栄西と九州の茶文化Eisai and the Tea Culture of Kyushu

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 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 Yojoki (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 spread across borders, the task is how to reconstruct this culture not as a mere “fashion,” but from an essential perspective.

I was made keenly aware of this point when I visited Shiiba Village, located deep in the mountains of Miyazaki Prefecture. Shiiba Village is often called one of Japan’s hidden regions, and slash-and-burn agriculture (yakihata) was practiced there until after the war, and even today a small amount of this practice remains, making it a rare and valuable place. Since Kunio Yanagita took note of slash-and-burn agriculture there, the village has held an important place in the origins of Japanese folklore studies, and this culminated in the classic survey Hyuga Shiiba Yakihata Chosa (日向椎葉焼畑調査), which shows the trajectory of such work. From this folkloric perspective, slash-and-burn agriculture in Shiiba was not merely an agricultural method but a “cultural system” closely tied to village life, belief, and annual rituals. And an important point is that Shiiba Village has what is called “yamacha” (山茶, mountain tea). When I heard its origin story, doubts arose that could not be explained by conventional tea cultural history, and it made me think as I have described above.

Today, what is generally called “yamacha” in Japan refers to tea cultivated in mountain fields, and for example, in Ukiha City in Fukuoka Prefecture, which I visited earlier, “yamacha” is sold as a product. When I spoke to those involved in cultivation in Ukiha, they said their understanding was that yamacha simply meant tea cultivated in mountain fields (aracha, unrefined tea). However, Shiiba’s yamacha seems to be something different. Shiiba’s yamacha traditionally makes use of naturally growing tea trees that sprouted in the aftermath of widespread slash-and-burn agriculture, and villagers would gather the natural tea leaves from there, roast them using each household’s unique method of kama-iri (釜炒り, pan-firing), and use them in daily drinking or in the hospitality of guests, a practice with a long history. In other words, yamacha in Shiiba is not tea cultivated in mountain fields, but tea that came into use as a part of daily life through harvesting naturally growing leaves after slash-and-burn farming. This perspective seems to have received very little attention in the history of Japanese tea culture until now.

Rather than focusing only on central cultural practices such as the tea ceremony, in fact Japan has long had multiple locally rooted tea cultures that existed in different places, and these were often closely tied to slash-and-burn agriculture. Slash-and-burn agriculture is no longer seen in modern times, but it was a common agricultural method in Japan since the Jomon period. From Jomon archaeological sites we have evidence of the use of nuts such as chestnuts and walnuts, and signs of the cultivation of azuki beans, perilla, millet, and other plants, and people made use of a wide variety of plant resources by setting fire to forests in cycles. Shiiba’s slash-and-burn practice was part of this lineage: after using fields for a period, they were left fallow to return to forest, and within this long-term cycle, tea trees would survive, and ultimately were integrated into local life as yamacha.

However, the modernizing policies of the Meiji era began to change all of this. The abolition of the old lunar calendar and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, in particular, were not merely a change of calendrical system but a decisive event that severed the “time sense of living in harmony with nature” that had long been cultivated in Japan. The old calendar was not just a method of counting days; it was the rhythm that structured agriculture, annual rituals, and daily life, a cultural system in itself, characterized by a long-term temporal worldview of living together with nature. Yet behind the great turning point of the Meiji Restoration lay a structure in which Japan’s closed market was opened and drawn into the large currents of world trade and industry. In the turmoil of the late Edo period, the domains competed for strength by obtaining funds and arms through trade with other countries, and in the end the shogunate collapsed, leading to the establishment of the new Meiji government.

