What is and was Uji 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 we're the Co founders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, Matcha, share startup stories and interview experts.

Ryan · 0:21

And today we're talking about what is and was Uji Matcha. And this is a little bit different. So last week, you would have heard the audio version of an article we've been working on for a very long time. We've been working in the research together.

Ryan · 0:36

And then I took the lead and putting it all in one article. And Zongjun just had a chance to read it. He made some mild edits. And this is an editorial conversation about this piece, what's in it. It's sort of our thoughts and how it kind of all came together. So if you haven't had a chance to listen to it or read it, I recommend that you do either in this podcast feed or also where we published it on Substack in a five part series. So Zongjun, what were your first impressions reading everything altogether in one place after we have for so long been kind of down this research quest at figuring out what Uji Matcha actually is, because it's a

Zongjun · 1:19

shockingly complicated questions. And in those complications, it's a pretty interesting story. After having gone to Uji for so many times, this piece really kind of weaved out of our findings and our discoveries altogether in a very coherent way, which is quite fascinating to read through in the 1st place and the second, it really made the whole mess feels like it's inevitable really.

Zongjun · 1:45

The the current status quo of Uji Matcha is really being constructed bit by bit in the past 200 years. That led to the state that just has so many dependencies on it that changing any bits or any components of this system will create a very severe kind of cascading effect onto a lot of other dependencies, farmers, makers, blend houses, consumers, politicians, and also people and businesses in other countries.

Ryan · 2:19

It's doing research for this piece just got me down so many rabbit holes. And the first rabbit hole that I think would be a good thing to talk about is so it actually it took us a decent amount of time to realize that Uji Matcha was a trademark. And that's let's talk about when you read Matcha and Uji Matcha literature online about people trying to promote it, there's 1000 different framings of it, so to speak. And actually the whole piece was largely motivated by an online argument I got into with someone who I won't mention here, who had a very different perspective than me. And I like could feel that he

Ryan · 2:54

was wrong based off of all of the conversations that we've had with so many people. I heard from three different times in three different places from people that I really trust. That Wazuka was never really a tencha town until very, very, very recently. And that's where I kind of discovered a year ago this broader Uji Matcha narrative where this so-called Yamashiro region, which I think is 6 or 8 different counties, I think it's eight across Uji, Ujitawara, Wazuka, Ide, Kyotanabe and some others as well that are part of this spin actually for UNESCO status.

Ryan · 3:34

And when you go and read the UNESCO status document, it is really interesting the way they frame it. There are several things. There is like different revisions of this UNESCO proposal to recognize the quote Uji Matcha landscape. And it's interesting how they kind of like fold themselves into a pretzel trying to unify this narrative. And that narrative actually doesn't agree with the legal recognized intellectual property status of the Uji Matcha trademark, which is much broader. And then there's like thousands of questions like why does this trademark exist?

Ryan · 4:13

Why does this exist the way that it does exist across four different prefectures, Nara, Shiga, Mie, and Kyoto. And then if you really dig online, but half of online sources say that it has to be 50% Kyoto grown tea. And then the other 50% can come from other regions and like figuring out who's who's right here and who's wrong.

Ryan · 4:37

This contradiction between trademark and you know, this whole concept about single origin and if certainties has to come from certain locations. And this very interesting piece of UNESCO document, which in the document it was not arguing about a location of tea being grown, it's arguing about a processing culture, a manufacturing culture that exist within a certain region.

Ryan · 5:09

So I think this contradiction is really the answer to a lot of questions. It did end up being an answer and actually ended up being part of the answer. I believe into why I had such a big disagreement with this one person online that was I was getting so heated that I was I was showing you these messages last year and you were like, dude, you've got to move this to DM.

Ryan · 5:31

Get this out of this poor guys comment section because the contradiction is is there such a thing called the Uji processing method? And the Uji processing method actually refers to sencha and the invention of sencha. And the sencha culture and tencha slash matcha culture are getting intertwined in these narratives.

Ryan · 5:56

So it's also very conveniently intertwined or intentionally blurred the boundary between ujicha and Uji Matcha. The sencha is definitely uji tea, right? Like it's it's tea. Yes, but weirdly enough, if you go even to this day and talk to any of the Uji matcha farmers, no one's growing sencha and Uji. In fact, I don't think anyone's really ever grown sencha and Uji.

Ryan · 6:23

It's gyokuro and it's it's tencha and there's we've only heard of one person growing actual sencha and the person who knew who it was wouldn't tell us the name of the farmer who was making it. We very respectfully said, OK, OK, I get it.

Zongjun · 6:42

It's dad to over there. We don't talk to him. It sounded more like I actually I didn't. I don't know why he couldn't tell us. So that part was a little unclear. Although if you go to Taishi San, the Shimizu family's cafe, everything that he sells at the cafe is actually Uji grown, including the sencha. And so if you are interested in actually tasting a tea that's more reflective of terroir and you want to taste actual uji sencha, you can you can buy it from from the his cafe. These two things get conflated.

Zongjun · 7:15

And I do believe that it's true that the Uji blend houses were sourcing material, in particular sencha, from the surrounding Yamashiro region. Yamashiro region is like trying to be thought of as this Ujicha UNESCO landscape.

Zongjun · 7:35

And by the way, it has not reached UNESCO status. I'm very curious why it has not been approved. Maybe it's because of all of this maneuvering and framing that clearly you have to contort yourself into a pretzel to make this all make sense, to understand it.

Zongjun · 7:50

And not not to praise the article too much, but I've never seen every this much context laid out in this way to truly rock what uji matcha actually means and all of its implications. Because Uji matcha is 100% made famous. Because the matcha.

