Uji Matcha, Japan: The Story Behind Japan’s Most Iconic Green Tea

Uji Matcha, Japan

In a small city south of Kyoto, the world's most serious cup of tea has been made the same way for eight centuries. What it costs to produce it properly, and why the finest version of it is unlike anything else you will ever drink.

Yusuke Tsuen has known since kindergarten that he would spend his working life in the same building his ancestors have occupied since 1160. Not the same company, not the same trade, but the same building, or very nearly the same, since the current structure was rebuilt in 1672 and has stood largely unchanged since then, its low ceilings and exposed beams and collection of ceramic tea jars several hundred years old all still in their place at the eastern end of Uji Bridge, where the Uji River runs below and the fog comes off the water in the early morning and the mountains begin just beyond the edge of the city. He is the 24th member of the Tsuen family to manage this shop. His grandmother was the 23rd. Her father was the 22nd. The shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi drank tea here. Tokugawa Ieyasu came through. The Zen monk Ikkyū, who was a friend of the seventh-generation Tsuen, composed a verse about their final meeting that has been preserved on a hanging scroll inside the shop for five centuries. A life, a coin, the froth on a cup of tea.

This is what it looks like when a place and a practice and a family have been inseparable for long enough that the distinction between them no longer makes any sense.

Uji is a small city of around 180,000 people on the Uji River, roughly thirty minutes south of Kyoto by train. It is not a particularly remarkable place to look at, a modest Japanese city with the usual density of convenience stores and apartment buildings and parked bicycles, interrupted here and there by a temple or a bridge that reminds you that people have been living here for a very long time and that some of what they built has survived. What is not visible from the train or the street is the reason the city exists in the way it does, which is the quality of what grows in the hills around it. The soil along the Uji River is mineral-rich and well-drained and the temperatures in this valley follow a pattern of warm days and cool nights that forces the tea plant to grow slowly, concentrating its compounds rather than expanding rapidly and diluting them. Morning mists from the river settle across the tea gardens most days from early spring through summer, providing a natural diffusion of light that affects the leaf in ways that farmers in this region have been studying and exploiting for eight hundred years. The result is a leaf that tastes different from tea leaves grown elsewhere in Japan, and different by a degree that anyone who has tasted both can detect immediately and most people find impossible to explain except by reference to the experience itself.

The monk Eisai brought tea seeds back from China in 1191, having encountered a style of preparation during his study trip that involved grinding the leaf into a powder and whisking it with hot water, a method the Chinese had developed during the Song dynasty and that Eisai recognized as something worth transplanting. He gave some of the seeds to his disciple Myoe Shonin, who first tried to establish a tea garden at his temple in Toganoo, northwest of Kyoto, and then, finding the conditions imperfect, went looking for better ground and found Uji. News of the quality of Uji tea spread quickly, and the shogunate took an interest in protecting what it had found. The decree that followed, that only the Uji region would be permitted to use the shading method that produced the highest grade tea, was not an act of generosity but of territorial logic. The shoguns understood what they were dealing with and they wanted it for themselves.

The shading method is the technical heart of what makes Uji matcha different from every other powdered tea in the world, and understanding it is the key to understanding why the finest ceremonial grade commands the price it does and why that price, when you understand what producing it requires, is not difficult to justify. Three to four weeks before the first harvest of late April and early May, the harvest called Ichibancha, the first flush, which produces the most prized leaves of the year, the tea bushes are covered with either traditional straw canopies or modern black netting that blocks more than ninety percent of available sunlight. What this does to the plant is not cosmetic. Deprived of light, the plant cannot complete the conversion of L-theanine into tannins and catechins through photosynthesis. L-theanine is the amino acid responsible for the distinctive quality of matcha, its deep savory umami, its characteristic sweetness, the particular quality of calm alertness it produces in the person who drinks it, which monks in the 13th century described as a gift for meditation and which scientists in the 21st century have confirmed is a measurable neurological effect. Research published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry established that shaded tea leaves contain between two and five times more L-theanine than leaves grown in direct sunlight. That difference is everything. It is the reason that a bowl of properly prepared ceremonial Uji matcha tastes unlike anything the global matcha trend has trained most people to expect.

