Yuichi

One line in particular stayed with me when Mr. Kiya compared Japanese tea with coffee, black tea, and oolong.

“Coffee, black tea, oolong… you could say they belong to a culture of aroma. Japanese tea, on the other hand, is about umami.”

Coffee and black tea are drinks built on layers of aroma, shaped by origin, processing, fermentation, and roast. Japanese green tea is different. It is about how you unlock the umami already contained within the leaf.

From there, our conversation naturally shifted to water temperature and time.

“At higher temperatures, extraction is all about timing. You have to catch the right moment. But when you go lower in temperature, it becomes more like a recipe.”

Temperature.

Time.

Water volume.

By adjusting these variables, you can draw completely different expressions from the same tea. If you enjoy experimenting with brew recipes in specialty coffee, you may already feel the familiar pull. Japanese tea is also a drink you can engage with at a high level.

A low-temperature, slow first infusion can feel like an espresso shot of umami. A slightly higher temperature with a quick infusion reveals a lighter, more refreshing character, one that pairs naturally with food. Change the parameters, and it can feel like a different drink altogether, even though it is made from the same tea leaves.

We also talked about how Japanese tea is positioned within Japan itself.

“For me, tea has always been something everyone around me drank. It’s part of the landscape of daily life. Because of that, people see it as just normal.”

Coffee, black tea, and oolong entered Japan as something new, something from overseas. Japanese culture has a remarkable ability to absorb external influences and build layers of meaning around them, trends, design, language, and stories. Japanese tea, meanwhile, remained in the category of what had always been there.

The tea your grandmother poured after dinner.

The hot tea a restaurant brings at the end of a meal, often without charge.

That familiarity is beautiful in one sense. It speaks to how deeply tea is woven into everyday life. But it has also meant that Japanese tea is often treated as something with no visible price, so ordinary that its value becomes almost invisible.

Listening to this, I realized that coffee and café culture are not the enemy at all. Coffee has matured into a fully recognized craft, with a shared language around origin, variety, processing, roast level, and extraction. Japanese tea, by contrast, has not yet developed the same vocabulary to communicate its value, despite how much potential is already present in the cup.

Another heavy topic that came up was the impact of climate change and the steady decline in the number of producers.

He said something that stayed with me:

“There used to be a feeling that if you had enough money, you could eat or drink anything. But with climate change, and with fewer producers, truly valuable things are starting to become unavailable simply because you have money. They end up where people who really understand them gather.”

High-quality tea is, of course, more expensive. But what he was pointing to goes far beyond price.

There is a point beyond which:

• Tea is no longer just a “premium product.”

• It becomes something that naturally flows toward people who truly understand what they are drinking.

When I write in this article that beyond a certain point, money alone is not enough to access it, I am simply extending his words.

A single hillside.

A single tea field.

A single season.

All of this is directly imprinted in the leaves. When someone who lives with that reality day after day says, “There are things that money alone won’t be able to buy,” it carries a different weight.

I do not want Japanese tea to compete with coffee. That is not how I see it at all.

Instead, one line from Mr. Kiya felt like a shared destination.

“With Western food, the automatic choice is coffee, right? But we’re not yet at the point where it feels natural to ask: coffee, black tea, or green tea.”

Imagine that after a meal in New York, London, Dubai, or even Tokyo, a server casually asks, “Coffee, black tea, or Japanese green tea?” Not as an exotic alternative, but as a third, perfectly natural choice. That is the future I am trying to move toward with our brand.

I imagine coffee bars and restaurants treating a specific tea from Hoshino the same way they treat a single-origin coffee.

• Introducing the field and the maker by name

• Talking about soil, climate, and structure of flavor

• Serving it with the same care and respect as wine or coffee

I would love to hear something like this: “Today, this Ethiopian coffee and this tea from Hoshino are pointing in a very similar direction in terms of acidity and clarity.”

A day when that kind of explanation sounds completely normal, when Japanese tea quietly takes its place alongside coffee as another drink that carries terroir, that is the future I want to see.

The conversation also turned to something much closer to home: how tea is drunk in daily life.

At the Kiya household, he told me, it is completely normal for a large pot of tea to be emptied over the course of an evening. After dinner, someone brews a pot. Later, someone else brews another. The pot keeps emptying and refilling as the night goes on.

“It’s delicious, easy to drink, healthy, and reasonably priced.”

From this story, the words “house tea” and “the taste of that home” came to mind. Which teapot you use. What kind of water flows from your tap. How much care you feel like putting into brewing on a given day.

These small, everyday decisions gradually become a household’s way of making tea.

In Japan, there is a saying that miso soup carries the taste of the home it belongs to. As I listened to him, I felt that Japanese tea can be exactly the same, a gentle, quiet expression of the household it comes from.

Once you experience a cup of Japanese tea that is truly dense yet balanced, rich in umami but not harsh, it becomes very difficult to return to drinks that are green in color only. It is not about luxury or exclusivity. It is simply that your baseline has shifted upward, and your tongue remembers.

Until now, I have mostly looked at the world of beverages through the lens of vessels, porcelain cups, and tableware from Arita. The curve of white porcelain. The thickness of a handle. The way warmth travels into your hands. These were the things I was most focused on designing and communicating.

Spending time with Mr. Kiya in Hoshino made something very clear to me. The liquid inside the cup carries just as much time, risk, and quiet conviction as the cup itself.

It brought together many of the ideas we talked about that day.

• The culture of aroma, and the culture of umami

• The way ordinary things become invisible in plain sight

• The reality of climate change and fewer producers

• The hope that truly good things will reach people who genuinely understand them

To talk about Japanese tea is not simply to introduce a delicious drink. It is to look at all of this, farming, craft, culture, risk, and care, condensed into a single cup.

This article is one small step, a field note from my visit to Kiya Hoyoen, written in my own words. In future pieces, I hope to share more of what we discussed that day.

• Concrete stories about water temperature and brewing recipes

• How Japanese tea can be paired with food

• How people in Japan and abroad experience Japanese tea differently

I will be writing them slowly, one cup at a time.

For now, I will end with a simple image. A coffee cup and a Japanese tea cup, quietly standing side by side on the same counter. That is the future I keep in mind as I continue this journey that began in Hoshino, Yame.