What do you care about?

Ryan · 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is Zongjun. Hello. Hello. Who also goes by Sam and we're the cofounders of Sanko Matcha Products. We launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in Matcha, share startup stories, and interview experts. In today's episode, we want to spend some time talk about perspectives.

Zongjun · 0:19

Essentially, what do you care about? As whom? With the subject of Matcha, of course, and we all care about slightly and sometimes very different things. Yeah, or even just at the vendor level. And we're going to actually for the sake of this podcast that we're going to talk about it more about the positioning of the vendor.

Zongjun · 0:38

So the person who's actually doing the selling and they can have very different values and different companies position their sourcing philosophies and their products in very different ways. And these philosophies can come in many different flavors. And it's not what they say in their mission statement, it's not what they say they care about and necessarily, but we all care about many different things. It's just the farmers that just consumer preference such as sustainability, environment, the environment, giving things at a good price, promoting a traditional heritage product. Everyone cares about these

Ryan · 1:14

things, but it's where you make compromises, where your values really shine. It is what you actually care about, which we wanted to focus on. We've recently received some negative feedback. Criticism. Some criticism and it made us do quite a bit of reflecting. And some of them we thought we were fair and some of them we thought were very unfair.

Ryan · 1:35

And we're not someone to openly complain publicly. And we definitely don't want to like quote, unquote, punch down on anyone who's criticizing us now that we have a platform. But we had a hard time, like understanding some of the perspectives. And we realized that like all of the toxicity in the comments section deep on Reddit and within the broader Internet community that celebrates Matcha all stems from the fact that we care about different things and we express that and where we draw the line on making compromises. So I'll give a very like specific example. If your primary objective as a company or as a vendor or even as a consumer is to support

Ryan · 2:15

traditional small Japanese tea farmers, And someone develops like fantastic matcha in South Korea and they're doing honzu shading, they've imported Asahi cultivar, everything is handpicked, they're producing a fantastic product and you have the opportunity to buy someone to sell it.

Ryan · 2:32

If your true mission is to help Japanese small farmers, that's a compromise you're probably not willing to make. But if you're a product focused company trying to source the best possible tasting matcha, or some people argue that it can't be matcha unless it's grown in Japan.

Ryan · 2:50

But for the case of this argument, let's call it matcha grown in Korea. If you're product focused and your goal is to source the best, then you should have no problem making that compromise. Very true. And you have all of these like toxic common threads.

Zongjun · 3:06

So accusing someone of cultural appropriation or accusing someone of using first harvest matcha for lattes and now there's not enough for tea ceremony practitioners. But the person using it for a latte in the vendor selling first harvest matcha to them might have different values making different compromises than you are as a tea ceremony practitioner. And we all have to stack rank these things. I mean, like this is a very extreme example for the a more common dilemma also happens in within Japan. Like you can have, you know, very also very product focused, very domestic market focused company trying to, you know, really stock their portfolio

Zongjun · 3:46

with a lot of these very ultra umami bomb matcha, which really cannot be created without mountains of fertilizers and pesticides. You know, it's really, you know it. That's the reality. But on the other hand, if you care about, you know, the environment and sustainability and you want to move to a more organic way of farming, more sustainable way of farming by using less pesticides and less fertilizers.

Ryan · 4:14

And naturally you end up getting a more bitter and more astringent tea. And with the domestic standard of judging a matcha that will inevitably falling into a inferior quality bucket. I mean, if you really care about the environment, you know, that's a compromise that you're probably willing to make. You'll go to a place that's doing fantastic organic farming and source some things from there. And naturally, when you do organic farming, that means you're not using pesticides, which means you have to use less fertilizer because fertilizer contains nitrogen. Everything loves nitrogen.

Ryan · 4:47

It attracts pests. So there's a cycle and it's a compromise that's being made. Now. People who really focus on just quality of the product and things that are going to taste very good usually don't source organic matcha. It almost always tastes worse and more bitter. And also when you're not using a lot of pesticides, the plant needs to compensate for that lack of pesticides and basically produce its own both caffeine and some other compounds, catechins, catechins, all sorts of other things that will deter insects and various pests.

Ryan · 5:18

So, so there's all sorts of things that the plant will adapt to naturally because you do that. So and also honestly, if you really care about like the environment and tea, you maybe shouldn't be consuming like really industrial matcha at all. If you look at agriculture and tea agriculture in Japan, compared to a lot of other tea producing regions in the world, it is incredibly industrialized.

Ryan · 5:42

When you think about the these gigantic fields that you see in these beautiful pictures, like in Shizuoka with Fuji behind it or in Kagoshima, it's all a mono crop. It's a big mono crop of genetically identical plants with very little genetic plant diversity with tons of nitrogen pumped into the soil, sprayed that autumn like auto harvested it. It is not what we would consider as natural farming or something that or something that if you really care about biodiversity, that you would want to support like it. It's a much more similar to like industrial chickens in a gigantic shed right now.