Zongjun · 8:07

Yes, there's sencha and Uji sencha. Uji cha is very famous in Japan. But in terms of the international stage and presence and the way Japanese tea is presented to the world, it's matcha. And if you dig into the history of matcha under the history of Uji, you'll very quickly find that shaded cultivation was forbidden outside of people who had the license to make it.

Zongjun · 8:33

It was literally a state controlled monopoly for the majority of matcha's history, especially during the foundations of what we call like tea ceremony chanoyu. And it was, it was very, very much controlled by the state. At the time there was this system called the Ochasis San Nakanoma, which is a formalized legal system that's inclusive of three types of chashi who were at the time the only people that were allowed to use shaded cultivation.

Zongjun · 9:06

And under them there, there were couple gardens associated with these chashis and they will be growing tea using shaded cultivation and then procure those tea and then turn that into tencha and then you know, milled it into matcha for the shogunate. And it was under this system too that all of these were very much supported directly by this feudal system, The economy of the matcha, the way the money flowed and the way the politics were arranged.

Zongjun · 9:34

It really feels like a very oligopic state controlled monopoly system where if you did have the license you could carry a sword. You had tax incentives when you had some degree of social status. So at one time it was truly indeed a single origin product because it was literally forbidden elsewhere supposedly and we had trouble finding any primary sources to validate this. So it didn't make it in the piece. But as the Edo era was declining, it's unclear if producers started to do shaded cultivation and push further and further and further outside of Uji itself, and so that part of the history is a little fuzzy.

Zongjun · 10:18

I've read from a few articles mentioning about this class called the Hira-chashi. So the the commoner's chashi which was granted also granted permission to do shaded cultivation during the late Edo era. The number of those chashis and the amount of those tea being produced and also the region where those Hira-chashis were was very unclear. Very unclear.

Zongjun · 10:46

And then like you can dig into a little bit longer, like a little bit deeper too, about when some of these companies that are still exist to this day, like in Joyo, for example. And Joyo is very, very, very close to Uji, especially in terms of climate too. It's it's also sits sort of in this River Valley. And they were very, very, very early too, I think like early Meiji, but potentially even earlier. But it's really hard to exactly pinpoint when this started to branch out.

Zongjun · 11:16

But you can actually look at the history and look at the politics and it's unlikely it was branching out that much because there was very little incentive. So imagine like during the Renaissance you had all of this patron of the arts model can imagine like the Medici family in Venice, you know, they paid the artists and let's say the Medici family had a couple different like some families and he had lots of aunts and uncles, whatever. Each had their own little domain and each were able to patronize different artists.

Ryan · 11:44

In this case, very similar type of model going on here. And now just imagine that like the Medici family and this very feudal system just evaporates overnight. The money stops flowing and when the money stop flowing, the artists starve. And when the artists.

Ryan · 11:59

Starve. They make great arts. They've got to pursue different professions and a lot of tea companies during the Meiji Restoration went out of business. They literally lost the money stopped flowing, they lost their ability to sell and create products and tencha volumes dropped precipitously.

Ryan · 12:20

And it wasn't until later on that sort of the quote UN quote great men of the Meiji era, the the railroad barons, the steel tycoons, Japan went through a pretty Western style industrialization. And those barons looked to quote, UN quote, great man of Japan's past, and it started incorporating tea into their lives.

Zongjun · 12:41

Yeah, but let's rewind the time a little bit back, back to the days of the Ocha-shi's. There could not really be that many teas being produced elsewhere that's further away from Uji because at the time that was the population center of Japan of all those tea growing regions.

Zongjun · 12:59

And there was a very, very important factor that impacts the production of matcha even to this date is super relevant. But the source of that factor changed over time. So what was the source this? Was one of the most interesting rabbit holes and doing research for this piece and we had been made aware of this. Actually.

Zongjun · 13:18

Aaron from Yunomi is very good friends with someone that comes from an Uji matcha family and her father wrote one of the books on tea. And she was telling us that back in the day that they used human feces as fertilizer.

Zongjun · 13:33

And I'd heard that one or two other places and it just kind of stuck in the back of my head. And then I came across a fantastic talk, an article by a Harvard historian about so-called night soil. And night soil is just a polite way of saying human excrement or poop.

Zongjun · 13:50

And there was a whole economy and Edo era Japan around buying and selling, aggregating literally human feces that were used in the surrounding areas to fertilize it. And he actually mentions Uji matcha farmers and how they specifically like to at least for the best and oldest trees that they had. And that was a very interesting use of words to from the best and oldest trees, you know, from these zairai plants that were in Japan's past were were this idea of a old tree being better is something we also kind of want to dig into further because nowadays the Uji matcha farmers have a very short lifespan for that tree.

Zongjun · 14:32

You feed it lots of fertilizer, you treat it like a performance athlete, and then that athlete retires. And in this case, it's a very special type of retirement called being replaced and uprooted. That was super interesting to read in.

Zongjun · 14:46

These Uji matcha farmers for the best trees wanted to source human excrement from very specific neighborhoods in Kyoto where the diet of the the people who were living there would be much more protein rich, much higher quality feces.

Zongjun · 15:02

And what's super interesting is something that I kind of connected the dots on is there's a big problem with using fish as fertilizer and that salt residues. And apparently there was a bit of a mix of demand. Believe it or not, urine was also bought and sold during the Edo period. And the rights to urine were very important. And apparently an Edo, which is the the old word for, for Tokyo, urine was not very desired.

Zongjun · 15:25

It was not nearly as desired as as feces. But in Osaka, apparently urine was much, much more in demand and went for much higher prices. And I don't have, I don't know if this is true, but one of my theories is that the crops that they were growing in and around Osaka might be more salt tolerant because the way salt leaves the body is it gets filtered out by the kidneys and you end up urinating it up.

