Episode 445 – A Bowl for a Coin

July 8, 2022 2 Comments

This week: we tend to think of tea in terms of the tea ceremony and fancy culture, but what about lowbrows like me who like to drink our tea bottled from a vending machine? This week we’ll be looking at tea as a commodity, and how it became a staple of Japan’s consumer culture.

Sources

Farris, William Wayne. A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea

Higuchi, Yoshihiro. “History of the Development of Beverage Vending Machine Technology in Japan.” National Museum of Nature and Science: Survey Reports on the Systemization of Technologies Vol.7, March 2007

Howell, David. “Hard Times in the Kanto: Economic Change and Village Life in Late Tokugawa Japan.” Modern Asian Studies 23, No 2 (1989)

Images

A yakken (sometimes read ‘yagen’) or druggist’s mortar. Used until the 1300s to prepare tea in Japan.
Matcha, or tea powder, as prepared in a chausu.
Sencha today is the most popular variant of tea in the country; it was developed during the Edo period.
A chausu, or tea grinder, being used. The chausu radically improves the flavor and texture of tea by grinding it much more thinly and thus making it far more palatable.
A tea house in Uji, still considered the heart of Japan’s tea industry.
Even the postboxes in Uji are big on tea! This one has been modeled after a tea caddy.
Tea fields outside Uji.

 

2 thoughts on “Episode 445 – A Bowl for a Coin”

  1. Very interesting episode. Other drink related topics I have interest in is the history of alcohol, which it has always tickled me was identified at the earliest stage by Chinese as being a Japanese thing. Crops that might have been used other than rice (other than distilled drinks – load of Japanese fruit often preserved in some way was there no nashi cider or kaki wine? ), rice brewing as a incentive to get into rice farming, and the drinking age and the quaint way saying alcohol shouldn’t be drunk by under 20s works far more effectively than it would in the uk! (It seems less common now but when i first went beer vending machines were common, but they didn’t have the circle of unconscious vomit stained 13 year olds such a device would have in the uk). Just a mention on the quantities of tea currently drunk i think kg rather than tonnes is right if talking solid rather than made liquid…a tonne per person per year is 3kg/litres a day which might just about be possible as a liquid (i get through a lot of oolong when I’m there but even so seems extreme) whereas 3g a day seems better as the amount of dry tea used for a cup or so a day. Last point more dry coffee is used per drink than tea so straight comparison difficult. Off to make my own cuppa now, sorry for the long mail.

  2. Matcha is just too bitter for me, so finely ground may not be better. Sencha and genmaicha are GOAT.

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