Ryan · 6:21

Obviously, there's not as much animal suffering going on, but if that is what you care about, then that's a compromise that you should make. And maybe you should only drink the seed propagated, meaning you have large amounts of plant to plant genetic diversity where they're growing it in a natural environment, not this gigantic monoculture, but they're also some potentially other crops or trees or various shrubs in between. And you know, much more sustainable methods. Typically they're quite a bit more expensive because they need to be handpicked because you can't have these big automatic pickers because they're not in

Ryan · 6:55

these big perfect rows. Typically, you need to require natural fertilizer, which is much more expensive than synthetic fertilizer. These compromises are important because it reflects what we care about as consumers and as different businesses. And might I say it is a very good thing that we have businesses caring about these different. Topics.

Zongjun · 7:14

Yeah. I mean, like, thank God for all those farmers in Shizuoka and Kagoshima figure out this way to producing large amount of consistently tasty matcha out there to supply the world. Like without them, like there won't be enough matcha. They're already like, we have a matcha shortage. But like, imagine like without Kagoshima and Shizuoka, probably this short shortage will be like, you know, really it will happen probably 10 years ago already. Yeah, and let's move to a different extreme. Let's say you're a cafe owner anywhere in the world and your goal is to really do justice to your employees. You are a beat, You're a

Ryan · 7:52

company, you're a business, and you're trying to make the best product you can. But really your goal is to make the community that you're in thrive and to make sure that your employees have a good living wage where your baristas and can really make a career out of this thing, right?

Ryan · 8:09

And you're like over here in this corner of the world, listening to someone else preach to you that these gigantic monocultures are producing a very industrial product and that you should just do the natural thing. And you're over here thinking like, I can't spend 4 times more on this product. And by the way, there's not another that product in the world to to.

Ryan · 8:29

Anyways to? Give matcha to everybody. It's not a scalable solution. Like yeah, good for you paying four times more. I'm glad you can afford it, but I got 50, 15 employees to take care of. So your values are reflected in the compromise that you're making. And of course they probably care about the environment, but in the stack rank of things that they care about, it's relatively lower.

Zongjun · 8:50

It's a really good, fine example. And you know, we also are very guilty of like hating on something like industrial scale Kagoshima first flash organic matcha that's milled on a ball mill. And typically the lens that we're filtering it through is a product or consumer focused lens like really focusing on like flavor expression that can come out of this plant that are interesting and unique and terroir expressive and things that we like to drink. But it's very much filtered through like a specialty product lens.

Zongjun · 9:21

And the compromises that we're making there is that we're ignoring like really good solutions for small businesses, like B to B environments, for people supplying other businesses with matcha. You know, we're ignoring and we might be ignoring part of the consumer focused lens who might not really care about high end matcha and just once nice matcha flavor for their bubble tea. So it's, you know, that's I think the fruit of where all of this conflict is, where people are making judgments on others. And you really have to think about what you care. About Yeah, you, it's really who you are by the end of the day that defines you, what you care

Zongjun · 9:59

about. You have, you have, you know, tea practitioners making criticisms on, you know, cafes or bubble tea shops consuming too much matcha is like, you know, a orchestra concert team, you know, making criticisms about, you know, a pop group using too much of the, you know, stage time of the stadium. You know they are essentially very 2 very different things for two very different audiences.

Ryan · 10:27

And filtered through two very different sets of stack ranked priorities. Because you cannot care about the environment or health and Wellness or the ceremony and culture like the farmers themselves, the product itself, much of businesses at various points in the value chain and the consumer all in the same breath.

Ryan · 10:49

You have to make compromises. And that is what you care about is where you make compromises. So for example, some people might hate on this quote unquote, Chinese bamboo chasens because we're not supporting Takayama chasens or people in Nara making chasens and that we need to support these traditional crafts. And it turns out that from purely a small business perspective, people who source these things have actually gotten a little bit screwed.

Zongjun · 11:15

These producers cannot keep up. There are not enough handmade Takayama chasens in the world to meet the current demand. And wait lists are huge. And typically when the vendors that sell them get them right, they get like, I don't know, 40 at a time. Like, it's not very much.

Zongjun · 11:32

And it's like having an inconsistent supplier to build a business on top of. It's hard if you're trying to do this and if you're truly consumer focused. Not all consumers need a $50 handmade chasen. And by the way, the ones from China that are much cheaper and much more available are actually handmade.

Zongjun · 11:53

I don't know why everyone thinks and calls them machine made. They're not. That's way too intricate for a machine to be made. It just so happens that when you have someone in a factory in China where a really decent lunch cost like $1.00, of course you can cut it, charge less for that product than when a Grand Master sitting in the middle of like Takayama, who like probably is driving a nice car, right?