Zongjun · 15:52

So when you think of pest, when you think of salt residues based on different fertilizer types, fertilizing with urine probably leads to much more salt contamination in the soil. Or maybe it's that those soils around Osaka have better drainage and the salt was just able to eventually leak versus more clay soil types, which probably have higher salt retention. It'd be really interesting to understand why, but there's such a genius to using human feces and because if you're just putting fish in the ground one, it's very wasteful. Fish is still very good to eat if you're just purely using it as fertilizer, but you're

Ryan · 16:27

essentially running a biological desalination process when you filter it through human digestion. Yeah, it's fascinating. If you look at the map of all of these so-called Yamashiro region in the modern days, Uji is really the tea production area that's closest to Kyoto, which you know, from a anthropological perspective made Uji the most relevant place for matcha production historically.

Ryan · 16:55

And we heard that too from Oscar Breckel. We had a pre call with Oscar Breckel before we had him on the podcast. And I wish we recorded that pre call, but he was making some speculation as well. One of the reasons that Uji Matcha, just by happenstance, ended up producing such fantastic matcha was it's very close proximity to a population center.

Zongjun · 17:16

Because Uji was always an interesting town, because it had temples, you know, there was other things going on in Uji. Yeah, Byodo-in the famous temple used to be the House of Damians throughout centuries, so it has always been a cultural kind of heritage site for the Japanese.

Zongjun · 17:35

And supposedly too, because of its unique geographic positioning, the cold airs apparently more likely to sink to the need to protect your farms or your your your crops from frost. It might just be a geographic coincidence that these tana structures, these honzu shaded, these shading structures were, were much more necessary in this River Valley than they would be even in a place like Wazuka, which is much more mountainous. And the way that the air flows and the way that the cold air settles protects the tea much more than it does right next to the river as that cold air sinks. So it might actually be a just

Zongjun · 18:18

happenstance, geographical coincidence, geographical accident. The necessity of shade cultivation was first used for or frost protection and then they realized that it tasted good, which is pretty cool when you go back to learn about Uji. And that was also something that didn't make it in the article, as it's a little bit more speculation. Yeah, super interesting.

Zongjun · 18:39

I mean, a lot of the modern practices and the modern status of matcha really has a lot of historical roots connecting back to what and how matcha was produced back in the days. I'm also wondering how do they, because like people still use fish to fertilize their tea gardens nowadays?

Zongjun · 18:59

How do they like, desalinate all those fish being used in their garden nowadays? I don't know. They must. That's a good question. It'll be a good question to ask the next time we go back. I would also love to know about the historical transition from night soils fertilizer to all the fertilizers that they're using nowadays in Uji and across the tea agricultural, the agriculture in general in Japan. Pretty interesting.

Zongjun · 19:26

I highly recommend everyone watch or read the article from from this Harvard historian on night soil and Edo. I mean, it's not unfair to say that it was one of the most sophisticated circular economies ever. Even today, just the level of recycling that's going on, at least in the food system. It's almost disturbing to think of that the same households that were consuming the matcha, which were primarily the wealthy and the more elite class, were literally fertilizing it with their own excrement.

Zongjun · 19:57

And they can. Zoom them back. Talk about the cycle of life. And just to put some color on it, if you don't end up watching the talk or reading the article, there were literally contracts in place from large households, you know, granting permission or selling the household waste to go to people like this is something they literally set up contracts and it was such an important part and it's such a well integrated system into. Japanese history is that before is that during the war, you know, a lot of the chemicals, especially nitrogen for to create explosives and bombs etcetera, gunpowder during World War 2, you know, you couldn't

Zongjun · 20:34

just use synthetically generated nitrogen as easily for for fertilizer. So that was actually very easy for Japan's agriculture to switch back to this night soil. It started to become a little bit more unpopular in the beginning of the 20th century, became worth less and less and less as Japan industrial realized and after the dismantling of the feudal system.

Zongjun · 20:56

But during World War 2 they needed to revert back to it because it which wasn't enough nitrogen to grow the crops. They need to prioritize for the weapon. But it was a real economy. It was a very real economy of buying and selling. And you typically sold your household's waste and then someone would come pick it up.

Zongjun · 21:14

Love to know like if there are receipts for this, if there's any industry that has receipts for human waste, I feel like would be the Uji tea farmers and the transition and the history of fertilization practice of the 20th century would be so interesting. You know, we all think that when we're drinking Uji matcha, we're tasting heritage and something deeply rooted and very traditional.

Zongjun · 21:37

Authentic modern Uji matcha farming is the perfect encapsulation of a living culture, a living art and adaptive culture where you have different agents, different participants with their own agency that are moving everything forward the best they can.

Zongjun · 21:55

There's still some hand picking, there's still some honzu shaded, but everyone's converted to cultivars. That has such an enormous impact, right? Because when you're using seed propagated tea, you have large degrees of genetic diversity, which means not all the tea is ready at the same time, which has so many secondary and tertiary implications or operations of farming.

Zongjun · 22:14

When it gets it's picked, how it gets picked, how it gets batched, how it gets processed, how it gets blended, how it gets valued right even now, like you can think of like different Okumidori rates or Samidori rates or yabukita rates as commodity rates that can be aggregated and compare prices.

Zongjun · 22:33

How do you compare prices of of different batches of zairai depending on what it's picked in, its taste characteristics, the level of intimacy you have to have. That is such a massive change, and that change happened in the 20th century. Also, the way that these things are getting fertilized nowadays, you never hear of anyone using human feces to fertilize. They're using fish, rapeseed, oil byproducts, sesame seed byproducts, all sorts of things.

Zongjun · 22:59

Soybean byproducts. Sugar cane byproducts. Oyster shells. Oyster shells, it's such a interesting part. How did that transition happen? That's also, is it more expensive now than it used to be? That's that's another really interesting question. So even within the 20th century, in the past 100 years, the OOGEE monitors changed drastically.

