Tea in Japan

Early Meiji Japan set out to make black tea for export, alongside raw silk, as a way of earning foreign currency. Tada Motokichi sailed for India and Ceylon in 1876 to learn how it was done, and brought back both the technique and the seed.

That first attempt lost ground to cheap imports — costs were high and it was beaten on both price and quality — and the liberalisation of tea imports in 1971 made the decline final. Production came back from the 1990s, grower by grower, and the name that stuck is wakoucha — literally 'Japanese black tea'.

Styles vary, but a lot of it is gentle: low astringency, a soft sweetness, and no real need for milk. Some is made from cultivars bred for black tea, such as Benifuki. Many growers work instead with cultivars better known for Japanese green tea, and pick after the first green tea harvest — one reason a lot of wakoucha tastes unlike Assam or Ceylon, though picking time and how the leaf is withered and oxidised matter just as much.

It is worth trying while you are here for a simple reason: production is small and distribution abroad is limited. The choice in a Japanese farm shop or department store is far wider than anything you will find outside the country.

The one that catches people out is milk tea. Ordering it does not bring you a pot and a jug: it brings a cup with the milk already in, made to the shop's own balance. If you want to add your own, ask for straight tea and milk on the side.

Iced tea in a café is usually unsweetened, with sugar syrup — gamu shiroppu — brought separately. Bottled tea is a different matter, and here is the trap: on a bottle, straight means no milk and no lemon. It does not mean no sugar. Both sweetened and unsweetened bottled tea are sold everywhere, so if it matters, look for the two characters below.

A kissaten is an older kind of coffee house — the word predates the chains by decades. The ones people go out of their way for tend to look the part: dark wood, upholstered chairs, no wifi, a single owner behind the counter who has been there a long time. These are often called junkissa, though strictly that word means something else (see below).

Tea in these places tends to be brought as a pot with a strainer and a warmed cup, which is not always true of the newer chains. Prices are higher than a convenience store and lower than a hotel lounge, and nobody will hurry you.

In traditional kissaten you generally order at the table rather than at a counter, and pay on the way out. Some small owner-run shops are still cash only. Indoor smoking is prohibited by law as a rule; a limited number of small places that were already trading before April 2020 may still allow it under transitional provisions, and they have to say so on a sign at the door.

Japan's bottled tea market is unusually developed. Kirin's Gogo no Kōcha, launched in 1986, was the first black tea sold here in a PET bottle; keeping it clear meant working around cream down, the haze that forms as tea cools.

Straight, milk and lemon versions of the same brand sit side by side and the bottles look alike, so the characters are worth a glance. Remember that straight refers to milk and lemon, not sugar: mutō is the word for unsweetened.

In colder months many machines carry hot bottles as well as cold. Hot selections are usually marked in red and cold in blue, though nothing obliges a machine to do that, so the wording is the safer guide. A hot bottle is genuinely hot to hold — one of the small pleasures of a Japanese winter street.

Tokyo and Kyoto both hold long-running specialist shops and salons, and the larger department stores usually have tea brands or a specialist counter in the basement food hall — the depachika. Some counters sell loose leaf by weight and will make a recommendation; others carry only pre-packed tins and boxes.

Hotel afternoon tea here is generally sold as a seasonal, themed experience and booked in advance, which makes it feel rather different from its British precedents.

Our brand directory and map cover the ones we have been able to verify, in Japan and elsewhere.

Maruko in Shizuoka is where Tada Motokichi settled in 1869 and opened tea gardens; full-scale black tea production by the Indian method began there in 1881, which is why it is called the birthplace of Japanese black tea. It is an easy trip from Shizuoka city.

Chiran in Kagoshima sits in Japan's largest tea-producing municipality, some 3,425 hectares of it. Black tea factories were set up here in the 1930s, faded once imports were liberalised, and the growers turned to green tea — but black tea is still made. Gokase in Miyazaki works high in the Kyushu mountains, a pan-fired tea district whose best-known growers farm without pesticides or chemical fertiliser and also make black tea. Ureshino in Saga has grown tea since the Muromachi period; its black tea is made on the machinery used for the local curled green tea, so the leaf comes out in the same rolled shape.

All four are on our origins page with coordinates. Do check opening arrangements before going: many are working farms rather than visitor attractions.