speaker's name I'm

Ryan · 29:13

unfortunately going to butcher because her last name is it's a little too difficult for me to pronounce, but I'll try my best. And the speaker was Catherine Legevant. My apologies for for mispronouncing that, most likely. But she's the author of a very, very famous book written in French on Chinese tea called Empire of Tea, Le Empire du TE, a very famous French author.

Ryan · 29:35

And I think it's one of them, considered one of the most knowledgeable people on Chinese tea in France. And she gave this talk about Chinese matcha, and the audience were over 100 French people. And I was thinking, wow, it, this is such a weird and interesting talk.

Ryan · 29:50

Is it? Everyone seems so open minded to this idea of good matcha being grown from anywhere. And she opened this talk where she said, you know, a couple years ago, she didn't know much about Chinese matcha. Everyone, we're saying all of these negative things about it.

Ryan · 30:06

But, you know, she's an expert in Chinese tea. She knows, you know, she's been to China many, many times. She wrote a book on Chinese tea. The Chinese are perfectly capable of producing extremely high quality tea. And she was like, she was like, I don't totally understand all of this negativity probably coming from the Americans around Chinese grown matcha. And she said, you know, she did a lot more research and she's done trips now, many different trips to Hubei, to Guizhou, to Zhejiang to learn directly from the producers about what's going on with the machisen in China.

Ryan · 30:37

And she's like, you know, the view that China is producing industrial grade destined to go into food matcha and that it's very low quality is entirely outdated and that they are indeed producing a fantastic product that tastes good with good color. And she also mentioned what we've been saying too, is that a lot of the tea that's being grown in China is actually commissioned by the Japanese either through partial ownership or through contract.

Ryan · 31:07

And that it's going back to Japan and getting labeled as a Japanese product and that this is is not at all uncommon. And it's that that was very interesting, the way she presented the argument. And then you know what, what I've been thinking about it. And there's such, there's a battle of narrative. There's a battle of story over matcha between China and Japan, right?

Ryan · 31:30

The the most conservative people on the Japanese side will argue that much is from Japan. They were the ones who invented shaded cultivation, which makes modern matcha matcha. And there's this whole narrative about the centuries of skill.

Ryan · 31:46

And actually specifically, it was really just with an uji because they were the only people allowed to do shaded cultivation for all of these years. And you know, there's various forms of this argument that much is Japanese. It's the center of Japanese tea ceremony. The Chinese hadn't been producing it since the Song dynasty, which is about a 7 or 800 year gap in production. But I think it's a decent argument. But the Chinese also have a perfectly legitimate argument that it is a Sinosphere product.

Ryan · 32:14

And she was presenting that. You know, the origins of matcha are undisputedly in China, you know, referencing Tang and Song dynasty tea ceremony and how it came to Japan, even when tea first came to Japan during the Kamakura period.

Ryan · 32:31

But it was really thought of as a Chinese product. And it was the influence of Chinese Buddhism and people studying Buddhism in China. And then it just kind of got preserved and perfected in Japan. And you know, you can argue both sides of this narrative, but there's absolutely no question that China has a legitimate claim to having some narrative control over the fact that they touch matcha history. And that's never going away.

Ryan · 32:59

And we've heard that so many times, so many Chinese matcha people, people promoting Chinese matcha is, you know, this cultural tie. And these French people are honestly much more open minded than Americans are to this argument, this concept that products can be good anywhere.

Ryan · 33:18

These cultural ties. You know, she also talked a lot about, you know, overproduction and pesticides and how most of which is a very strong argument for a European audience that modern Japanese agriculture is is not very environmentally friendly if you care about pesticides.

Ryan · 33:36

And most of it is above the EU pesticide residue limits, especially the best matcha. And when you stack all of these narratives, it's a really compelling picture, especially when it comes to supply and demand. So she also mentioned what everyone does is the Japanese farmers are aging and they don't really have the infrastructure set up to scale much of production to meet global demand. And that China is just so much better equipped. And not only are they better equipped to scale because of land, because of government help, because of the fact that they already have Japanese cultivars and Japanese processing equipment, but they

Ryan · 34:11

are scaling with global exports in mind, right? They're not doing this level of intensive pesticide spraying because they know that the Chinese domestic market for matcha is so much smaller than the international demand.