Zongjun · 12:22

Like it's very different labor requirements. Are the Takayama chasens better? Yes, there are more thoughtful and there are more heritage. The bamboo is higher quality and from a structural and functional perspective, like it's subtle, but they are definitely better. Who is going to notice that difference? I don't know.

Zongjun · 12:42

It's a very small group of consumers. So like compromises like that. I mean, as long as the, you know, Chinese bamboo is not acid wash, I don't see a problem with them being used every day in a cafe and, you know, gets disposed like in three or seven days because, you know, it's really abuse to use. And which is, you know, the, the reality of the modern usage of utensils in the modern cafe.

Zongjun · 13:07

Takayama chasens were made meant for be used in a tea ceremony. And ironically, it was a disposable item at the time. They were meant to be used only once or twice, but now they get to use every day. And if you are trying to use that in the modern consumption scenario, which is like, I don't know, 30 to 30 * 50 times a day, like, that is really not what it was meant for. And using, you know, a cheaper and more economical replacement, well, there's really no problem with that. And you know, I think people can hold different perspectives at different times because we've actually hated. I remember on this podcast

Zongjun · 13:48

criticizing someone who was advocating for starting authentic in your practice. And part of what they were advocating for is whisking matcha in a chawan with a bamboo chasen. And I remember looking at the chasen and realizing this is the 100% not made in Japan, handmade in Japan. Like this is absolutely industrial quality coming from China, which is decent.

Zongjun · 14:10

But like I can tell that it's not by looking at the details. And I criticized them, right? And part of the root of the criticism was I was putting Japanese ceremony and culture first. I was filtering it through that lens. And I was filtering through that lens because that was what I was primed to do.

Zongjun · 14:27

When you're telling someone to start authentic and to do things the way they've been traditionally done in Japan, right? You're trying to profit off of someone else's culture, but not directly supporting it in any way by selling a product that's produced somewhere else.

Zongjun · 14:41

None of that money circles back. So that's the primary effect. But actually there's also secondary effects to all of this. Everyone needs an intro chasen. Very few beginners should ever start with the Takayama chasen. So having a bunch of people have these cheaper Chinese made chasens, which you can buy retail for and 1520 U.S. dollars, right? That's going to create the market that then realize, oh, you know what, I kind of want an upgrade. I really like this matcha thing.

Ryan · 15:11

I'm enjoying this every morning. I want an artisanal product. I'm going to go out and buy a really nice raku bowl and support these makers making these $50 chasens. Yeah, You know, here's an interesting point. Like if you really care about, you know, the spread of and the preservation of Japanese additional culture, you would want to see more people, want to practice, you know, whisking matcha with a chasen. And do you want to see your very expensive chasen being used everywhere in the world, like by all these beginners trying to, you know, really put force using that and scraping the bottom of the people?

Ryan · 15:50

Like this is really the same logic with, you know, like all of these quote, UN quote over consumption of ceremonial matcha. It's the same thing. Words are getting spread, cultural are getting spread, people are getting interested. People naturally want to learn more and want the best. But you know, without a lower tier replacement to to compensate, you know, like and stigmatizing and criticizing people for using a lower replacement, I think that's not going to do any good.

Zongjun · 16:17

So by any means. Well, I totally agree. And even like a, another good example of a lot of conflict and something that we've talked about before are these poetically named matcha blends. Like we took the position in an opinion piece that we wrote. Are poetic matcha names harmful?

Zongjun · 16:33

You can go back and listen to that if you, if you haven't for, for more context, if you're taking a ceremonial or cultural perspective and placing it first, of course they're good. But it's like a huge legacy of Japan. Like if you go to Marukyu, right, it's a 300 year old company, something like that. Or maybe it's even older.

Zongjun · 16:52

It's it's like 17 something or early 1700s writing that culture all over the world. Like, great, like if that's your primary objective, but if your primary objective is to help consumers build preferences so that they can discover what they like and dislike based on the specialty principles of the product, such as like what cultivar it was from, where it was grown, how it was processed, it is harmful.

Zongjun · 17:16

So in that stance, we were putting the consumer above the ceremony and culture and that offends some people. Sometimes we got some hate now recently saying, who are we? We're not Japanese speakers. We haven't lived in Japan.

Zongjun · 17:30

Why are we belittling and slandering Japanese tea ceremony? We need to come in with a lot more respect and and show reverence to this art because that's what created matcha in the 1st place and they're rights. They're you're totally right if you're putting ceremony and culture first.

Ryan · 17:50

And by no means we want to disrespect, you know, such culture like thank God the ceremony exists so that you know, the culture of matcha gets got preserved over the course of time. And so are all these art related to chanoyu. The very the reason why a lot of these matcha got their poetic names was their relationship with traditional Japanese literatures and their culture.

Ryan · 18:16

And that was part of the appreciation or the theme, setting, progress or procedure doing a chanoyu ceremony. And of course it makes sense in a chanoyu or tea ceremony context. It doesn't make sense for as much as a specialty product complex.

