The beginning of Japanese tea culture is generally said to have originated when Japanese monks were inspired by the unique tea-drinking culture cultivated among Zen monks in Song China, and it is attributed to the Zen monk Eisai（栄西, 1141–1215）who brought this culture back to Japan, which is thought to have been around the late 12th century. For this reason, historically, Japanese tea culture has always been emphasized as being tied to Zen and its spiritual dimensions. Indeed, Eisai’s own work Kissa Yōjōki（喫茶養生記, 1211）is a text that connects tea with health and spiritual practice, and tea became deeply related to life in Zen temples. Yet, at the same time, it is also true that aspects such as tea leaf production and the processing of aracha (unrefined tea) that supported this culture were largely neglected, as the emphasis fell too heavily on tea as a spiritual culture. This is typically reflected in the fact that most people interested in tea culture have focused on tea ceremony practices in urban centers such as Kyoto and Edo, and very few have turned their attention to Kyushu, to look at tea culture from the dimension of cultivation.
Certainly, if we limit the focus to the northern Kyushu region, traces of tea culture connected to Eisai remain in cultivation history and transmission sites. However, these narratives often told in history—that “someone brought a specific culture”—whether that “someone” is tied to a particular country, people, or individual, are stories that, the more I investigate, the more I cannot help but harbor serious doubts about.
For example, if we consider the culture of tobacco smoking, the conventional account in Japan is that it began when the Portuguese introduced it during the Sengoku period. However, such a simple framework that “specific people brought in a culture” is far removed from reality. In fact, within the wider East Asian trading networks, tobacco and smoking culture had very likely already flowed into Japan at an earlier stage, and traces of this have indeed been discovered. In other words, the story that it came solely from the Portuguese is largely a fantasy created in the modern era and differs significantly from the facts. From this we can see that, in discussing the origins and development of Japanese tea culture as well, it is necessary to discard such modern fantasies and to carry out a deeper inquiry. This means that in observing the current historical shift in Japanese tea culture, where its bearers are beginning to move from Japanese to foreigners, the task is how to reconstruct this culture not as a mere “fashion,” but from an essential perspective.