Zongjun · 23:19

You are tasting heritage, but it's not the heritage that you probably have in your mind. The tea probably tasted very, very, very different even 70 years ago, before for the move to Xairi or 50 years ago. Yeah, well, you're basically tasting human behaviors and human choices, human intervention of the piece of the crops that's growing on a piece of land and which I think strengthened the argument of Fuji tea being more like a Uji style tea, Wuji styled matcha instead of a Wuji cha. And if this practice is being executed elsewhere that's outside of Wuji proper, calling that Wuji style TI think will still be validated.

Ryan · 24:00

It's it it is a piece of culture being it the name is essentially a piece of culture, a piece of farming guidelines that that that kind of gets gets crystallized over time. But if you are doing that, practicing it in other places, you know, calling it Wuji style matcha, I think it's totally valid. So Sam, if you look at the numbers and this was the earliest part of my research, I really was curious how much tea is actually grown in Uji today.

Ryan · 24:29

And it turns out it's about 37 tons, or at least it was in 2024. And which to put it into perspective, that's about two to 3% of all the tension that's produced in Kyoto. And then even more so if you account for all the tension that you can find that was produced that year and other tea prefectures, it represents about 1 to 2% by volume. But like, you know, you know, Uji is a single origin product is actually very, very, very rare. And where I take offense to people's argument is that, you know, so much of the stuff gets labeled as a single origin product because when you looked at the Japanese tea wholesalers price list, it says Uji Macha,

Ryan · 25:12

Uzi, Uji Macha, Kagoshima Macha, Kagoshima Macha, Shizuoko Macha, Shizuoko Macha, Nishio Macha, etcetera. And almost all of those are probably actual single origin products and Uji Macha definitely is not. And then you ask like, where is it from?

Zongjun · 25:30

Like usually you don't get a straightforward. Answer yeah, it's a sad reality in the way that Uji is just too small. It's tiny compared to these other, you know, quote UN quote single origin place that you mentioned, like Kagoshima and Shizuoka.

Zongjun · 25:45

They just naturally have more landmass to a support a higher volume. But whereas Uji like even for the amount of tea or gardens we see today, still shrinking. It's a sadly very urbanized, pristine towa. We saw highways cutting through tea gardens.

Zongjun · 26:04

We saw houses being built right next to some of the oldest tea fields in the city. And not to mention it's called Uji City. It's a city pretty far away from what you would envision as like something or some place that makes the best tea or some of the most priced tea in the world nowadays. Yeah, actually.

Ryan · 26:25

It just goes to show how much human effort is actually making it taste good. I mean, we were talking with someone in the industry and they were joking saying oh, you mean highway tea, referring to UG tea. And it's unfortunately very true.

Ryan · 26:40

There are very few of these plots in actual uji that don't look like highway tea. They generally don't make a very good picture. But that's just the realities of urbanization. It doesn't mean that the tea is actually bad. If terroir mattered, Uji probably wouldn't. Yeah, that's just another evidence of tawa really doesn't matter for tea or like geographic tawa doesn't really matter for matcha at all, I would say. And what what really should be considered is the human part of this equation, like human human culture and human intervention should be part of this TOA concept when it comes to matcha. 100% So Sam, if you are trying

Zongjun · 27:22

to source teas with Origin and you're putting out educational content and you're trying to make the claim, Wazuka tea, wazuka cha, Wazuka macha is uji cha. Do you agree with this claim? Well I mean goes back to how do we define uji cha right? Like wuji style tea or tea prone from uji. I think that the definition really really needs to be clarified before we have any kind of discussions like this. For me I would say that uji tea really equals to uji style tea in modern days.

Zongjun · 27:58

And calling Watsuka tea, watsuka macha, uji styled matcha. I think it's totally valid. What about uji Matcha? That's a single origin. Product, but geographically. If I'm making the claim was zuka matcha is uji cha and I'm labeling everything as a single origin product, is that intellectually honest or dishonest?

Zongjun · 28:21

Yeah, I think that's dishonest. I mean what what doesn't wasn't producing any attention to I think the 80 in to to the late 80s. I think that they had the the first tension kill. So historically now, but if you put into the perspective of how Wuji Cha is operating as a system in the modern days, all of these surrounding regions are basically contractors of plant houses and manufacturer in, you know, in Wuji or they follow a Wuji style of making tea, which, you know, kind of extended this definition beyond its geographic origin. So that's more of a complicated question and the conversation that we'll probably we'll talk

Ryan · 29:07

about in depth for the next episode. But, but, but for what? You asked Ryan, I think it's dishonesty if we call Watsuka T Ujita. So this was a big rabbit hole that I went down and I was like, just so curious. And I use Wazooka as a great example of like one of these surrounding Yamashiro towns.

Ryan · 29:29

And like trying to unpack, is there a legitimate claim that this is Uji, right? Like were the Ochashi's and Edo sourcing Tansha from Wazooka? When did they start producing Tansha? When did this start getting the you know, part of the broader Uji ecosystem?

Ryan · 29:47

And Wazooka didn't have a kill him until the late 80s. And then it's very obvious when you look at the one of the so-called shocks in matcha was the Haagen Dazs shock. It was in the late 90s, Haagen Dazs placed a massive order and basically outbid everyone at auction and the price went up by an incredible amount that year. It's still referred to as the Hagen Shock and David from Tazumi has done a really nice job documenting this as well. And there's a there's a blog that you can find by a Japanese author that was actually there, whose family dates back to the Edo period in the tea industry, who is at that auction. And he's a really interesting

Ryan · 30:32

first hand, first hand account that's worth looking into. And he himself said one of the reasons that was Zuka was able to succeed so, so drastically was because, quote, it can be sold as Uji matcha. So, you know, this Hagen shock really led to an explosion across was Zuka.