Zongjun · 18:32

Yeah, but they're also wrong within the same spirit of what they're advocating for, because people are naturally interested in different things. And I'm sorry, tea ceremony should not be the entry point for the majority of consumers.

Zongjun · 18:46

Maybe they like at the surface level like it, but like if you attend enough of these things and learn enough about it is not like the path to actually learn about the strength. It is much, much deeper and philosophical.

Zongjun · 18:59

It's actually like pseudo spiritual, I mean like quasi religious with all the Buddhism philosophies and Zen really closely linked with a lot of the modern day schools. And of course there's different schools that have slightly different philosophies, but it is way deeper than most people realize. It has really nothing to do with matcha, but spreading matcha and the love for matcha as a product, as a consumer, as a flavor from the people like for various reasons, especially the specialty principles where it's from, how it was grown, supporting farmers, etcetera, etcetera. That is a much larger potential

Zongjun · 19:34

market, right? There's a pretty definite ceiling on the number of people that are actually going to be interested in tea ceremony and chanoyu and actually becoming a student long term. But that ceiling for much as a specialty product is huge. It's potentially billions of consumers. Naturally, a sub segment of those consumers will then become interested in learning the more traditional aspects of chanoyu and better understanding where this product came from historically.

Ryan · 20:02

We're creating another entry point, We're creating another marketing funnel for chanoyu practitioners. Yeah. And from perspective, point of view, you know, if you are a tea farmer, if you're a tea maker in Japan, of course this is going to be the future that you want to see like a much larger market out there in the world versus a very confined domestic market that we only use matcha for a very specific purpose. Yeah.

Zongjun · 20:28

So people, especially in their arguments, can be both right and wrong at the same time, depending on whether or not you're looking at primary effects or secondary effects or depending on how you stack rank your priorities, which is what you ultimately care about. And I think that's the root of where a lot of this toxicity comes from.

Zongjun · 20:50

It's very painful. Some generally it's I think just misalignment of, you know, expectation and you know what they essentially rooting for. It's a context specific, and people frequently do not understand other people's context, which is totally fine. Yeah, that's reality of the Internet. Well, actually, that's exactly what it is. People do not understand other people's context, but it's it's the perfect encapsulation of it.

Ryan · 21:17

People who don't do transparent label don't care about matcha farmers. If you're in like, if you're not sharing who you're sourcing from, that is lower on the stack rank than convenient opacity or selling a very cheap product or or trying to wrap your brand in mystery and, and the mysticism that we are seeing. You really care about the matcha farmers. You'd be very transparent.

Ryan · 21:42

You help them create brands for themselves. Look at Suji San. Suji San didn't get famous by himself and necessarily, I mean, he won lots of awards within Japan, very famous within the domestic market. But the only reason we know about him is from Kettle is from Johnny Matcha is from Marc from Ooika.

Ryan · 21:58

It's from pop in Thailand with Kodo T space. It's people who source this product and tell their story. It's very similar to how like wine producers get very famous. The Somalis talk about them, we are talking about them.

Zongjun · 22:11

They're stories to be told. And like they lift up these farmers to the point where they have a lot more control over their livelihoods. And now someone like him has the ability to make a lot more investments to raise quality and to increase volume so that more of us have a product that's coming from him versus a large traditional blend house or from a gigantic mass agriculture operation somewhere else in Japan or even in China. And so it's it's if you really care about the farmers and put them first, that's what you're doing. Yeah, it's the reality.

Zongjun · 22:42

Or if you are a traditional house and you continue to make this product with all of these historical significance, that's fine. You know, like this culture needs you to continue to exist into the future and it will be benefit from more people wanting to drink and try and be interested in matcha and Japanese culture.

Ryan · 23:03

Yeah, and there's sometimes a lot of irony too. And a lot of this marketing, a lot of vendors will call matcha like very environmental and it's very natural. You're drinking this leaf and you're drinking the whole leaf.

Ryan · 23:15

I'm like if you learn anything about tea farming and other places, matcha is literally like one of the most unnatural forms of tea cultivation that there are. Yeah, or like not just tea, agricultural cultivation, even if you compare to like grapes and the coffee are the beverage category like matcha is hyper, hyper engineered.

Zongjun · 23:37

Yeah, it's shaded and like plants have like natural rhythms, just like we have circadian rhythms. Plants have natural rhythms that have a lot to do with the light and the sun. When you shade it, it's very hard on the. Plant basically suffocating the plant. Like, you know, one thing that really surprised me like Ryan and I both came from a Kung Fu like Chinese tea education background.

Zongjun · 23:58

And one thing that really caught me off guard is that when farmers tell me that these tea plants have a they have a lifespan. They will die in like 30 or 40 years. And then before, you know, at the end of their life cycle, they would just basically kill the plant and replace it with new bushes.

