Notes at Origin: Nishio, Aichi

Ryan · 0:07

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my co-founder Zongjun, who also goes by Sam. Hello, and we are the co-founders of Sanko Matcha products. We launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. Speaking of startup stories, Sam, how's it going? I'm here in France, you're there in China getting this mill over the finish line.

Zongjun · 0:29

We've had a couple delays and you know, we've been working through all sorts of problems. How's it feel on that side? How's it all shaping up? Yeah. We've been working very diligently with our partners in Guangzhou and Shenzhen and Dongguan and Zhongshan, in fact with 28 different suppliers on all of these components.

Zongjun · 0:49

And we are trying our best to put everything together. And it's very close to the finish line. Has been raining in Guangzhou quite a bit in the past two days. I saw some district, which is a neighborhood in Guangzhou, has become a river. There were literally cars flowing in the river. Yeah, I missed the sunny and dry days in Aichi. Well, I wish I was there.

Ryan · 1:13

We were there together about two weeks ago. I'm working on the mill and getting to sample and mill a bunch of different teas and we've got all sorts of learnings which we can't wait to share with everyone once we get these mills out to all the beta program users.

Ryan · 1:27

But there's some really interesting flavor transformation that happens with different parameters and we're learning a lot about different milling speeds, like some very non intuitive factors that can lead to a mill milling tea faster or slower that we didn't quite expect.

Zongjun · 1:47

Yeah, and also with different teas too. It impacts the milling speed, the output speed, the quantity and also the flavor and also the flavor degradation, which is very interesting. Yeah, we were talking with someone who was using some culinary applications of Sencha to make ice cream, and apparently they were milling it.

Ryan · 2:09

And after three or four days after it was milled, it had lost a lot of vitality. But on day one after milling, if you used it immediately in that application, it was like really expressive and aromatic, which was really validating for us to hear because we've been milling a lot of Gyokuro just because that it tastes good, but it doesn't taste that good after like a week. And it was super interesting and validating to hear that just off the mill they had had a similar experience. Yeah, it's really matches with our experience and I bet you know it's probably has any something to do with the whole rolling process with Gyokuro and

Ryan · 2:50

Sencha versus Tencha which doesn't get rolled after it's processed. There's must be some like breakage of cell wall that release some certain compounds that doesn't age well. Yeah. Or doesn't age well after milling because like the difference between a fresh milled Gyokuro and even like one week old one is enormous. It's like a four point lower in quality on our seven point scale in my opinion.

Ryan · 3:18

Like, it's still tasty, it's still interesting, but it doesn't have that richness that it can have right off the mill. The avocado creaminess, like some hints of olive oil, like all of those wonderful flavors that we experienced from milling one of the, you know, pretty high end Gyokuro from Uji just vanished after a week. We were like so excited to share this Gyokuro powder to some of our friends and then we whisked the, you know, the tea powder and we sat down and we drink together and we were like. It's decent, but lean, much more vegetable, much more asparagus-y pretty quickly, which just wasn't in the cup at first. And then of course we've been

Zongjun · 4:04

milling a lot of different Tencha and just the how moisture and humidity can affect Tencha. The the quality of the milled matcha, but also the speed, which it's milled is a, there's a enormous variance, actually almost a 2X variance for some Tencha versus others.

Zongjun · 4:23

It's the same mill parameters, same pressure, same mill speed. And there's a much larger variance now that we have access to a much larger variety of Tencha to test on the mill. Yeah, so and this sorts of interesting learnings.

Zongjun · 4:39

And that's really just, you know, a small fraction of all the experiment that could be done with this mill platform. So really cannot wait to release all these machines out into the world and let everybody test. Absolutely.

Ryan · 4:53

We've been, we're so close to the finish line, we can almost taste it. We are tasting it. It's been it's been quite the journey getting these out the door and really owe you a huge thanks to managing all these dependencies and complexities in China.

