煎茶と売茶翁：抹茶へのカウンターカルチャーSencha and Baisao: A Counterculture to Matcha

A Counterculture to Matcha: The Sencha Philosophy Born of Baisao’s Zen

Today, I’d like to shine a spotlight on a uniquely Japanese “counterculture” that emerged around matcha—a type of powdered green tea revered worldwide.

The tea ceremony built on matcha was handed down from Sen no Rikyu (1522–1591) through the generations, and its manners were gradually systematized. It began with the merchants of Sakai, who held the manufacture and trade of weapons, serving tea to their clients, the samurai, and from that background the tea ceremony grew greatly as a culture of the warrior houses.

During this time ordinary people had no chance to drink matcha; it was limited to the aristocracy and the warrior class.

If we trace tea’s history further back, however, we discover a deep connection with Zen long before Rikyu’s era.

When the monk Eisai crossed to China, tea was enjoyed in Zen temples everywhere, and he was deeply moved to see the Zen monks debating freely and with spirit. Drawn to this “tea-drinking culture” that began in China, he understood the many possibilities of tea and brought its seeds to Japan.

Kennin-ji in Kyoto, a famous place for visitors, is a temple Eisai founded, and he also brought the origin of Japan’s tea-drinking culture. From here a historical context of “tea and Zen” arose in Japan too, and Zen monks entered an age of using tea to debate freely.

Myoe, a monk close to Eisai, received seeds from him, made a tea garden himself, and succeeded in cultivating tea. It is said that matcha, tea in powder form, was invented then.

So matcha, joined to shoguns and warlords, became indispensable as a pleasure of the warrior houses. When Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had unified Japan, opened the Edo shogunate and a new age began, matcha grew so important that it was formally adopted in ceremony, and it became still more remote from ordinary people.

The Edo period, though, was an age when ordinary people came alive. Against this aristocratic matcha culture, the seed of a counterculture suddenly appeared, to give ordinary people a chance to enjoy tea.

That counterculture was sencha (steeped green tea).

After returning from China, Eisai is said to have sown tea seeds in the mountainous regions of Saga Prefecture. About 460 years after Eisai’s death, Baisao (1675–1763) was born in Saga.

As a young monk, he took the tonsure at Ryutsu-ji in Saga, where the culture of “tea and Zen” had taken root, and spent his days drifting from place to place. Little by little he felt a fierce resistance toward a Buddhism that was losing its substance.

At fifty-seven he became certain that there was no truth in the existing Buddhism. Full of a rebellious spirit, he followed his own heart and decided to set out. Carrying on his back the utensils for serving sencha, he arrived in Kyoto with nothing else.

The tea ceremony itself was born in Sakai, but it developed in Kyoto. Against this matcha culture closed to the high-born, Baisao set a sencha culture open to everyone, whatever their rank.

At 61, he established a teahouse called Tsusen-tei along the banks of the Kamo River in Kyoto, creating a free place for sencha where manners did not matter.

There, he expounded his own unique Zen philosophy to the patrons who gathered daily. Captivated by his words, more and more people began to congregate—this would eventually become known as the very first “café” in Japan.

Carrying his utensils on his back, he also ran mobile cafés at Kiyomizu-dera, Tofuku-ji, Shimogamo Shrine, Ninna-ji, and Arashiyama.

Baisao, who opened Japan’s first café, set no price at all. He hung a provocative sign, “Pay what you like, but I cannot make it cheaper than free,” and thoroughly criticized the aristocratic mindset a single street in from the Kamo River.

That he chose the Kamo River above all shows Baisao’s rebellious spirit.

The Kamo River today is lively with couples and visitors, but its history is deeply troubling. Since the Heian capital, bodies were thrown away in this area. Kukai (774–835), the esoteric monk who founded Mount Koya, was shocked on his return from China to see a mass of corpses scattered about; he proposed cremation and made it happen.

According to the Hojoki, written in 1212, the Kamo River of that time was strewn with countless bodies of the dead from the epidemics, famines, and earthquakes that struck Kyoto again and again, and it was hell.

In the first place, the Kamo River had been regarded as a river flowing between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Naturally, it was no place for aristocrats to enter. So the ones who took up position on the border of the world of the dead were the people who would later become the samurai.

Knowing the context of places like the Kamo River, Baisao stood against aristocratic culture. He did not claim the nullification of social rank in words; as a Zen monk should, he showed it in action.

His influence reached widely, from ordinary people to artists and even samurai, and a place that fostered a singular culture was born in a café that made use of sencha. From here appeared Jakuchu Ito, a gifted painter born in Kyoto. Jakuchu was devoted to Baisao’s thought, kept a deep friendship with him, and later expressed in his paintings the ideas Baisao spoke.

Thus, one lone “heretic” became the wellspring of a new cultural movement.

In the West too, the café was meant to be an important place where those who would carry the culture of the future gathered, argued, and tied it to creative work. How is the café culture of the world today?

In Japan, the spirit of Baisao has largely vanished. Most cafés in Japan today have become study rooms for students and offices. Culture will not be born from such places.

Sencha is not just one method of making tea. It was an open reaction against the culture of matcha, closed to those of rank. Drink sencha with this in mind and you feel the rebellious spirit of old, and a Zen experience deeper than anyone’s becomes possible.

In Saga, Baisao’s home, a Tsusen-tei was founded in the same spirit, and sencha is served there. Drinking it there brings a deep emotion, quite different from the tea you drink at Kyoto’s tourist sites.

For anyone drawn to Zen, I hope you will experience Baisao’s spirit for yourself. In Kyoto, which has become one of the world’s great destinations, that rebellious spirit lives on even now.