Ryan · 30:49

Now was Zuka accounts for 40% slightly more actually of all the tension produced in Kyoto Prefecture and actually a very large part of it is a second harvest tea and this is actually is going to be a separate topic. A future blog post is that the history of second harvest matcha is fascinating.

Ryan · 31:08

Second harvest matcha, like the idea of first harvest matcha is a very modern concept. And if you look at the history, it wasn't really, no one was really doing it until Nishio and it was actually the history of Nishio. The more I learned about it, it's fascinating, the history of Nishio. And basically, I think it's in the 50s, they basically learned they just couldn't compete with Uji for the tea ceremony practitioners.

Ryan · 31:32

So they decided to lean really heavily into matcha as a food processing ingredient. And actually it was because they couldn't compete with Uji in the Uji name that they decided to be a lot more experimental. A lot of these innovations were were coming out of Nishio, and then they spread.

Ryan · 31:51

And one of them was the idea of a second harvest. And then realizing, oh, actually, you know, the increased bitterness and the astringency actually kind of makes it suitable for confectionery. And not only that, we can make it much, much, much cheaper.

Ryan · 32:07

And they had less cultural baggage. Most people were actually handpicking tea in Uji and the surrounding areas like Wazuka until the 60s and 70s until the scissor style harvesters were were were brought in to have larger degrees of mechanization. But second harvest tea literally would not have been profitable without that level of mechanization. You can't have a hand product second harvest and have it be a commercially viable.

Ryan · 32:35

So there's a whole set of conditions that were happening in Nishio that led to this idea of Second Harvest and that later did spread to Wazuka. So all of these people talking about the difference between 1st and 2nd Second Harvest and Wazuka is a really, really, really modern concept.

Ryan · 32:50

And it clearly followed the money. And Wazuka switched to Tencha because it can be sold as Uji matcha. And it became very profitable to do so largely from the creation of new markets that were really pioneered in Nishio of promoting matcha as a culinary ingredient.

Zongjun · 33:08

Really fascinating history which we want to cover later on. Ryan, here is a piece of interesting thought experiment about the idea of single origin as a concept that's geographic. So Nishio tried and failed, arguably based on the reality there's only one success story so far is Uji, and everyone is very conveniently taking this right.

Zongjun · 33:37

But my question is, could the matcha community or the current market support another geographic brand? Because these places are essentially brand brand names, so people will associate with a type of product. Like if anyone in the future is going to try to build another brand, they need to basically go through what Uji has gone through in a lot of ways unless they find a different solution.

Ryan · 34:07

Yeah. So what Sam's referring to is that Nishio at one time had GI status where it was very geographically restricted about where they can source tea from to be called Nishio Matcha, had GI indication, had indication for about 5 years and then they formally requested to withdraw.

Ryan · 34:25

But. They asked to be removed. Because it was no longer profitable. They were I'll competed on price by two to three times. And you know, is there space for GI protection? So I don't know. There's only one other tea in Japan that has GI protection and it's Yame Gyokuro and I think it's labeled traditional authentic Yame Gyokuro.

Ryan · 34:48

And even that GI protection is a little weird because you can find a lot of Yame Gyokuro that's non GI. What is the difference between traditional authentic Yame Gyokuro I think is the full name and just Yame Gyokuro is really weird. You don't really see the GI protected stuff very often. When you do, it's extremely expensive. I mean like I bet that will happen to any other GI GIS in the future.

Zongjun · 35:19

If one day Uji got a GI status, it will be like authentic premium Honzu matcha Uji and has a little label on the package and versus all the other Uji cha that will still probably exist in the market that just doesn't have the label on.

Ryan · 35:37

Yeah, yeah. That just doesn't have the little GI protection and everything else is Uji matcha. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. The GI protection thing is, you know it's a system that largely works in Europe and in other places. It depends on what you're protecting right? Are you we protecting these farmers? There's only 35 ish active farmers in Uji. Are they worth protecting?

Zongjun · 36:01

More than probably thousands of tea farmers that can ride off of the Uji name is a really great question. Yeah, it's, I think, I think there's no good answer to to that question. And honestly, I think that the current Uji name is supporting so many lives, so many families, so many businesses that, you know, like confining that into a very small town that's South of Kyoto is essentially could be catastrophic to the matcha industry nowadays.

Zongjun · 36:37

It's essentially a brand that people spent generations of efforts trying to build, and they finally reach to its current status. And now people are making a profit for it. And they are actually trying so hard to do so because, you know, Japan is the shrinking population. They're less and less farmers every year. And it's, it's there will be less and less people to make the endeavor.

Ryan · 37:04

Like building a new brand is hard. It's very difficult. Yeah. And it's interesting to go back and read the old histories about how this trademark even happened. The trademark is pretty recent. It's from the early 2000s that this trademark actually existed. And I spent a lot of research, time and energy trying to figure out what was Uji matcha before the trademark in the early 2000s, in the 90s?

Ryan · 37:29

Like, was it the Wild West, or was it approximately the same system that we had now? And why in 2000 before did they decide to make the trademark in the 1st place? So or, excuse me, 2003 or 2004? And what happened was, is there was a gigantic food labeling scandal in the early thousands where tons of Australian grown beef were being fraudulently mislabeled as Japanese beef and the government wanted to formalize food labeling standards.

Ryan · 38:02

And this is a, this is a huge problem in so many industries. Japanese wine, I think it's 80% of Japanese wine has foreign imported grape or grape must or grape juice as a base. And that's was legally allowed to be labeled as Japanese wine until about like, I think it's like 2014 or something or 2018 to really recent. That's funny where they put in this law because most Japanese wine did not, and this is for a product where terroir really matters.