Zongjun · 5:08

Thank you. We really found the world's best partner on that too. But let's not pat our shoulders too quickly. We can save the champagne time when we officially get these machines out to people's hands. Yes, let's do it. Yeah.

Ryan · 5:24

So we learned quite a bit when we were in Nishio and as well as our last day in Toyota. Yeah, has been really, I will say eye opening trip for us in a sense. This is actually the first time we see some Tencha facilities actually running with tea, which is a little bit incredible since we've been talking about it for so long.

Ryan · 5:45

But it's also like really magical to be in those facilities seeing everything running and seeing the Tencha being processed in real time and smell, you know, different Tenchas. That's fresh off the open but was incredible. And feeling the radiant heat and just the level of processing that's going on inside these Tencha factories and the taste and the smell.

Ryan · 6:09

And it's interesting every time we go into one of these factories, we were in one, Nishio, and the factory operators, it's, I don't know why, but they was like almost push it on you to taste the aracha or like the fresh.

Ryan · 6:22

They're almost like Tencha chips, leafy chips coming off, and they want you to taste it and chew it. And they taste pretty good. Oishii. Yeah, they're so good. I would totally buy like a bag of Tencha chips from like a company if that's available.

Zongjun · 6:36

Me too. I think it's actually very under. You can talk about matcha shortage, but I think it's a pretty underutilized thing or utilizing this because I know what I think it's in Burmese cuisine in Myanmar and they have these fermented tea salads.

Zongjun · 6:50

But other than that, feels like cooking with tea is a pretty underutilized thing. We heard, we've had, what was it, some oolong chicken and Dong Ding in Taiwan. But for the most part, you know, people don't use it enough in like savory applications I think.

Ryan · 7:05

Yeah, actually they put these tencha fragments into onigiri, which was very. That's right. They have their special version of these tea onigiri's that we got to try with tencha and it does give a little umami and some freshness. Pretty good.

Ryan · 7:20

Yeah, yeah. And you can buy them too if you're in, if you're happen to be in Toyota or in Nishio, there's actually a shocking amount of tencha for sale. And it's tencha specifically for these Onigiri's. It's typically outrageously expensive when you really calculate the cost per gram, but it's, you know, it's kind of fun. Yeah, it's kind of fun.

Ryan · 7:41

And we also have these tencha fragment salt that you can use, I guess to season your food. But people are pretty creative. Very creative. So Speaking of creativity, we also learned of a very interesting type of pest control that doesn't involve like chemical pesticides that some farmers are doing in Aichi and Sam.

Zongjun · 8:03

You were telling me that you've actually heard of this type of pest control? Not in the tea context, but some Chinese farmers also use this as well. Yeah, it's very specific type of machine oil that people will dilute that into a very thin solution and that's sprayed onto the vegetations. And what he basically does is that it kind of dissolves the insects outer exoskeleton wax, which kind of disabled the insects ability to breathe and that acts as a pest control, which we saw that in in IT too.

Zongjun · 8:38

Yeah, they diluted apparently one to 100 and the farmer literally held up a gigantic like 5 gallon can of machine oil, like lubricant or something you would run through an engine. It was kind of shocking. But yeah, it's better than applying, you know, these whatever these chemicals are that people are typically doing. The other thing that we learned about were different types of tencha ovens.

Zongjun · 9:04

So something we've talked about here before and it's like widely reported on is the Hori style tencha oven. But the Aichi farmers have their own style called Mikawa style tencha oven, which was actually developed at a very similar time as the Hori style kiln in about exactly 100 years ago in the 1920s when there was this move from tencha producers from entirely hand processed tea hand processing of tencha to more mechanical versions. To my knowledge, I don't think anyone is still hand processing tencha in Japan.

Zongjun · 9:44

Like at some point the tea hits a conveyor belt where it's not just like entirely hand processed batches handpicked, yes, but hand processed I've never heard of. So it seems like that move to automation happened. Is is only about 100 years old. And something they have both in common is that they both are very radiant heat tencha ovens.

