How it's drunk

The hot tea at a sushi counter is usually konacha — the fine dust separated out during finishing. Small particles extract fast and strong, which suits both the pace of a counter and the job of resetting your palate between oily fish.

It is called agari, but that is trade shorthand used by the staff, not by customers; 'o-cha o kudasai' is the normal way to ask. The word is often traced to the pleasure quarters, where it meant the last of something, though the origin is not settled.

The saucer travels separately from the cup and is assembled at the last moment, so that tea slopped in transit doesn't soak it. The cup goes down on the guest's right, turned so its front faces them.

Sweets come out before the tea, not after — otherwise the tea sits cooling while the guest waits. These are the conventions of hosting, though; at home none of it matters.

Ocha o nigosu, to muddy the tea — to fudge an answer. Chacha o ireru, to put tea in — to butt in with a quip. Nichijō sahanji, everyday tea and rice — a commonplace. The idioms are a record of how ordinary tea was.

That last one is worth pausing on: the name of a drink came to mean 'utterly unremarkable'. Not many beverages get there.

Setting tea before a household altar or at a grave is common across Japan, and in many homes the first cup poured each morning goes there. Tea meant to be placed rather than drunk.

Tea is also a frequent choice for the gift returned after a funeral. Several explanations circulate for why; none of them is more than a plausible story after the fact.

Kyoto's everyday tea. The large leaves and stems left after the first flush are steamed without rolling, dried, and then roasted hard. The leaf stays brown and enormous, and the smell is frankly smoky — first-timers often don't recognize it as tea.

Uji is known abroad for gyokuro and tencha, but this is what has been in Kyoto kitchens. What a region is famous for and what it actually drinks are not always the same thing.

Rice porridge cooked in bancha or hojicha rather than water, eaten at breakfast around Nara, where it goes by the affectionate name okaisan. It is served thin and loose, never thickened.

Here tea is not a drink but something closer to a stock: its astringency gives an outline to rice that has no fat in it.

By the agriculture ministry's figures, household spending on green tea and tea drinks combined has held steady at around ¥11,000 a year. The split, though, has moved hard: leaf tea has fallen to 64% of its 2008 level while bottled tea has risen to 146%. People did not stop drinking tea. It stopped going through a pot.

By age, spending on bottled tea peaks in the 50s and falls away after, while spending on leaf rises the older the household. The shift is generational as much as anything.

None of the brewing detail on this site is an argument that you should go back. Bottled tea is convenient and consistent. But the experience of changing the water by ten degrees and getting a different drink is not available through a bottle.