The industrial states that had advanced earlier, on the basis of the Gregorian calendar, were becoming tied to the Japanese market, and the problem was that the rhythms of life of most people who lived by the old calendar were very different from the rhythms of factory work that industrialization presumed. Even within the Meiji government, the relationship between the Satsuma and Choshu domains had long been complicated, which left tensions inside it, and when Saigo Takamori, the hero of Satsuma, took his own life in the Satsuma Rebellion, the government moved toward a system led by Choshu politicians and bureaucrats. In this current, slash-and-burn agriculture with its decades-long cycles and the life rhythms of the old calendar came to be seen as “inefficient,” and the Meiji government, idealizing the industrial state, abolished the old calendar and adopted the Gregorian calendar. In this way, multiple time-consciousnesses were replaced, and eventually the unified concepts of “Japan” and “Japanese” were established.

Behind this policy was, of course, the dynamics of a world system advancing industrialization. It is a fact that in the course of the Meiji Restoration, Satsuma and Choshu received financial and military support from abroad, and that when the new government introduced modern industrialization and state systems, there were many points at which it had to answer international agreements and demands. As a result, slash-and-burn agriculture, which had continued through the Edo period, declined rapidly, and the practice of yamacha as a living culture was also marginalized. In other words, the end of slash-and-burn agriculture and the yamacha culture rooted in it was a symbol of how a time sense of living together with nature was cast aside under the name of modernization as “barbaric” or “inefficient.” This, I believe, is a deeply important issue that will resurface for all of us in the future.

That is why the remnants of yamacha in Shiiba Village provide a great deal of insight for rethinking Japanese tea culture. Whereas tea ceremony tied to Zen was sublimated into a spiritual culture, Shiiba’s yamacha was a local culture rooted in everyday life, a rare example that faithfully preserved an essential tradition. And considering that Shiiba’s slash-and-burn agriculture is a continuation of practices from the Jomon era, it is highly possible that the use of tea leaves existed “before the tea ceremony,” alongside slash-and-burn agriculture across Japan. Indeed, when we think about the flourishing of tea culture on the Chinese continent, it seems unnatural to assume that tea leaves were not used at all in Japan before the Kamakura period. The notion of sakoku (鎖国), or national isolation, during the Edo period is also a typical misunderstanding; even though restrictions were imposed, it was impossible for the shogunate to control everything, and in reality trade with China and Korea was active. Considering this, it seems important to recognize that there were independent forms of tea culture across Japan from long ago.

Furthermore, if we take into account the evidence that the Jomon people moved freely across the seas, cultural exchanges between the Japanese archipelago and the continent were not one-way but two-way, and given the vigor of this, it is entirely plausible that Japan had its own unique tea practices that existed “before the tea ceremony.” Yet modern tea studies, focusing so heavily on the tea culture tied to Zen from the Muromachi period onward, have neglected this earlier dimension of tea as a living culture. Especially now, as the bearers of tea culture spread across borders, this issue will become increasingly important. Perhaps the reference point should be the history in the Kamakura period, when tea cultivation and tea drinking spread centered on Zen temples of the Rinzai school and extended to warriors and nobles, and in the Muromachi period when the amusement culture of tocha (闘茶), tea competitions that guessed where a tea was grown,flourished. Building upon that, Juko Murata (村田珠光) and Sen no Rikyu (千利休) developed wabi-cha (侘茶), forming a tea culture that emphasized spirituality. Taking that trajectory into account, I felt in Shiiba Village that what is needed now is to approach tea not just through the lens of the tea ceremony, but by visiting tea-producing regions and gaining insight into multi-faceted local cultures beyond tea itself, in order to open up the next stage of tea culture.

In other words, slash-and-burn agriculture and older forms of tea culture were by no means far apart, but deeply connected with daily life, and they formed history with a pluralistic character that varied from place to place. Shiiba’s yamacha is proof of this, and by taking this perspective, another image of Japanese tea culture emerges—one that is different from the spiritual current of Zen and the tea ceremony, a living culture of tea rooted in everyday life. Personally, I believe this was precisely the source that eventually led to the formation of practices such as wabi-cha.

A Shift in Understanding Japanese Tea Culture

Culture Is Not Brought by a Single Individual