Ryan · 10:04

And so not only is it drying the leaf, but it's also creating a lot of flavor development through Maillard Browning reaction with all this radiant heat in these red brick ovens. So what's the difference between a Hori oven versus a Mikawa?

Zongjun · 10:19

So we have a big table, the Hori style, which was developed in Uji from an ancestor of Horii Shichimeien, was known to be more of a combination of radiant heat and convection heat. And the Mikawa, at least in this table that we're looking at, doesn't really talk much about convection. It's much more about radiant heat than about airflow. Yeah.

Zongjun · 10:45

So all of these elements have some slight differences in terms of designed and choices, but they more or less have a very similar structure. But for these Mikawa style oven, usually the hottest temperature is around 150 to 160°C.

Zongjun · 11:05

And for one of the factory we we visited, it was specifically set to be 167°, which was a very precise number that they that they decide to do. And on top of these ovens, you have these small fence that you can opened to kind of vent out the moisture from the tencha being processed, which we kind of experienced that difficulty when we were trying to roast some tencha in China when we were doing our little tencha cultivation experiment in China. All of these tea getting roasted in these oven generates a lot of moisture, a lot of steam.

Ryan · 11:42

So if you don't vent out these steam quickly or these moisture quickly, the tea basically end up getting steamed again of it, which is not desirable. Yeah, something that they were mentioning too is it, it's hard to cross compare tencha oven temperatures because the temperature probe are different places. So it was they warned against too much cross comparison of the exact tencha temperature.

Ryan · 12:08

It seems like these are really bespoke things like these, like with the Hori style and the Mikawa style like it. It seems like you kind of like learn the personality of the tencha oven and then optimize for it. The other thing too is that they're all gas powered or like crude oil powered and you can actually see the flame burning.

Zongjun · 12:29

One thing is it's just so energy intensive to heat up. So typically I we've heard this with the Hori style kilns, but apparently the Mikawa style kilns and Aichi as well, is that once you start them, you don't stop. And because it takes so much energy to get it hot and then you just run it continuously for the whole season.

Zongjun · 12:48

But it's very energy intensive. Matcha is just so energy intensive, like even feeling this room like generating that much steam. These tencha ovens are extremely energy intensive, especially the old school ones, these red brick ones, both the Hori style and the Mikawa style, and then all the ishi-usu milling and all of this cold storage.

Zongjun · 13:12

When you think about all their types of tea processing, I cannot think of one that requires more energy and more cost to the energy than matcha. Both across like the steam, the tencha oven and the milling and then all the refrigeration that needs to happen afterwards. It's really mind boggling amount of energy compared to other types of tea when you think about it. Yeah, that's why it's so expensive. Not to mention all the hard work that it takes. So at this table, it's comparing and contrasting Mikawa and Hori style and they say the heat concept. So for Mikawa, the one in Aichi, it's a stable drying with heat stored and brick and far

Zongjun · 13:53

infrared radiant heat. In the Mikawa region, this became part of local identity of matcha production. Whereas the Horii style from Uji uses strong radiant heat closer to the fire source and convention and convection heat further from it. And the heat, the heat design is often linked to aroma development.

Zongjun · 14:12

So it's I guess they're just slightly different. And the other really interesting thing from this table too that I I didn't quite realize is that the early Mikawa style tencha ovens are said to have been developed around 1920 and that it was a practical transition from hand drying to mechanized drying. In early forms of this oven are described as brick drying chambers with hands with a hand fed movement, whereas the ones in Uji were a were more developed continuous tencha drying machine that combined radiant heat and convection heat.

Ryan · 14:50

It's unclear like is that is this a giant pizza oven or someone literally? It doesn't sound like a conveyor belt is being used the the early Horii style ones. That sounds like more of a conveyor and actually the model at Horii Shichimeien retail store of the first Horii style tencha kiln it looks like a a conveyor belt.