Zongjun · 38:31

I mean, that also happened to Japanese whiskeys. Really. Yeah. They were importing Scottish malt barley and then they they germinate them in Japan and turn that. Oh, they did the malting. They did the malting in Japan, but they were importing the Scottish barley in the beginning. I don't know if they switched that model to domestic barley nowadays or they're still importing the Japanese Scottish malt.

Ryan · 39:00

OK, so big. Well, it's a big problem in other countries too, let's be honest. But essentially there was a basic food labeling law, and all these industries were kind of scrambling to regulate themselves before they were going to be regulated.

Ryan · 39:13

At Uji City Hall, they convened basically a conference to try to define what Uji matcha was. In a stroke of what could be argued a strategic genius, they decided to make it very vague. At first, they demanded that it has to be 50% Kyoto grown tencha and then up to 50% from the four-prefecture region being Nara, Shiga and Mie.

Ryan · 39:35

And there wasn't enough consensus. It didn't pass. It was determined that there's not enough volume in Kyoto itself and that they needed to make it more broad. And first it was entirely a voluntary standard, and then it got cemented into IP rules, which led to that modern definition.

Ryan · 39:52

But it was actually a beef labeling scandal that forced them. And you could say that it's almost legal fraud. There is an argument to be made that instead of being more honest and being more specific about where your tea came from, or admitting that it was a blend, they decided to make the category

Ryan · 40:13

just much more vague. They decided to cast a wider net to have larger amounts of safety rather than a more narrow net that's more intellectually honest. And the reality is most consumers, even in Japan, when they buy Uji matcha, they believe that they're tasting place. There are so many blog posts and drone footage and history lectures and all sorts of stuff mythologizing Uji matcha, Uji matcha, the history of Uji matcha, the heritage, the craftsmanship, etcetera, etcetera. In the consumer's mind, it is very reasonable to state that they are being misled and all of these marketing materials are misleading people into believing

Ryan · 40:56

that they are tasting something that is from this very historic place just south of Kyoto. And the reality is if you drink a fantastically well produced tea that's a blend of tea from Joyo, Wazuka and Ujitawara, the reason why it tastes good has nothing to do with the tiny patch of earth south of Kyoto that we call Uji. It was those farmers, it was the fertilizers, it was the processing knowledge and skill.

Ryan · 41:26

And this reduction of the reason why this can is good, that you bought the only attribution of the effort and why that can is different than matcha from other places is the name Uji. It gets reduced into these this two syllable word and it totally misattributes the quality. And we have gone so far down this Uji matcha bandwagon, but it's reached the point of dogma that the entire consumer base has been miseducated to believe that's that's why that matcha is good.

Ryan · 42:05

Or even more extreme example, let's move prefectures. Tea that was grown entirely in Nara, processed in Kyoto, not in Uji. The reason why that tea is good is because of the farmer and the processors, not Uji. Uji people or place didn't even have to touch the tea.

Ryan · 42:23

So if we're just talking about processing knowledge and culture, that can happen anywhere. You hear stories of farmers from Kagoshima coming up to do like a residency and shadowing people in Uji and taking those techniques home, right? Then if you're using this as your basis for your argument that it's the processing knowledge and culture, it could be done in China.

Ryan · 42:46

There is an Uji matcha house that set up in Hubei, China, not about four hours from Wuhan, right? They're bringing Japanese cultivars, Japanese processing equipment, Japanese knowledge, even Japanese people to come help manage this product. It's owned by the Japanese.

Ryan · 43:05

So like you, and we're going to get into this more next episode, but this, this narrative of the broader Uji matcha definition and what is it and what it's not, has a lot of hypocrisies if you think through the implications of the arguments that are actually being made by people trying to sell you this product.

Zongjun · 43:27

Yeah, it's, it's complicated. And I think the fault really largely lies on the marketers of the product because the system itself is not organic, adaptive and quite sustainable. But what is being the center of the contradiction is really the consumer's interpretation of the origin of a place of a product versus what the product actually is.

Zongjun · 43:55

And that misinterpretation or the miscommunication really happened when the definition of the product was being communicated. And that happened when the consumer starts to read labels on a product. There's nothing essentially wrong behind everyone that end up getting the product into consumers head.

Zongjun · 44:18

I will argue that and I will also say that it's really a clash between concepts of place of origin between the East and the West because like you kind of see this kind of naming scheme in other places too, in not only just Japan, but but also China. Like Pu'er, for example, Pu'er refers to a place in Yunnan. It's a city.

Zongjun · 44:41

It's the trading center of Yunnan tea at the time. And calling all Pu'er Pu'er, you're basically calling like it's it's basically like you're calling like Uji tea, Uji tea, Uji cha. It's not actually from Pu'er, and the tea is actually, not actually from Uji, but Pu'er kind of evolves into a style of tea later on, a concept the name of a very distinctive and regional taste on the map versus, you know, like right now there's still a very tight association between Uji matcha and the city of Uji, which is the, you know, the origin of, of modern matcha.

Ryan · 45:19

What do you think? I totally agree with you and you know it's not even something unique to Pu'er. You even look at things like Liubao, that's also the name of a place. Yeah, you can. You can see a lot of similarities between Uji and these places, and I think Uji is uniquely complicated in the way that because like when talking about Pu'er, right, when you say Pu'er, everyone knows you're referring to that tea you'll need. A category.

Ryan · 45:48

A category. You don't need to specify Pu'er like tea, cake or Pu'er. Like you can call it Pu'er cha, but like people oftentimes just drop the name cha, just call it Pu'er. But you cannot call like Uji matcha, just Uji, that that that name has not yet been disassociated from the product itself.

Ryan · 46:09

And also like historically it it has been the actual region that produced that specific type of tea where a poor was just a trading port, trading Center for for all you know, the tea being grown in the surrounding regions.