Ryan · 24:17

Yeah, they don't live very long. Yeah. And that's not the case for a lot of people growing in Korea and China. Yeah, where it's much more biodiverse. We were just in Anhui province checking out a bunch of royal tea farms there.

Ryan · 24:31

I'm just out of our own personal interest because we're really into Chinese tea as well. And like, the biodiversity is insane. They were like, yeah, we planted these evergreens here. We planted this other camellia plant here. And we actually noticed that like a lot of the tea tastes different when it's by all these other plants. It's not just this big giant mass agriculture. Yeah.

Zongjun · 24:53

You see the same thing happening in Yunnan, like, a different, you know, vegetations in different mountains will actually have a pretty obvious impact on the tea Bush. And, like, those are not tea Bush. They are tea trees. Like, they live for hundreds of years, and they're part of the forest.

Ryan · 25:10

Yeah, that's not something that you will see easily in Japan. They do exist in Japan, just, you know, in much smaller quantity. And we were asking some of these farmers in Huangshan, like, how long do your green tea, the bushes that you use for green tea, how long do they live?

Ryan · 25:28

We've been very Japanese focused, obviously for a while. So it was like top of mind for us. And they were like, they don't die. What are you talking about? Don't die. We were, like, very much in a very different mindset.

Zongjun · 25:41

Yeah. They were like. Wow. Yeah, right. You're right. And actually we've recently been translating some Japanese literature about shading, because we're really a lot more interested in that process from an agricultural perspective. And the practice and shading and its stress on plants do get talked about in all these Japanese literatures to like it's aware, well aware within the industry. And something that Ian from Yunomi has talked about too is that some of the very large players in Japan who are buying up lots or leasing land from smaller tea farmers and kind of plugging it into their

Zongjun · 26:18

operations are shading now into the fourth harvest, right? That's like forcing a tea plant to run a marathon four times in a row. Well, because when you do this shade cultivation, you're depriving it of nutrients. Photosynthesis matters. That's why all the best tea producers in Japan from a product perspective, are only shading once a year to allow a full year of recovery for that plant. And some people do 2 harvests and so there's a little more recovery time, but it can be driven into three or four. And those plants do not live very long. And also if you wean them off of fertilizer, a lot of these plants are addicted to

Ryan · 26:56

fertilizer. There's a episode deep in the archives from Ricardo's podcast, My Japanese Green Tea podcast on organic matcha farming. I think it might have been the second episode they ever did where Ian from Yunomi was invited to talk and he was saying that when you transition a non organic garden into an organic garden or tencha slash matcha production, there's a lot. 1 a lot of the tea plants die, and two, the ones that do live are very sick and have almost no yield for a very long time, and it takes years before you can harvest them because they're like drug addicts.

Zongjun · 27:33

So I almost they need to go through a detox. Yeah, they're going through a withdrawal. So anyway, it's a long rant. We don't want to sound like some sort of them eco maniac that care about, you know, like these plants are suffering, but in a way they are suffering, right?

Ryan · 27:48

But but also at the same time, like shading technology is really the very reason why matcha tastes like matcha. If you don't shade matcha or the tea Bush, it's not going to taste like matcha at all. So there is a fine balance I would say between, you know, how do you shade and how you grow and how you treat matcha as a plant and as a living thing.

Zongjun · 28:10

Yeah, From an environmental perspective, it's kind of disastrous. You need to use tons of fertilizer and because you use tons of fertilizer, you need tons of pesticides in this very high intervention process of making tea. So you can criticize it with that lens if that's what you care about more.

Ryan · 28:24

But if you care about human health outside of the negative externalities of like the the nitrogen and the waste, the runoff that's produced from that type of agriculture, let's say you don't live in Japan, those environmental factors don't affect you. It's not immediately, but you care about health, right? You don't get those levels of L-theanine, you don't get those extremely high levels of EGCG.

Ryan · 28:44

So you're now producing tea leaves even from an exhausted plane, you're producing tea leaves that are way more nutritious than before it went through that process. So if you care about nutrition first, you know, who cares about that other stuff? We're now getting something that's very good for human health.

Zongjun · 29:00

Actually, the Global Japanese Tea Association does a conference every year. They do one in Tokyo, one in Kyoto and it's fantastic content by the way. And they invite 3 keynote speakers. They each have about 1/2 hour talk that's consecutively translated between Japanese and English.

