How Powdered Tea Came to Japan

The practice arrived in the early Kamakura period.

1191: Eisai returns

The monk Eisai, back from Song China, brought the method for producing tencha and the practice of drinking powdered tea.

He later wrote Kissa Yojoki, covering cultivation and the effects of tea — the first Japanese text on the subject.

Toganoo, then Uji

Eisai encouraged Myoe Shonin of Kozanji at Toganoo to take up cultivation, one of the origin points of Japanese tea growing.

Myoe subsequently sought land better suited to the plant and chose Uji, where deep river mist and the local climate favored it.

Uji began as an outsider

Under the early hierarchy, Toganoo tea was honcha — true tea — and Uji was classed as hicha, everything else.

A tea-tasting game of the era asked participants to distinguish Toganoo from all others. Uji sat among the others.

That changed in the Muromachi period. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the third shogun, extended patronage and around 1390 had tea gardens established in Uji — the Uji Shichimeien.

With shogunal backing, Uji became the country's foremost production area.

Shaded cultivation develops there

Covering fields to block sunlight was developed in Uji.

L-theanine, the savory amino acid, converts into astringent catechins under sunlight. Covering slows that, producing leaf high in umami. Both tencha and gyokuro are grown this way.

Between April and May, the covers still hide the bushes from view.

The practice faded in China

Powdered tea ceased to be mainstream in its country of origin. From the Ming period onward, steeping leaves became standard.

In Japan it survived alongside the tea ceremony and developed independently. That is why matcha reads as Japanese despite arriving from elsewhere.

Sweetening comes seven centuries later

Everything above concerns matcha. The sweetened powder appears in the twentieth century.