Ryan · 46:25

So it's similar, but not entirely the same. And I really don't have a good answer to to this question, but but you know, like if in a parallel universe, poor tea was indeed being growned in the poor city and now there's a group of people arguing that, you know, like the poor tea being probably grown in poor is the real poor. Like that.

Ryan · 46:51

That is a legitimate like argument, right? Like if you put a modern concept or modern frame onto it. But that's like that. That concept didn't exist in the past. You know what's interesting is that none of this was a problem until the Uji Macha families in Uji started selling their product as a single origin product. The the the frontiers of this, because then what happens is let's say you're an early company. Let's use Kettle as an example.

Ryan · 47:20

Kettle was a very early player in Uji, meeting these Uji Macha families for the first time. As Zach Mungen has documented in his book, Let's say he's the first Westerner to really come in and have a major brand to sell it as a single origin product. I don't know if that's true, but let's say for the case of this argument that that's true.

Ryan · 47:40

Now you have a product on the market that's actually from Uji and it gets communicated let's say through sub region like Shirakawa or Gokasho, etcetera. And now all of a sudden you have this weird example and the way you market it is, it's actually from that place. Well then it leads you to wonder what about everything else? And that whoever did that first broke this whole system. Because if single true single origin Uji matcha didn't exist, it's it's much more like poor.

Ryan · 48:17

And it would have been actually intellectually more honest because all of the material would have gone to the blend houses and it all gets blended out and everything that's available, that's Ujimatcha is this heritage of blending from all of these other places. And you could still argue it's a modern definition, But these Uji blend houses grew, they started sourcing material from other places.

Ryan · 48:41

They work with those farmers, right? And everything just got blended together and everything was controlled and part of that culture. But the moment that this broke was the single estate idea of these farmers gathering agency and wanting to sell it as a single estate tea. And how is it possible that these two things can commingle now?

Ryan · 49:03

Because it leads to this article like two or three years ago. I was so confused the. Idea of single origin is just so new to everyone. It's a introduced concept into a very old system, and now part of the the system is all of a sudden being accusatory to the rest of the system.

Ryan · 49:24

It's more there's every incentive. If you're sourcing true, a single, single estate matcha that was actually grown in Uji, you can sell it for a higher price. It's a more interesting story. You can highlight that farmers practices that actually made it good. You shine a gigantic light actually on what truly makes that can of Hanzu Asahi good versus, you know, buying hatsumukashi from, you know, some random blend house, right? It gives it dimensionalizes it in such a rich way. You know, people in China do have a solution to this in some area.

Zongjun · 50:03

It's the idea of Jungshan, the original mountain basically. So whatever a tea gets famous for example, like Wu Yan Cha or like even some sub regions in Junan or Lao Banjang, right? Like it gets, it flows to all of the surrounding regions because it's just like Muji. Like people making the tea in that style, using that type of a certain type of cultivar will naturally yield a very unique taste that can be sold for a higher price in the market. It's mixed total economical sense, right? And what happened is that, you know, instead of blocking everyone from calling themselves that tea, the people from the actual region origin just called

Zongjun · 50:49

themselves the, the, the Jungshan tea, the, the original mountain tea. And like you, you see, you know, the, the, the Jungshan and sometimes it's called and sometimes you call Jung Yan or whatever. This whole like kind of Jungshan system really in a way helped the production of that tea in the area being more sustainable and everyone can become prospered together, but at the same time protected the name of the original place.

Ryan · 51:16

This is a fantastic comparison because it just goes again to show just how processed Uji, matcha and matcha is in general. Poor processing typically involves some sun drying, some shashing on a walk, you know, then eventually and and even later it can be steamed, impressed somewhere else, it doesn't even matter. So the creation of the crude poor or the malcha, it's much less capital intensive and it's much much much cheaper to process internally.

Ryan · 51:49

Now imagine that place has all these blend houses that have so much money to make by increasing their supply from other regions. UGI is so weirdly particular because the farmers don't control their own processing. It's either from a Co-op or they're using someone else's equipment.

Ryan · 52:06

Honestly, they can't go from the agriculture to close to a finished product entirely on their own. It's too expensive and it requires the systematic support of the local ecosystem to bring that tea to life, to bring the matcha to life. It could be amazing and then you do see some farmers. I think to our knowledge, I think Suji San has very largely integrated his operations and has quite a bit more control over the end processing of his tea. But there's, I don't think there's actually any others that have that level of vertical integration in going from agriculture to a finished can of matcha that's ready to sell. And maybe even parts of his

Ryan · 52:48

processing are outsourced, although we're not sure. We do know he recently got a bunch of mills and then he's able to do his own shiage. So that's interesting. And you see some fibers exercising more and more of this agency. There is no coincidence that this idea of hand sorting tea, you see the Furakawa Secha doing it, you see Hori Shimayan doing it and you see some others of where there's literally a group of people going to with chopsticks doing this competition grade tea hand sorting it using this very old method.

Ryan · 53:15

Those tea cell for very high-priced, but it's also something to have agency over. Can't be really done on very large commercial scales. But it's interesting that you're starting to see it. You know, I just think it's another evidence of the fact that Uji matcha is so much more processed and then you get into the even bigger arguments.

Zongjun · 53:33

Does it even matter? Like you know it doesn't, And if you know if it tastes good and you like it, it kind of doesn't matter. But it does matter if you care about attributing success to what actually makes it good, or to learning about it. Yeah, it's it also comes down to collect because like if this you know like segmentation of refinery of what a product actually is will really only benefit the consumers because they can have a more interesting consumption experience and will only really eventually benefiting that's the farmers. So the manufacturers when the product can be sold for a higher price and they can get a higher

Zongjun · 54:18

premium. Otherwise, it really doesn't help anyone other than the consumers. And for the farmers, you know, the question will be like, why bother? Why do I need to do so much work telling like all these things to consumers that are 10s of thousands of kilometers away that you know, I have never met, that I probably don't care about that much?