Ryan · 34:25

And that's what this whole modern Malta matcha industry in China is built off of, is built off of exports and that it needs to be export compliant. And she was mentioning that they have, you know, export to over 60 countries now and that despite the sheer production numbers, if you count that as matcha, then it's the largest matcha producing country in the world. And for the case of this podcast, I'd like to refer, we're going to call it Chinese matcha and not mota. And I think the distinction should be in its characteristics.

Ryan · 34:55

The more I think about this matcha that looks and tastes like Japanese matcha, they're processing Japanese cultivars. They come from proper tencha processing equipment that looks, tastes and feels like Japanese matcha should be called matcha.

Ryan · 35:08

It's matcha with Japanese characteristics, right? And anything that's like very obviously not whether or not it's using Chinese cultivars or some other method, you know, maybe this can be called Mota. I I think this is a better working definition. But what's interesting is that in in Chinese, whether or not it's the kanji that has the hand radical that the Japanese used to spell out matcha, or without the hand radical, more cha. In Chinese they all pronounce more cha, so it's the same thing.

Ryan · 35:37

So she mentions, too, that, you know, Japan has really hit its ceiling and that the ceiling is structural, like labor, aging farmers, no one to take over and it's really capped. And like we're almost fortunate to have China to sort of re bring back their own culture and how and it's been readapted and to bring it back and to have a new era sort of of Chinese matcha. And it was a really compelling argument. She was also talking and then she spent the rest of the time talking about different Chinese tea production regions for matcha, Guizhou, Hubei, Zhejiang, and, and presenting a real terroir argument saying, you

Ryan · 36:13

know, it's, it's very good conditions. They're using Japanese processing equipment. And this is a really compelling narrative. And what was interesting was 1, she got no pushback from the audience. And when I looked around, everyone was legitimately open minded and were, what's the right way to put this? They were really receptive to this idea of Chinese matcha being sort of the origin.

Ryan · 36:38

They're taking back some of their own culture and this like very American idea of cultural appropriation and like the fact that the, you know, people shouldn't be doing that to someone else's culture, etcetera. I didn't get any, any of that from this audience.

Ryan · 36:54

And I, I was, you know, sitting, I was standing at the back of the room and I was thinking to myself, wow, You know, if you look at a battle of narratives between Chinese matcha and Japanese matcha, the Japanese matcha needs to step up.

Ryan · 37:09

Because this was such a compelling and interesting argument to all like this group of 100 French people. I could feel it. I could tell, I could see it on people's faces. I could tell by the questions that they asked that they are much more receptive to this than the Americans. I don't know how much you can project that onto other European countries.

Ryan · 37:29

But for a French audience, at least, it was a very powerful narrative. And you have this sort of silent, not silent battle of narratives going on between a Chinese and Japanese product. But, you know, the reality is too, and she talked about this as well, is it the reason the Chinese are doing this is primarily for poverty alleviation. There is still a lot of very rural places in China that are very poor.

Ryan · 37:56

We heard this when we were at Canton Fair. She was saying this is a major effort of the Chinese government. And even in the 1990s, as you learn, the Japanese were trying to help fight poverty alleviation in China by planting Japanese cultivars there.

Ryan · 38:12

And honestly, I find that to be an incredibly compelling argument. It's designed, the whole system is designed to use less pesticides. They're using similar cultivars that are very suitable for shady cultivation. And you're supporting people and an industry where people are like, I don't want to say starving, but they're living in poverty.

Ryan · 38:32

And you need, you're helping lift up a group of people that really need the help. And I don't put it like want to knock down Chinese matcha just because, you know, it originated in Japan. I think they have every right to do what they're doing. And I think it's actually doing more social good in China buying Chinese matcha than it is in Japan, which, you know, you have people knocking down people's door trying to get supply. Like Japan has a demand problem, meaning it's too much demand, it's too much headache, it's too much inquiry, it's too much dealing with these foreigners that it's complicated to export. It's complicated to have like

Ryan · 39:15

paperwork that's complicated to pay people in Japan, but it's so much headache. You can get this feeling that a lot of Japanese tea producers just don't want to deal with all of this influx, right? Like it's, they have the exact opposite problem. And, you know, I think in just so many scenarios, if you're just looking for a very tasty product or even a specialty product, there's a lot that China has to offer and it's going to lift people up who honestly need the help more than the Japanese tea farmers.

