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A history of Japanese tea
The history of Japanese tea mixes record and tradition freely. This page keeps them apart: what can be dated from a document or an official designation, and what has been handed down as an account. Both are worth knowing; they are not equally certain.
Nara to Heian
Tea as medicineDate from tradition
Envoys to Tang China are said to have brought tea back, and it is described as being drunk as medicine among monks and the nobility. What they drank had nothing to do with modern sencha: tea was pressed into cakes, dried, then shaved and boiled. Records from this period are thin, and how far it spread is not known.
1211
Kissa YojokiDate from a record
The Rinzai monk Eisai wrote Kissa Yojoki, a treatise on the virtues of tea and how it is made — among the earliest Japanese texts to take tea as its subject. The story that Eisai carried tea seeds back from Song China is widely told, but it is usually handled as tradition rather than as firmly dated as this book.
Muromachi to Momoyama
Uji and shade growingDate from tradition
Shading the fields is held to have taken hold in Uji in this period, and it is the root of what later became gyokuro and tencha. It is also when the tea ceremony spread among the warrior class and townspeople, and tea became a matter of form and setting as much as a drink. The origin of shade growing itself is poorly recorded; no start date can be fixed.
1738
The aosei sencha methodDate from a record
Nagatani Soen of Ujitawara worked out a method of steaming the new shoots, then rolling and drying them by hand over a heated bed. Known as aosei sencha, it is the direct ancestor of modern sencha. Tea before it was largely brownish; this method is what produced a green cup and a young aroma. It is why Ujitawara is called the birthplace of Japanese green tea.
around 1835
Gyokuro appearsDate from tradition
Yamamoto Kahei the sixth is said to have made gyokuro at Ogura in Uji, an account usually placed in 1835. Accounts of gyokuro's origin differ, however, and whether it can be credited to one person at all is unsettled. The usual account is that finishing shade-grown leaf in the manner of sencha took shape around this period.
Meiji era (1868–1912)
Green tea as an exportDate from a record
After the ports opened, green tea became a major export alongside raw silk. Tea was produced in volume for overseas markets and the fields expanded sharply, Shizuoka above all. Because only the leaf was used, stems piled up — and roasting them is the account given for the beginnings of kaga bocha. Machine processing followed, and hand-rolling moved from being the way tea was made to being a skill that is preserved.
2015 and 2026
Heritage status and geographical indicationsDate from a record
On 24 April 2015 the story 'Eight Hundred Years of Japanese Tea — Kyoto Yamashiro' was designated a Japan Heritage by the cultural agency, covering 28 sites across twelve municipalities plus the Uji hand-rolling technique and three rites of the Uji tea festival: 32 components in all. The legal side kept moving too. Yame Dento Hongyokuro became the first tea registered as a Geographical Indication in 2015, and in July 2026 the term 'Japanese tea' itself was registered.
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