Zongjun · 29:18

And one of them was actually exactly on this topic was over fertilization and all this nitrogen. And something that Ian also from Yunomi talks about a lot is like the pesticide residue requirements in Japan are some of the, it's very well regulated, but it is they're very not conservative with the amount of legal pesticides allowed. Actually, especially some of the like ridiculous fruits, like if you ever hear about like a $200 melon made in Japan, those are all hyper pesticide, very heavy use of pesticide. My girlfriend went to agricultural school in France, but she did a year of study in Tokyo and agricultural food program there and learned all

Zongjun · 30:04

about this. And she was horrified. Like someone coming from France in the EU where there's really strict rules around residue requirements is horrified to learn that. And in Taiwan and in mainland China, all very relaxed places in general in terms of like legal requirements. And apparently a lot of some of the Japan's best tea, like apparently Suji San's tea is not EU compliant. So everything that's coming in is coming in in very small quantities.

Zongjun · 30:30

And all of the large houses like Marukyu basically have two separate arms and two separate production, one that's EU and European compliant and one for domestic consumption and for the rest of the world. You know, this whole EU policy has really did something good to the environment as a whole.

Ryan · 30:46

Farmers and all of these manufacturers trying to be EU compliant, they are using less pesticides. So you see that happening in Japan. You see that happening in China too. Like in order to meet the EU standard, they, the local government, are incentivizing farmers to use less pesticides and less fertilizers in order to meet the exportation requirement. And you see some really heavy-handed policy being applied in some area in Japan and China too. Well, isn't that ironic of us to say? The two people who really hate on organic matcha because from a product perspective it tastes worse. It does taste worse.

Ryan · 31:22

So we're all kind of hypocrites in this way. And that's where all of this conflict comes from because you and I could get into a legitimate argument right now about this. And like we would both kind of be right. We're just stock ranking and prioritizing different things. I'm advocating for the consumer and a specialty product with interesting flavors coming from all of this process and nature and the things that go on to, you know, bring matcha to life. And organic almost always means lower quality. And at the same time, right, it's having all of these other positive externalities.

Zongjun · 31:53

And I'm sure there's secondary and tertiary effects to both of these arguments as well. Like the reality is, is that reality is complicated. I mean, so is the matcha industry. And people get so easily offended, especially online. And we think they're literally talking past each other because they care about different things. We cannot say that we care about the consumer, matcha businesses, the product, the matcha farmers, ceremony and culture, health and Wellness and environmental all fit in the same level. At the same time, that's just not possible or not possible for now because, you know, consumer

Zongjun · 32:26

preference is going to change too, right? Like in the future, Like people nowadays care about certain things. And, you know, the only way to achieve those sweetness, those mommy bond is not using sustainable ways of farming. But you know, people's preference might change in the future for more bitter, more pungent flavor coming up from tea plants might be a trend into the future. We don't know.

Ryan · 32:49

And for that to happen, you know, like naturally you don't need to use over fertilization or over pesticides. And if there is a future that, you know, all of these things that people care about might converge. Yeah, very possible. You know, consumers aren't a monolith either. You're very experienced consumers with tons of context that value different things and people who have a little context just looking for a quote, UN quote ceremonial grape product. And you have people that don't even know what matcha is, right? Consumers aren't a monolith.

Ryan · 33:19

And by the way, not there are tea farmers, also not a monolith. And so, you know, you got like really successful rock star farmers winning competitions against like grandma and grandpa who have no retirement plan, who don't know what to do with this farm.

Ryan · 33:33

There's like thousands of these people and you know, end up making some sort of deal or just abandoning it all together because there's no succession plan. And then you have like gigantic businesses who are doing mass scale agriculture to make tons and literally many, many metric tons of matcha a year. And they're very different people. And by the way, so is ceremony and culture everyone talks about, like when we were being accused of slandering tea ceremony and tea culture.

Ryan · 33:59

I recently was reading a book that I think I've talked about before called Making Tea, Making Japan, and it's kind of the history of ceremony in Japan and how it's been shaped over the years. And I didn't realize that I was putting Urasenke and Mushakoji Senke and Sen no Rikyu up on this giant pedestal. And it actually turns out that the San Senke, these three schools that all descended from Sen no Rikyu, actually like waxed and waned in prominence over the years. So not only were there tons of other samurai schools, but at some point they were kind of very marginalized and had very little influence.

Ryan · 34:33

And there's some very interesting maneuverings that they did to regain power. So the the ceremonial institutions and schools are not a monolith either. And reading this book was very illuminating. Like Hideyoshi in the way that he was doing tea at the time.

Ryan · 34:48

And like all of these other warlords, it was almost a big show and tell. Like you took all the expensive stuff that you got from China, mostly all these expensive ceramic and we're showing it off. And even this like the Meiji era, when all of the barrens, like the oil barrens, the steel barrens, the textile barrens, as Japan was undergoing massive industrialization, they weren't necessarily attached to the tea ceremony schools either.

Ryan · 35:16

And they were hosting their own tea gatherings, kind of doing it their own way, which were also some kind of big show off of wealth and cultural capital and to build some social capital and to do networking, and had really nothing to do with the philosophical underpinnings that we all think of as tea ceremony.

