CHAPTER XXXIII

GREEN TEA AND BLACK

(SHIDZUOKA)

Things I would know but am forbid
By time and briefness.
Laurence Binyon

More than half of the tea grown in Japan comes from the hilly coast-wise prefecture of Shidzuoka through which every traveller passes on his journey from Kobe or Kyoto to Tokyo. He sees a terraced cultivation of tea and fruit carried up to the skyline. But there is more tea on the hills than the passenger in the train imagines. When viewed from below much of the tea looks like scrub. In various parts of southern Japan patches of tea may be noticed growing on little islands in the paddies, but tea is a hill plant and it is on the sides of hills and on the plateaus at the top of them that the plantations are to be found.

Tea looks not unlike privet and grows or is made to grow like box to a height which can be conveniently picked over. The rows of neat-looking plants are half a dozen feet apart. The first picking may take place when the bush is three or four years old. Bushes may last forty, fifty or even a hundred years, but the ordinary life of tea is between twenty and thirty. A bush is usually cut back every ten years or so. A good deal depends on the pruning. After each picking the bushes are cut over with the shears just as we trim box. These trimmings may be used to make an inferior tea for farmhouse consumption, or they may be utilised in the manufacture of caffeine or theine—the two products are indistinguishable. Usually the bushes are cut round-topped, but occasionally they are roof-shaped and sometimes they are like giant green toadstools.

The characteristic feature of a tea district beyond the rows of tea bushes is the chimney piping of the farmhouses which manufacture their own tea. (The word manufacture is used in the original sense, for farmhouse tea is hand-made.) In a country where the houses are chimneyless these galvanised iron chimneys are conspicuous.

The picking of the tea seems to be done almost entirely by women and children. The pickers are supposed to take only the three leaves at the tips. But the pickers mostly take bigger pieces, for the somewhat higher price given for good picking is not enough to secure three-leaf stuff only. It is not absolutely necessary, however, that the leaves gathered should be all of such a choice sort.

Women and girls come from a distance to pick tea. Picking is regarded as "polite labour by the daughters of the higher middle class of farmers." It has also the attraction that farmers' sons have a way of visiting tea gardens in order to "pick up wives." The girls certainly give would-be husbands every chance of seeing what they can do, for they are at work for a long day, often of from twelve to fourteen hours. In such a day it is possible, I was told, to pick 50, 80 or even 100 lbs. of leaves. One man put the rate as from 50 to 120 pieces a minute. Four pounds of leaves make a pound of tea.

In one district the first picking may take place during the first three weeks of May. In colder districts it is proceeding until the end of the month. The second season is from the end of June until the beginning of July. The third is in August. The bushes, after producing their three crops of leaves, bear in November their seeds, which are about three-quarters of an inch in diameter and are worth about a sen a pound. Oil is pressed from them.

Good tea depends on climate and soil, careful cutting over and good manuring. In some places I saw soya bean being grown between the rows as green manuring. Like so many other crops, tea is or ought to be sprayed. The northern limit of tea is Niigata, where the bushes must be protected from the snow, which may fall in that prefecture to a great depth. The region in which tea cannot be grown is that in which the temperature falls below zero for two months. Tea is not grown, as in India and Ceylon, by tea planters, but in small areas and as a side-line at that. I never saw a plantation of more than five acres. Most areas are much smaller. The chief reason for this is that tea is largely manufactured on the day on which it is picked and the capacity of a farmer's tea manufacturing equipment is limited. In Shidzuoka nearly a quarter of the tea is hand rolled and three-quarters made by machinery. Elsewhere in Japan half the crop may be hand rolled.