Ryan · 15:10

So little unclear what the early versions of this word in IT. But this goes to show too that early 1920s so that they have at least 100 years to mechanized tencha development, about the same amount of mechanized tencha production as Uji actually.

Zongjun · 15:26

So they're pretty historical or tencha growing region. Yeah, and also not that old if you think about it. Yeah, both in both cases actually. And one thing that they that this document really emphasizes too is that, you know, these type style of tencha ovens are really optimized for flavor development.

Zongjun · 15:45

You're not just dehydrating the leaf, but you're actually creating new flavors. And the the contrast to this is, is a new type of tencha oven, which apparently is being widely used in places like Kagoshima, apparently some in Yame as well, what they call a simple or net type tencha dryer.

Zongjun · 16:05

And it uses almost entirely convection based heat. So essentially you're using hot air to roast the tencha and there's very little radiant heat. So yeah, it's basically a air fryer and the temperature on average is they what they told us was on average 40°C less than all of the more traditional tencha ovens.

Zongjun · 16:30

And we got to taste the side by side sample, one tencha from a simple tencha dryer and one from a classic Mikawa red brick radiant dryer. And you could really tell the difference in aroma. Like I'd say the one that came out of the Mikawa tastes like tencha to me, like pretty developed nice aroma where the one coming out of the simple or net type tencha dryer was extremely green, very cucumber Y kind of vegetal and much more harsh in its verdant.

Zongjun · 17:07

See, it was very verdant, very kind of vegetal, harsh compared to the one coming out of the radiant heat tencha dryer. You know, now that I think about it, like they were telling us all these tencha are sitting on some kind of a net or a mesh and then it's purely hot air convection, roasting or drying.

Ryan · 17:30

This sounds a lot like all these rat tea roaster that have been seeing in Shima and other places. I actually saw all those too. I bet it's like maybe it's the same thing or a very similar mechanism. Interesting. Well maybe it's easy to produce this type of tencha. Maybe it's these net type tencha ovens. Could open the possibility for not needing an entire tencha factory using some existing infrastructure. I've also heard that there are some producers in Kagoshima that add like an extra step after this that give it a blast of radiant heat.

Ryan · 18:10

It's like, I don't want to call it artificial because it's not, but like a stage where there is some non red brick source of radiant heat being applied to this processing specifically for flavor and aroma development. But actually so the the color difference is also big. The the one from the simple or net type tencha dryer is a greener color.

Zongjun · 18:31

And one more reason why color is a very bad indicator for much quality because the the radiant heat ovens are much better tasting, much more complex, much more interesting. But you do get better color preservation when this goes through what is essentially A dehydrator, where you know hot air is doing the work and removing the moisture content, but it's developing very little flavor.

Zongjun · 18:53

Yeah, heat really matters. Kind of counterintuitive. It also matters doing tencha milling to apparently too cold is not desirable either. Yeah, heat is very important, which does destroy some color, but it can add a lot of different flavor. So these large net type systems can process several 100 kilograms of fresh leaves per hour, which is just a much, much larger throughput compared to these radiant brick ovens. So you know, tencha processing too, this is something that we don't talk about enough on the Specialty Matcha Podcast is what type of tencha oven was being used to make your tencha also has AI mean that's a lot of

Zongjun · 19:29

Maillard browning. A lot of flavor creation has happened at that step. And if it's going through one of these net style ones, you're going to end up with a much more rougher, greener, better color cup than these more developed ones coming out of these Horii style or Mikawa style kilns.

Ryan · 19:47

I bet people blend. Probably both for color and for flavor. That actually is probably a very smart thing to do. Yeah, very interesting. There are so many different technologies being used. And just not that much of the public information that people can learn about, but it actually makes a huge difference.

Ryan · 20:08

We taste all these tencha fresh off from all these types of oven and it's it's really drastic. So we also got some industry gossip and some industry news while we were there both in Nishio and when we were in Toyota. And we've got bad news for matcha prices. I'm so sorry, guys.