Ryan · 35:32

And this, this was when Meiji, Meiji very recently. Yeah, 150 years ago in the 1800s when Japan was going under this rapid industrialization. And actually it turns out also during this period, I think that Urasenke wanted to get much closer to the emperor and to be have much greater proximity and and cultural relevance there. And they quote UN quote rediscovered some ancient temae or practice that Sen no Rikyu did in their documents. Very timely.

Ryan · 36:03

Very, very convenient. There was it was any criticism of this was implicit in the book, but they left room for interpretation that it was very convenient timing because the book was also written by an Urasenke student. So I'm sure she had a very difficult time threading that needle. We both being historically accurate and being a member of this institution.

Ryan · 36:23

But I mean, these these institutions are not perfect and a lot of valid and a lot of valid criticism around sexism, especially. I mean they like flat out like Urasenke and Omotesenke and a lot of these schools are sexist. As a woman, you have an absolute ceiling where you cannot raise past certain levels.

Ryan · 36:39

Some of the most advanced timeline, the most advanced teachings are all reserved the top for men and at the very highest level. The iemoto system has actually been criticized as one of the last vestiges of feudalism in Japan. Patriarchy at its finest.

Ryan · 36:55

Right. It's really what Warren Buffett would call the divine right of the womb. The only way that you're able to get that is to be born and to inherit this position, which is an interesting cultural legacy, but it's far from egalitarian or meritocratic or fair.

Zongjun · 37:11

But you know, if your life goal and passion is drawn on you as a woman to progress, it's absolutely a ceiling. And most of the reason why women are encouraged in Japan to study tea ceremony is basically to become quote, good wives and wise mothers. This was actually a policy, very famous policy, which started about 100 years ago.

Zongjun · 37:32

And that's basically the reason why Urasenke is so prevalent everywhere today is because it had a whole new influx of young girl somewhere. This was basically finishing school which became the current practitioner. Basically tread wife readiness school.

Ryan · 37:47

So yeah, basically it's a very different type of culture and that still lives on today. We actually recently got a message from someone who's Japanese and kind of like, doesn't love the traditional aspects of Japanese culture.

Ryan · 38:01

And he was like, yeah, I thought, like, tea ceremony was for women. If you spend any time in Japan, it's very easy to get this impression. Yeah, very stereotypical. Yeah, but it's also on a monolith too. I mean, there's other schools and samurai schools, and actually, to be honest, I don't know very much about them or their philosophical underpinnings, but they might be very different.

Zongjun · 38:18

It's really weird to me honestly. Like it's a thing for women, but the leader can only be male. And the top leadership can only be mailed. Yeah. It's really weird. And weirdly enough, the iemoto himself does almost no teaching.

Ryan · 38:32

It's all the direct level underneath him that have the direct interactions with the students. And it turns out too, that you can accelerate your licensure within within Urasenke. I've learned within this book is that if you are a person of prominence, let's say you're a director of the museum or something, the iemoto can bestow upon you certain licenses and you can sort of accelerate, would normally take someone 20 years or 30 years to achieve.

Ryan · 39:04

But it's actually really interesting maneuvering to make sure that these institutions remain culturally relevant because you're connected and how have influence over all of these other people with both hard and soft power and within society.

Ryan · 39:18

So it's actually, if you think about it from an institutional preservation perspective, incredibly smart, very smart and no one talks about it. Just like the Bene Gesserit, the Jesuits, the Church. In Dune. In Dune. Yes, exerting power with the names of culture and religion. So these, these places are very far from, from pure and, and now I am talking from the perspective of a consumer and someone who loves this product and not as a member of these institutions, right.

Ryan · 39:48

But like, if I really care about like keeping it pure in a ceremonial perspective, of course I'm wouldn't talk about this argument. And I'm sure maybe we'll receive some hate now for talking about this. But anyway, in this thing, I really highly recommend both making tea, making Japan. It really broke down a lot of assumptions that I about the evolution of tea ceremony and how it's not a monolith either. And you know, on the other hand, really makes us become more understandable why, you know, certain people got triggered so much when we talk or sometimes criticize Japanese TCM. Oh yeah, that's actually the

Zongjun · 40:23

reason why I've read this book. It's really it's so intertwined with the Japanese Ness, the Japanese identity and the Japanese as a nation, that when you are trying to make any criticisms of any of its cultural elements, a lot of people will naturally think that you are attacking this whole idea, this whole community as a whole, which is understandable.

Zongjun · 40:49

Yeah, and the Japanese government has put in tons of policies to select chanoyu and tea ceremony as the embodiment of japaneseness. And that was not only done with the modern government, but also with eras before this in the Meiji and Edo as well. Compared to the length of the tea and tea culture, you know this is really nothing.

Ryan · 41:14

Yeah, and there's something. Traditional about it. And very weirdly too, if you look at the histories of these institutions, like if you read the history books that are closely associated with Urasenke, for example, you basically learn about Sen no Rikyu, Hideyoshi.