When leaves are sold to factors the transactions take place in booths opened by them in the tea districts. It is a busy scene in the region of the cottage factories. One is on a wide plateau covered almost entirely with rows of tea plants. Here and there are parties of chattering pickers, their heads protected by the national towel. Against the blue hilltops on the horizon stand out the cottages of the farmers with chimney-pipes smoking, the booths of the dealers, and, in every patch of tea, the thatched roof over the precious sunken pot of liquid manure by which the tea bushes have so often benefited. On the road one passes women with baskets on their backs, like Scotch fish-wives with their creels, men carrying two baskets suspended from a pole across one shoulder, or a man and his wife hauling a barrow, all heavy-laden with newly picked leaves. Small horse-drawn wagons carry the manufactured tea in big, well-tied, pink paper bales. On the whole, although the labour is hard it seemed a better life having to do with the fragrant tea than with the rice of the sludge ponds in the valley below.

RACK FOR DRYING RICE.

VILLAGE CREMATORIUM.

DOG HELPING TO PULL JINRIKISHA.

AUTHOR, MR. YAMASAKI AND YOUNGEST INHABITANTS.

The tea produced in Japan is principally green tea. Most of this is of the kind called sencha—Chao means tea. An inferior article made out of older and tougher leaves is called bancha. The custom is for the maid who serves bancha to heat the leaves over the charcoal fire just before infusing. This gives it an agreeable roasted flavour. It is often served in a darker shade of porcelain than is used for ordinary tea. There are also the finer teas, kikicha (powdered tea) and gyokuro (jewelled dewdrops), which is the best kind of sencha. Black tea was being made experimentally when I first arrived in Japan. Brick tea (pressed to the consistency and weight of wood) may be green or black. Most of the exported tea, other than brick tea, goes to America.

"TORII" AT FOX-GOD SHRINE.

RECORD OF GIFTS TO A TEMPLE.

It is unnecessary to state that the Japanese tea-tray does not include a sugar basin, cream jug or spoons. It does include, however, a squat oval jug into which the hot water from the kettle is poured in order to lower the temperature below boiling point. Boiling water would bring out a bitter flavour from the tea. Made with water just below boiling point the tea is deliciously soft, even oily, and has a flavour and aroma which cream and sugar would ruin. It is certainly refreshing, and, when drunk newly infused, relatively harmless. Bancha is made with hotter water than other tea. The handleless cups hold about half of what our teacups contain. [[201]] Tea is not the only plant used for making "tea." One drinks in some parts infusions of cherry, plum or peach blossom.

The processes of tea manufacture in farmers' outhouses and in factories are described in school-books, and I need not transcribe my impressions.[ [202]] But I may note that some of the money the tea farmer earns for the country is spent in his interests. There is in Shidzuoka a well-directed prefectural experiment station which exercises itself over problems of tea production. Every tea grower and tea dealer in the prefecture must belong to the prefectural tea guild. He must also belong to his county tea guild. The rules of the guilds—there is a central guild in Tokyo—have the force of law. Evil doers in the tea industry have their product confiscated. Tea dealers who do not carry their guild membership card are fined. It is not difficult to discover colouring in tea if it is rubbed on white paper. The Government's part in subduing tea colouring was to seize all the dye stuff it could lay hold of which could be used for colouring tea.

The future of green tea depends almost entirely on the demand from the growing population of Japan, but a taste for the "foreign style" black tea—with condensed milk—is spreading. The cheap labour of India and China and the big plantations and factories of India have diminished the Japanese green tea trade and the effort to produce black tea is also met by foreign competition. I was told that China tea receives much sunshine while growing, and that there was most hope for Japanese black tea when made from leaves grown in the extreme south. There is a difference between the Chinese and the Japanese tea plant and it cannot be got over by importing Chinese plants, for the climate of Japan simply Japanises the imported sort.

I found in the United States that green tea is bought, as it is no doubt sold in Shidzuoka, on appearance. American housewives were paying for an appearance that matters little in an article that is not to be looked at but soaked. Not only is much extra labour required for sifting the leaf several times in order to obtain a good appearance, but the bulk is reduced from 5 to 10 per cent. The drinking quality of the tea also suffers, for the largest leaf has usually the best cup quality. If teas were bought for cup quality only they might be at least from 5 to 10 per cent. cheaper.