Ryan · 20:28

So the Kagoshima auction apparently on average has approximately doubled in price for spring tencha depending on the day, I think. And the price, average price now at least what we were told for this is material being sold at auction. So it's pretty downstream of the tencha prices that we you see when, you know, you reach out to someone trying to buy Tencha. There's very few people who are actually allowed to buy the Kagoshima auction.

Ryan · 20:55

But the average price there is about ¥12,000 per kilogram, which is just under 100 U.S. dollars. And apparently a huge order was put in by a company that will remain nameless and really shifted the market and really raised prices. Yeah, the demand is high and the supplied is very limited. Very limited.

Ryan · 21:17

So yeah, prices I think are going to continue to inch up. The other thing that we were doing is apparently we've caught wind of some news too, that there's a lot of tea laundering not only going on in Uji but also going on in Yame.

Ryan · 21:33

And then if you look at the tencha production capacity and the output of matcha and tencha, that's happening here in Yame, that there's a mismatch in the number and they're probably blending a lot of material from elsewhere.

Ryan · 21:47

Yeah, the math is just not math things for a lot of these places. Yeah, doesn't math and Uji when it comes to what's produced in Uji's not mathing and Yame pretty concerning problem. We wrote a big piece about this on the sub stack about tea laundering, specifically with regards to the GI for all of Japan, which we encourage everyone to go read. You know, tea laundering from from material coming from China, from Korea and to Japan is a problem, but also between prefectures is a pretty big problem. Yeah.

Zongjun · 22:17

And it's not just Kagoshima, but also some other regions across Japan that we also learn about, you know, some very legacy, you know, heritage matcha brands in Japan who claims to be, you know, like specific origin, but they are indeed still procuring materials from other prefecture under the table, I guess.

Zongjun · 22:38

Yeah, it's, it's interesting. Big mess. Makes it very complicated if you want to source a specialty product with transparency provenance. Yeah, and and it's very difficult for other people, even if they want to remained as a single origin Regent or a producer. There's so many politics and guanxi being maneuvered in all these places that a lot of farmers are actually under a lot of social pressure in participating this whole system, which is, you know, kind of shocking to learn and also not that surprising.

Ryan · 23:14

Yeah. This whole system is so organic and exists for so long that there's so many intertwined relationships because. There's a lot more soft power than I thought because we we were meeting with the farmer who had kind of apprenticed under a large wholesaler and and blend house and you know, they're under some obligation when they go back and ask, can we buy some of this material to say yes?

Ryan · 23:38

So there's a lot of like soft power being exercised and there's these huge advantages because the knowledge is so gatekept. You have to go learn how to produce matcha production from someone. And when you go, the act of acquiring that knowledge through finding a senpai or a sensei is that you know, they can come and turn around and ask for favors. So it's a huge amount of soft power being levied by these very large blend houses and wholesalers, which is removing a lot of supply from what could go to a single origin single cultivar product and is now being put in a blend. Totally agree.

Zongjun · 24:18

And also on the other hand, a lot of these farmers are just so willingly to work with these large blend houses and especially those that, you know, based in Uji or other famous regions. It's kind of like an endorsement of quality for them too. Like they can talk to other people that you know, we are supplying for these brands that's based in Uji, even though that's true.

Ryan · 24:39

Yeah, good point. So, so yeah, it's very hard to unwrapped, you know, all these relationships and disentangle all of these relationships if we really want to push for a single origin in the future. Yeah, a lot of legacy inertia here. So we also spend a lot of time in Nishio learning about, you know, very Nishio specific things with an IT. And one of the things that really surprised me as we asked a couple people this is if there any Nishio native cultivars. Nishio has been growing tea since Seattle. It's been growing matcha for the past around 100 years, 100 plus years.