After shading comes the harvest, which for the finest ceremonial grade is done by hand, the youngest and softest leaves at the top of each bush selected individually. These leaves are steamed immediately after picking to stop oxidation, green tea's color and flavor compounds are extraordinarily fragile and the window between picking and steaming is measured in hours, not days, then dried, and sorted through a process that removes the stems and veins to leave only the leaf blade, which at this stage is called tencha. Tencha is the raw material from which matcha is made and it is not interchangeable with other forms of processed green tea leaf. Only tencha, shade-grown and processed in this specific sequence, produces true matcha. The rest is something else.

The grinding is the last stage and the most meditative. Granite stone mills, each weighing approximately one hundred kilograms, turn at between thirty and sixty revolutions per minute, a speed calibrated specifically to prevent the friction heat that would degrade the volatile aromatic compounds and the L-theanine that the entire production process has been designed to concentrate and preserve. At this rate, one stone mill produces between thirty and forty grams of matcha powder per hour. This is not a process that can be accelerated without destroying the thing it is making. The powder that emerges from the mill is so fine that it remains suspended in hot water rather than sinking, and this is what makes the whisking possible, and the bowl of bright vivid green foam that results from proper preparation is the visual evidence that the production has been done correctly. The color is not dye and it is not chlorophyll washing off a poorly dried leaf. It is the intact photosynthetic pigment of a shade-grown plant, preserved through every stage of processing by people who understood what they were doing.

This is where the contemporary global matcha market and the actual tradition of Uji ceremonial matcha have very little to do with each other. The matcha that appears in lattes and baked goods and smoothie bowls at cafes around the world is almost entirely culinary grade, later harvests, machine-milled, grown without the extended shading that builds L-theanine concentrations, priced for volume and produced for mixability rather than for the experience of being consumed as a bowl of whisked tea in the traditional manner. There is nothing wrong with this. Culinary matcha has its place. But it has created in many people an idea of what matcha tastes like that has almost no relationship to what the finest ceremonial grade from Uji actually is.

A bowl of properly made koicha, the thick tea preparation used in formal tea ceremony, three to five grams of premium matcha kneaded rather than whisked with a small amount of water at eighty degrees, is not a beverage in any sense that the word usually implies. It is not refreshing. It is not thirst-quenching. It asks something of the person drinking it. The flavor arrives in layers and continues to develop across the two or three minutes after the bowl has been set down, the umami deepening, the sweetness emerging from beneath it, the bitterness, which is present but structural rather than harsh, the way bitterness in a great espresso is structural, receding as the L-theanine begins to move through the body and the particular quality of alert stillness that the monks valued for their meditation practice becomes legible as something more than a feeling. It is worth the forty-five minutes that the preparation of a proper tea ceremony requires. It is worth the price that genuine Uji ceremonial matcha commands. It is worth understanding, which the global matcha trend has not yet found a way to communicate because understanding it requires slowing down to a pace that the trend has no particular interest in accommodating.

Yusuke Tsuen, the 24th generation of the oldest teashop in the world, told the BBC some years ago that when he was a young child and asked, as Japanese children are asked, what he wanted to be when he grew up, he already knew the answer. He was going to run the business his ancestors started. In a country where this kind of answer is not unusual, where the continuity of a craft across generations is treated as a form of moral seriousness rather than mere tradition, it still carries a particular weight when the business in question has been running continuously since 1160, when the building has been in the same location for nearly nine centuries, and when the tea being served is made by the same method that the first farmers in these hills developed by covering their bushes with straw and watching what the darkness did to the leaf.

That is the simplest description of what Uji matcha is. It is what happens when people pay very close attention to a plant for eight hundred years. The rest, the science, the ceremony, the philosophy and the calm alertness in the body of the person holding the bowl, follows from that attention, and from the willingness of each successive generation to regard the knowledge they inherited as something worth spending a life on.