Japan for Tea Lovers & Tea-Country Travelers

About this book

200 composed journeys across all of tea Japan — bases, sequences, seasons and fallbacks included, ready to travel the night you buy it.

Japan for Tea Lovers & Tea-Country Travelers is the first English guide built entirely of tea journeys: the Makinohara plateau crossed at first flush, the Oigawa Railway ridden into Kawane's gorge, Uji slept in for two nights while its wholesalers grade the new leaf, Wazuka's terraces climbed at picking time, Chiran's green sea in the year's first week, the fermented-tea triangle of Shikoku, Nishio's matcha plain, Murakami's snow-buried fields at the northern limit, and the subtropical clearings of Yanbaru at the southern one. Eight parts: five travel the map, one chains coasts, rivers and the whole arc from limit to limit, one is the tea calendar itself — shincha front, shading season, fermentation summer, autumn gold, winter white — and one is the traveller's craft: bases, dawns, tastings, bowls, notebooks and returns.

Leaf books tell you what a tea is. Place books tell you what a field is. This book tells you how to go: where to sleep, in what order to move, which season redeems the driving, and what to do on the morning the mist closes the famous view. Tea gardens, farms and tea rooms are working businesses on private land, so nothing changeable is asserted — every one of the 200 entries closes with its own official-confirmation sentence, written for that entry alone. No health effects are claimed for any tea; the land, the culture and the movement carry the book.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.