Ryan · 25:13

But they're primarily not using any Nishio native cultivars. And everyone we asked, we're not aware that there was a single native Nishio cultivar. So I'm not sure if it doesn't mean mean that it doesn't exist, but if it does, it's probably pretty obscure. Yeah, probably me.

Zongjun · 25:29

Shields I rye. That's unheard of. Well, we asked one of the farmers in Toyota about when they made this transition because we keep asking everyone this every time we have an opportunity. 1965 was the year that they started, which is even earlier than some farmers in Uji that we asked, which were more in the 1970s.

Ryan · 25:49

So we have at least a data point showing that Nishio was making this transition even earlier than a lot of the families in Gokasho and Shirakawa. Yeah. And then I wonder how much, you know, contribution or participation is required on the government or the, you know, local tea institute side to kind of push for that to happen with local farmers and also like develop, you know, local cultivars. Because for all of these regions that have their regional cultivar, they have a very like active local tea institute, like Shizuoka, like Uji, like Yame.

Zongjun · 26:28

I bet that's like that's really important for, you know, this kind of local flavor from a cultivar point of view to develop. That's a really interesting point. I don't know, that's a that's a good question. Maybe they just didn't have that research infrastructure the same way that these other places did.

Ryan · 26:45

I do know by reading some records at the early Nishio, early Nishio matcha producers in like 50-60 seventies at a very difficult time competing against Uji both in quality and price. And actually part of the reason why we have matcha as a culinary ingredient was an effort was a a large scale effort by Nishio farmers to find new markets for their matcha because like literally no one would buy it. And I heard there was a quote, I think this is from one of the past leaders of Aiya and was trying to sell their their matcha to a bunch of these different department stores. And someone said Uji and Matcha

Ryan · 27:21

are the same thing, is what he was told what he was trying to sell and learned, figured out that this is a fool's errand, at least in that environment, and tried to go after new markets. Set a very, really fascinating history, the corporate history of Aiya and of Nishio, we want to deep dive into later.

Zongjun · 27:38

There's another interesting legacy of Nishio that I had heard of, but we actually ended up getting to see is they have a very clever way to handpick tea and it's by using local school children. Yeah. So a lot of middle schoolers and high schoolers.

Zongjun · 27:52

And this program has been going on for a couple decades to kind of learn about local agriculture and put these kids to work. And they go and pick tea. And we were walking around Nishio and we actually saw, I don't know, must have been what, like 50 bicycles and 50 school kids eating their lunch on break in the tea fields, picking tea. Child labor.

Ryan · 28:11

Child Labor. I was very tempted to ask if those kids get paid if you still have seen anywhere outside of Japan, but let's say like in the middle of nowhere China, we would be by this these very like overly woke Western standards because I would be calling for child labor.

Zongjun · 28:30

But in Japan, I guess it's fine. Wow. I remember doing that, the backing elementary school when I was in China, that, you know, the school will kind of gather us to go help farmers pick vegetables. Really. Yeah, yeah. And we feed like the local sheeps with some of the vegetables we picked and then they would use those vegetables to cook us meal by the end of the day.

Zongjun · 28:55

No, that's nice. It's like you get to see where your food comes from and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a school activity, but we're also like helping to. Must have not been that good at picking vegetables if they fed them to the sheep afterwards. I But we do get like quotas for each class and then we kind of compete against each other.

Ryan · 29:17

That's so smart. That's what they should do in Uji. Let's make it a gigantic competition. Yeah, competition. That's that. I wonder if they do that. Who gets to be the Bok Choy king? That's cool. Anyways, yeah, it's interesting to see that that's happening in in Japan too.

Ryan · 29:40

I guess it's very like an Asian. I think, I think it's smart. I mean, it's probably a good character building for these kids. They can participate in local agriculture, pick tea, learn about their heritage, maybe hopefully develop an interest in it.