Ryan · 39:45

I'm not saying we shouldn't support them. I'm just saying I would rather help someone that is in poverty than someone who's driving a nice car and has no problem selling their tea and who's been educated and who has social safety Nets, right, who has assets, you know, rather than, you know, this poverty alleviation.

Zongjun · 40:05

Yeah, it's, well, I'm Chinese and I'm definitely biased, I tell you that. It's a lot to unfold. I feel like I think in a parallel universe and the best outcome would be China and Japan working together to define a narrative together because this has always been a product, a result of cultural exchange between China and Japan.

Zongjun · 40:31

And for the large part of the Japanese narrative, I don't think there's any doubt that matcha originally come from China. Like everybody is actually talking about that in Japan, which I find a little bit unfortunate to see is that in China there is a under acknowledgement of Japan's role in preserving matcha as a product historically. Like you can say anything about, you know, China invented matcha, which is thing largely true, but without Japan, there will be no matcha for anyone to enjoy there. There will be no matcha boom.

Zongjun · 41:03

There will be no matcha latte because there will be no powder green tea. The culture will be lost for hundreds of years ago. And in China, you rarely see people acknowledging Japan's role in this whole thing, which I think, you know, deserves some respects and, and mentioned in, you know, in, in forming the Chinese side of narrative as well. Because you cannot just for a lot of these places like Tianmu Shan or Jingshan that proclaim that there are the origin of Chinese matcha, there is a very obvious missing component about like what happened after Ming Dynasty. Like, like there's no matcha

Zongjun · 41:42

being produced in China. Like, like, like how can you retained a discourse of some culture that has already has been lost and and somehow framing that as a continuous practice? I think that's not fair, right? And I think like you really need to look, you really need to zoom out to a broader context. You really need to include both China and Japan throughout history to form a very comprehensive and coherent story about matcha.

Zongjun · 42:12

And I think that's what's really lacking right now. And unfortunately, there's really, I would say not enough impetus and not enough foundation for both countries to work together to, to figure that out because, you know, China and Japan are not getting along very well.

Zongjun · 42:28

So yeah, I think it's very difficult. But but, but, but if you really understand the history and you know how much has evolved and also the modern context, I think both Chinese matcha and Japanese matcha are matcha. It's actually a continuous culture that started in China, ends up being preserved in Japan and are and is coming back to China again. And in between, it also passed through Korea, which is also a pretty interesting matcha production tawa right now in the contemporary era.

Zongjun · 43:02

But but if you really want to form a coherent and solid argument about what matcha is, you cannot just talk about Japanese matcha or Chinese matcha. You need to talk about everybody. Yeah, the idea of a coherent narrative kind of a super interesting because everyone usually picks some side, but it's really tell actually a full and complete story.

Ryan · 43:24

It's much more nuanced. And you're right, it's really actually cultural exchange. And that cultural exchange, if you just look between China and Japan, has happened twice, once when it went and now it's coming back. And probably when it went, there was all sorts of judgment going across and information moves slower.

Ryan · 43:41

But I'm sure if information moved as fast as it could, the Chinese would be looking over and say, what are they doing with our products? It's which I, you know, it's a, it's a human reaction. It makes sense that this is the reaction of the Japanese when they look at the Chinese.

Zongjun · 43:59

But yeah, this narrative battle over the next couple of years is kind of interesting and. It's it's what, it's what makes matcha life. It's what makes matcha living culture. It's this constant flash and fusion of narratives and people. It's what makes it interesting.

Ryan · 44:16

Absolutely. Yeah, Well, I'm shocked. I'm shocked by your learnings from this trip. I did not realize it went back to the 90s and it's literally the oldest evidence. I guess we kind of knew that like there was something going on, you know, before 2000s from stuff we've heard. But this is like the most direct primary source story that we've we have blinking it because I know that I, the big Nishio producer, set up their first subsidiary in Zhejiang in 2005, but that that was like the first thing that I had heard. The oldest one I direct knowledge of anyway. All right, well, I, I think that's all we have today. Thanks so much for listening.

Zongjun · 44:56

If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing and friend, find yourself some interesting Chinese matcha to taste. It's very outdated, this idea that it's sun shaded industrial stuff that's destined for your cookie. And there's absolutely usucha and even koicha worthy matcha being produced in China. You just got to find it.

Ryan · 45:15

All right, thanks so much for listening and we'll see you on the next one. Bye.