Ryan · 41:28

Many one who's taken tea ceremony lessons have certainly heard these names. And it's kind of the great man theory of history. And there's remarkably little accounting for of everything after Rikyu. And a lot of scholars are speculating that even Rikyu and during Rikyu's time and there were, he was pulling a lot of philosophy from a lot of other places.

Ryan · 41:48

And that like there were a lot of other voices and perspectives that have contributed into what is this actually a very beautiful art of Chanoyu into nowadays. But it's been kind of reduced down to this great man theory of history that's easy to explain and to have a narrative around.

Zongjun · 42:04

Because when you actually learn Japanese tea ceremony lessons as a student, the way the school was structured is it's kind of an oral tradition. It used to be, it used to be. I think there's exceptions now, but I was, I remember being told by my instructors that you're not allowed to take notes during the lessons. So it's a completely experiential type learning. I mean, typically you're not allowed to ask questions. And I remember her telling, telling me she would go to lessons, she would really try to remember and repeat the steps over and the corrections that the teacher were making over and over her head.

Zongjun · 42:33

And on the subway ride home, she would like be jotting down notes endlessly to then study because she wasn't allowed to take them during the lessons. Zen Buddhism, the kind of. Practice, yes, extremely Zen, very not direct learning, much more experiential. You have to live it and when you have many instructors all over the world in different languages and or even before it spread internationally, you need to have easy to remember stories and narrative to tell your students. And it's actually something that we all kind of share. Anyone who's been through this training, kind of this one big family, we all sort of have

Ryan · 43:08

heard the same stories and philosophies. And it's actually a very beautiful thing. And something that was written in this book, Making Tea, Making Japan, is that if you compare it to other institutions, Chanoyu has even with all of this drama that we're talking about negative externalities has done remarkably little harm, but that you can directly point to it's largely benefit Japanese society and is actually relatively innocent.

Ryan · 43:32

So when we're criticizing it, we're very much criticizing it through the lens of the consumer. And but you know, we bounce back and forth and we've talked to tea ceremony practitioners on this podcast and really respect it and want to learn more about it.

Zongjun · 43:44

Actually, the single greatest barrier for promoting matcha as a specialty product is all of this quote UN quote cultural baggage, which isn't cultural baggage at all. It's like a lot of like Japaneseness and its philosophies and its aesthetics, etc. And you cannot understand how much it can evolve in the future without deeply understanding its past and understanding where all of this inertia comes from and why it exists. That no one wants to be the idiot in the room stumbling around with no context.

Zongjun · 44:15

So actually, in the Season 3 of this podcast, we want to do a lot more learning going back in time through Chanoyu history and tea history in Japan, but to better contextualize how the future can be made and to better understand why some of these barriers exist. Where do these poetic names come from? Where do these institutions come from? Where do all of these beliefs come from? But you know, calling it a baggage or calling it inertia, I think it's very context specific. It's a inertia when we are viewing matcha in the lens of the specialty product.

Ryan · 44:48

It's all of these cultural contact is essentially really inhibiting matcha being enjoyed and consumed as a specialty product in a lot of ways. But it's not a inertia or a baggage as a Japanese cultural element. Like it will exist and it will continue to exist.

Ryan · 45:06

I hope it will continue to exist into the future and make more people enjoy and be curious about Japanese culture as a whole. Yeah, and it can swing back. That's the second order effect. So really, a lot of these things can be true at the same time, depending on whether or not you look at it as a company and as a podcast and as a specialty movement. But we deeply care about the product quality itself and the consumer, and we're putting that before history and culture, at least in a primary sense of the word. All of these institutions and a lot of companies are doing great work spreading the direct

Zongjun · 45:42

culture itself. If you're interested in culture, don't enroll yourself into a tea ceremony school. But for everyone else, there's this huge vacuum which the specialty movement can fill and grow and ultimately swing back to these other people. And we think all of this online negativity and conflict comes from this misalignment.

Zongjun · 46:01

And people do not recognize that people are operating and prioritizing and optimizing for very different sets of context, ranging from the consumer to being a small, matcha business somewhere in the supply chain, the farmer, the farmer, big, small, medium, old, retiring, one that has no succession plan or the product itself and product quality, the ceremony and culture or the health and Wellness aspects of it or the environment. And that these things can both contradict each other or reinforce each other.

Ryan · 46:33

And when you put on the lens of time and cause and effect, maybe it's temporarily negative, but could then be very positive. Yep, and they will be forever intertwined with each other, and they might converge or diverge and hopefully converge again into the future. Yeah.

Zongjun · 46:48

So what do you care about? That's the That's a fine conclusion. I care about getting over from this podcast recording and get some dinner on green. Sounds good. Sounds good. So if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider sharing the friend and we'll see you on the next one.

Ryan · 47:06

See you. Thanks.