Zongjun · 29:53

Yeah. So I mean. Community event, Yeah. I also saw that in in Wazuka too, when I was picking tea with Google last summer and it was high school at that time. It was a lot of high schoolers that kind of rode a big bus into Obooboo and we all picked sencha. That hand picking event was pretty cool too because they processed the tea and gave everyone a little sample of the tea that you picked.

Ryan · 30:18

It was, but that's even. That's even nicer, I think for everyone who gets to participate in it is to really see the full circle process and get to taste the end result. Yeah. And, you know, it's also kind of cultivating, you know, this tea drinking or tea consumption habit in the newer generation, which is really the foundation of the whole team, does change that.

Zongjun · 30:40

Yeah. And a big problem because young people don't have an interest in it. So it's I think it's good to get everyone involved. Yeah. One thing that we didn't talk about is the shading structures are pretty different. They tend to be on suspension cables.

Zongjun · 30:54

So one of the ways that you can tell that something is a tencha field when you're looking at tea fields is there's a large post usually made out of cement, but sometimes out of metal. And then coming off of it just like a suspension bridge or a bunch of cables which are holding up all of the tana structure. And you don't really see these tana structures anywhere else. I think I've seen some in China from some producers in Jiajiang that use a very similar mechanism. But in Japan I think IG are the only people with these types of suspension based tana structures. You will wonder who's behind those Jiajiang people. Indeed, indeed.

Ryan · 31:36

Well, there's really only two large companies in Nishio, Aya and AOI. We recently taste the matcha coming from Jia and was really good, so they're definitely making some progress I guess. Totally. And a lot of it are these raised tana.

Zongjun · 31:51

So it's even from a shading perspective is even higher quality than what a lot of Japanese producers are doing. But in Uji actually it seems to also all be almost all raised tana. We saw very few directly shaded bushes like you see in like Wazuka for example, and part of the reason that those yield lower quality matcha is 1.

Zongjun · 32:12

You can't shade for as long because it does a lot of damage because the shading structure is directly in contact with the tea leaves, but also it's trapping a lot of heat and a lot of humidity. The tea Bush literally cannot breathe. When it does that, it starts to attract a lot of pests and pest control ends up being a big problem. So the the ceiling on this direct shading I think is typically around 3 weeks and you cannot go that much longer without damaging the plant.

Ryan · 32:41

Whereas these tana structures, there's people in Nishio for example, shading well past 40 days when you separate that tana off of the plant itself. Well, this is one thing that tawa does matter because in some regions it's just too difficult to do a raised tana because it's too windy like in some regions in Wazuka. Yeah, and apparently that's why there's no honzu shading either. Must have been very difficult before the invention of kanreisha because it's just too windy to keep the rice straw there. Yeah.

Zongjun · 33:14

I wonder how people dealt with that, or if they just, like, dealt with it and it was just their headache all season. Every morning they go sprinkle new straw. Straw. I collect all the straws on the road. I can't even imagine.

Ryan · 33:25

It must have been so difficult before kanreisha. It's a wonderful invention. Well people in Uji was talking about it like all the bro sites are kind of scattered with all these straws being blown away. You got to go collect them and apologize to your neighbors. The dark side of intangible cultural heritage. A lot of sumimasen, sumimasen and I go manasa. And Speaking of Uji, to sort of conclude this episode, you know, every once in a while we we pick up different pieces of industry gossip.

Zongjun · 33:59

And we learned that actually that some point about 20 years ago or, you know, on the order of a decade or two ago, Uji was offered some type of intangible cultural heritage status. I don't think it was GI, but it was some some level of protection to protect the tea industry there for the Uji matcha farming families. And apparently it was rejected particularly for for a reason that I wouldn't have guessed, but about zoning law and how you were allowed to use different types of land. Because the more context we get, we actually are learning that a lot of the Uji matcha farming families do not necessarily rely off of agriculture or tea as

Zongjun · 34:39

their sole source of income, but their land owners in an in a town that is economically prosperous. And that in some cases literally turning your tea field into a parking lot is a better economic decision. But there are also landlords and building owners and that they make a lot of supplemental income doing things other than tea. And they wanted to maintain that level of flexibility and not basically forced to be tea farmers with this level of protection.