Ryan · 54:42

Yeah. Why do I have to go through all the rigmarole of explaining why this process is great and demonstrating the exact number of days shaded, exactly what I did for fertilizer? Like, it's just, you know, it's not an open culture to begin with.

Zongjun · 54:57

Yeah, it's not the numbers of shading. The numbers of days of shading also can vary a lot from year to year depending on the climate, the weather. And there's fear of being misinterpreted. Yeah. What if you have a bunch of Karens on the Internet saying, oh, you shaded 23 days last year, now it's 21. Why is that?

Ryan · 55:15

Must be worse. Then you have to like be in the, think through a lot of defensive position. Well, actually it was raining and we could, we had to pick it earlier because of the weather forecast. You know, you just don't know.

Zongjun · 55:30

Yeah, it's complicated. But ultimately, I think the difference between a commodity product and a specialty product is having interchangeable components. And I think the idea of matcha as a specialty product has so much benefit to farmers in the long term by creating a new market of people that do have that nuance and are willing to pay a higher price for a more transparent product in a more rich experience. Understanding really the closer to objective truths about what this is versus buying into this marketing vortex of Uji matcha. Well, we are not advocating for like people to sell tea more expensive in the future, but I

Zongjun · 56:14

guess we are advocating for brand owners or, you know, tea or bulk buyers that you know, it will be really beneficial for the whole community, for the whole industry if the profit can also be cascaded down to the farmers level, like let the farmers see the money. This is going to be a profitable path. Show them that, you know, this could be the future. And it's not just economic incentivization, but also at the same time, it's a confidence for them to to be willing to work for more innovative practices like investment of new equipments, investment of doing, you know, more organic, you know, fertilization practice.

Ryan · 56:58

All of these practices and investments and innovations requires a financial buffer for them to be willing to take the risk. Now, as consumers and as business owners, it's part of our job to actually think through these incentive cycles, whereas safety, like how are we going to get to a higher price? Can we create a culture of people willing to pay more for a better product because they happen to know a lot more about the product that they're buying and the preferences that they have based off of a transparent label, the cultivar, the processing, the fertilizer, or some unique process that you're doing, whether or not using a

Ryan · 57:37

certain piece of equipment. In Nagasaki, there are people who are using pan frying and steaming simultaneously. That's resulting in some very interesting flavors. It's about creating these incentive feedback loops to get people to break out of their bubble instead of selling their tea as a commodity to get blended into something that's called Uji matcha, right? It's, it's kept out the, the evidence of humanity, the proof of life is in the tea.

Zongjun · 58:04

Yeah, the human story, the human component of matcha, which arguably is really the essence of matcha, is all about human intervention that, as you say, Ryan, gets missed. And its spirit is much closer. And everyone listening to the podcast, I think actually really has a moral obligation to do so and to take interest in these because the Japanese tea industry is in structural decline from its traditional practitioner base. The number of people practicing tea ceremony die every year. And these people who are in kimono practicing chanoyu everyday are not the consumers that are willing to pay more for a better product that is

Zongjun · 58:44

transparently sourced with verified provenance. They don't know if you talk to tea ceremony practitioners, they don't know what cultivars are. They're not interested in the agriculture right there, but this market for understanding and appreciating what actually makes quality tea, which are the humans that are involved in this process, lives entirely outside the scope of chanoyu.

Zongjun · 59:10

And largely what's going to be the only growing part of this market is in its foreign audience and with the matcha boom that we've experienced. That's the sad status quo, but they could be interested in it. If you are part of the chanoyu community, we really encourage you to also talk about it too with your peers. Yes, like like you guys are have been the largest buyer from matcha historically and will be a very important buyer of matcha into in the future.

Zongjun · 59:41

And chanoyu community can make such a influential impact on the matcha industry if we all work together for a common goal. Yeah, of not just buying a commodity with interchangeable parts that are given some poetic. Yeah, ask your sense of what the cultivar is of that matcha like sense of my go back, you know, to their senses and you know this. Could be the new culture that gets talked about during internal chanoyu session.

Ryan · 1:00:08

And it's such a shame too, because chanoyu has such a fantastic culture of artistic appreciation. You know everything about your prize tea scoops, the bowls, the history, the Potter, where it's from, why it's special.

Ryan · 1:00:20

It's literally baked into the pre scripted, partially pre scripted dialogue of tea ceremony. Beautiful bowl. It's pizza and what Potter is it from? And then you. Oh, I got it on my trip to Japan. It's a element of discussion, even looking, and there's a viewing of all of this stuff and it touches everything.

Zongjun · 1:00:42

But the tea is so sad to me. Yeah. There's its culture of appreciation already exists. Yeah, this mindset already exists, it's just missing a very unique component. Which are the people that actually make the tea, which is ultimately what we're all about here on the Specialty Matcha Podcast.

Ryan · 1:01:02

So if you haven't read this article, we really recommend that you give it a read or give it a listen, which is the previous one in this podcast feed that you're listening to now. And we're going to do a follow up piece on what should Uji Matcha be, which will be an opinion piece. And we're going to try to source some opinions from across the industry where Sam and I will have a dialogue about these different perspectives and expanding on these ideas even further.

Ryan · 1:01:29

And if you have any ideas about or opinions about what Uji Matcha should be, let us know. Please send us a message or an e-mail. And we'd love to actually include your thoughts in the piece as well as they see as they fit into the broader discussion.

Ryan · 1:01:45

All right, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing with Fran. We'll see you in the next one. See you in the future.