2025 November round up
Welcome to the November round-up newsletter. A monthly letter about everything that has happened inside and outside the tea nursery.
The north wind blows the leaves
After a year full of activity in the fields as well as outside of them, we are wrapping up the season, slowly preparing for winter. The weather has been signalling the arrival of the cold, the blossoming of the tea bushes and all the other camellias are a beautiful reminder of early November. Then the sudden reddish tones on the forest and the clear nights delivering a chilly morning the next day.
The Rittō, the 19th traditional solar division, or arrival of winter, was on the 7th of November, and the light snow period has arrived since the 22nd. While in Wazuka, we only experience snow a few times per year, we can feel the cold effects while we are out in the fields trimming the bushes. Cold mornings, warmer at noon, and then again cold, with a quicker sunset, to close our days. I think I mentioned it before, but trimming is one of my favourite activities to do, much technical and precise. It is crucial to do proper trimming not to damage the bushes, and this is really the first task to prepare for spring next year, which we have already started thinking about.
Recent Activity
This month has been packed in different ways, with lots of work at the farm wrapping up things for the season, and an uptick in visitors and tourist activities. As well as some trips here and there myself. There has also been time to catch the flu and be knocked down with fever for a few days and participate in a sencha do ceremony to celebrate a friend, now an associate senchado teacher.
I will be recording a podcast episode and writing a trip report as well of my recent trip to Shizuoka for the National Hand Rolling competition. Once more, we travelled together with some members of the Wazuka Hand Rolling Preservation Society to represent Wazuka in the national competition. You can read my experience competing last year here. This year, though, I was on the support team like I did in the Kyoto Tournament. It was a substantially different experience, but one that allowed me to go around and meet, observe, and learn from other teams as well. I love how warm everyone is and how many of them know each other and jump from table to table just to chit-chat for a couple of minutes or just to roast each other a bit. More to come in an upcoming trip report.
After a bit of a hiccup with trips and other stuff, I have published an article on the Hokumei cultivar, an interesting one coming from Saitama Prefecture. As always, it will be uploaded into our digital cultivar book in the next update.
What’s next
Next up in line is a bit of rest during December, with time to gather some more research into cultivars and keep expanding the selection we have at the blog. At the same time there are some published cultivar articles that I have not yet put into the book, as soon as I revised them, I will add them to the book.
December and part of January will also be a time for me to learn about Chinese tea as I continue with the next level of the Chinese tea education I started in September this year. Education does not stop there, I have some other courses and books to go through this winter, and I will be continuing my education in sake. This time with a bigger focus on the regionality of Japan, which I found fascinating and will better inform our project for the next year, Food Where Tea Comes From (still a tentative name).
Books and other fun stuff
This time I have an incredible tea book I would like to share, Tea Production Research by Hideki Kuwahara. The author has written many other articles and books. This one compiles some publications only found in research journals, like the Kyoto Tea Journal, most of which are not easy to access or are not digitised either on top of the obvious language barrier. I have been holding up on this book for a time, it has taken me a lot of time to dig through its content. While it was just released in April 2025, it is one of those books only available through the Shizuoka Prefecture Tea Industry Council website.
The book does not even have an ISBN code. So while it is not difficult to get if you are in Japan, it is practically impossible outside of it, plus it all in Japanese. While it is written in a sort of research but a bit of casual tone, some articles are a bit more tight up and made me scratch my head quite a bit. We need more books like this, publications directly from research journals, making them accessible out there, clearing the myths and other information gaps that cloud and prevent having a good education approach to Japanese tea.
Lastly, I have been listening to a lot of coffee, sake, and wine related podcasts lately trying to find out common threads used in the teaching of those beverages, their vocabulary, their curriculum progression etc. I would like to learn how to make a great education course or material, lacking in great measure for Japanese tea, with only a couple of courses that have any real value to it.
While I do not like the term terrior to be applied to tea, for multiple reasons I would rather not get into and don't have the tools to express either. Japan construct of terroir is different from our western mind. It is a different thing, a different approach, less tight to the area and more to the process, to the craftsman. Moreover, most of us, do not know or understand what terroir really means, fully. I found this talk between Dr. Kevin Pogue, a geologist and Elizabeth Schneider an excellent and revealing conversations that bring up foundation to the concept and makes it accessible for people. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
That is it for this month. As always, you can help the blog by sharing this newsletter or any of the blog posts and sharing it with a friend or family member who could enjoy it.