Ryan · 35:06

That's right. You know, this is one thing that Uji is so different from other tea region in Japan is that it's a tourist destination. You have all these, you know, legacy tourist spots like Byodo-in and all these places that would naturally just subtract a lot of the traffic from tourists. And it's just a better, you know, business model for a lot of people to, you know, not do tea, but you know, kind of facilitate or accommodate all of these incoming tourists, which was, I guess a very easy decision to make. Back in the days but matcha, price was not that. True.

Zongjun · 35:40

We had 20 years ago. Who could have known this was coming? Yeah. And you know, they probably made the right decision, right? People like us are going to find them anyway because some of the most famous tea growing region in Japan, right?

Zongjun · 35:53

So they're going to have an export market. Even if this matcha boom goes away, there will be enough demand for the Uji matcha farmers which have the most famous name. And even to this day, I mean like with all these automations, but still like farming matcha is so laborers, it's so much headaches and people are getting old. And, you know, managing a, you know, parking lot that basically pays itself is just like so much easier than managing a tea garden, especially for these grandmas and grandpas. And you don't want to also just close the door on that, right? Like having that level of protection basically closes the door on all of your optionality

Ryan · 36:33

forever, right? With the zoning laws, like an intangible cultural heritage. It's like actually one of my complaints about being in some cities like Rome. I've been in and out of Rome for work, and it just feels like you're trapped in a museum, right?

Ryan · 36:48

There's very like it. It feels like the city is fundamentally untouchable because it's so old. There's very little room to adapt or create new buildings or to do this or do that. Like it just feels trapped in time, which in some ways is incredibly good, and that it feels like you're entering a place that's locked in time.

Zongjun · 37:09

But also it really prevents a lot of dynamism for the people that are actually living there who actually want some level of opportunity. No wonder I saw all these graffitis on all these, you know, statues and old buildings in Rome. Clearly some sentiment of rebellion against that suffocating environment, I guess from a local point of view. Yeah, whereas so, you know, a place like New York, it's built and rebuilt and built and rebuilt with different waves of migration and it's just constantly adaptive, but still authentically New York, right.

Zongjun · 37:43

Like this is a much closer to a living tradition and real tradition is where actual people are actually living and making decisions and allowed to determine their livelihood. So I actually don't, I don't judge these Uji matcha farmers at all for rejecting this level of protection in the past.

Ryan · 37:59

Yeah, yeah. But you know, this really explains all these urbanization that's happening in Uji and why we have all these quote UN quote, highway teas and all these tea plots that's sitting in the middle of the city or right next to a highway. Yeah.

Zongjun · 38:13

And even all the abandoned tea fields, right? Like they're all over each like right next to the Okonoyama tea garden, arguably the single most important tea garden in Japan, dating back to Uji Shichimeien and the state controlled monopoly of the Edo period. It's the only one that's still being cultivated. Like right next door.

Ryan · 38:31

There's an abandoned tea plot quite like it's, I don't know what the story of this abandoned tea plot is, but, you know, having some optionality for whoever is owning that land to repurpose it because they don't want to do tea anymore.

Zongjun · 38:45

Is, you know, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's hard to say. You can really argue both ways. But I think there's a lot of damage to if it's all trapped in a gigantic glass box. Agree. Agree. Change is the most important part of any tradition. Otherwise it's it's no longer a living heart. I bet there's a very long queue behind that abandoned T plot because some grandma grandpa is, you know, having a very hard time gatekeeping that piece of land or whatever. We.

Ryan · 39:14

Indeed. All right. Well, I think it's a great place to stop. Sam, do you have anything left in your notes? No. I think we, uh, gone through everything. If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing with the friend and we'll see you in the next one. Thanks.

39:25

In the future.