煎茶
I am the great-granddaughter of a Japanese immigrant; my name is Ayame (あやめ), and some days I cannot bring myself to make a cup of matcha. Matcha is a science, art, ritual, and ceremony. It carries centuries of history under its bright green belt. The water temperature, the soaking of the chasen, the z-shaped wrist motion until the green liquid climbs into froth, none of this works without the complete appreciation of Chado’s Four Pillars:
Wa 和 — Harmony
Kei 敬 — Respect
Sei 清 — Purity
Jaku 寂 — Tranquility
On days I have none of these to give but still want my green fix, I reach for sencha, matcha’s more mellow cousin.
This essay is two things at once: a love letter to Japanese tea and an argument about what gets lost when a culture becomes a trend. And I want to talk honestly about the cost of commodification, not just to the farmers and the supply chain, but to the culture itself, and to the people who belong to it, while also putting some more respect on sencha’s name and it’s very important place in Japanese society.
Origin
Sencha meaning 煎茶, “brewed tea” takes its name from sen, to extract essence by boiling, and cha, which simply translates to tea. The leaves come from the Camellia sinensis plant, that has been grown in the full light of Japanese sun, then harvested, steamed, dried, and hand-rolled into fine needles. Steep them at the right temperature for no more than two to four minutes, and you’ll be presented with a greenish-gold liquid that carries distinctly grassy, nutty, and faintly citrus-like notes in your cup.
The story of how tea arrived in Japan at all belongs to Zen master Myoan Eisai, who in 1191 traveled to China and returned with both the seeds of the tea plant and the powdered preparation method (called dancha) that had flourished during the Tang and Song dynasties. His text Kissa Yōjōki 喫茶養生記 — “Drinking Tea for Healthy Life” — reads, to anyone trained in Traditional Chinese Medicine, like a diagnosis of an entire nation.
Eisai observed that the Japanese diet at the time addressed four of the five elemental tastes — sweet, salty, sour, and pungent — but was almost entirely without bitterness, the taste associated in TCM with the heart. He concluded that this absence was the root cause of the heart disease so prevalent among the Japanese at the time, and that green tea, as a bitter medicine, was what was missing.
And yet ask most Westerners what Japan drinks, and they’ll say matcha. The reality is sencha: accounting for over 70% of Japan’s daily tea consumption, found in vending machines, school cafeterias, and home cupboards across the country. Matcha is the ceremony. But Sencha is the everyday.
What Gets Lost
All one needs to do is type matcha into any social media search bar to be inundated with thousands of bright green, sugary drinks racking up millions of views, while the BBC quietly publishes articles about a world-wide matcha shortage: global demand surging, poor crop yields from heatwaves, an aging population of farmers, and tariffs driving prices further out of reach. This strain on production hasn’t eased, even a year on.
Matcha came to Japan through Buddhist monks as plant medicine, a tool to help cultivate mindfulness and presence. It has since turned into a hollow version of itself, lost to overconsumption.
The West is always searching for new health trends to capitalize on, and it often turns to indigenous or non-Western forms of plant medicine to fulfill this itch. We saw this with yerba maté, acai, and cacao. There’s always a part of me that is skeptical when these plants enter the market, especially as an herbalist and person of color who immediately starts to think about farming practices, working conditions, and the impact my purchase has on these plants and the people who grow them.
Seeing this same cycle claim a part of my own culture is something else entirely, because back in Japan matcha is seen as a special ceremonial drink, whereas the everyday person is mostly drinking Sencha. Curiously enough, Japan has started including more matcha products in its cafes, restaurants, and stores as a direct result of the tourism boom and the West’s appetite for the bright green drink.
Much of what made matcha special was its allocation to the tea ceremony, to Chado. When the slowness and ritual surrounding it are commodified, it loses its meaning and the culture it is tied to becomes background noise.
There’s always this little sting when the zeitgeist of consumerism picks up pieces of you, your family, and your culture, plucks only the parts that it likes, and then quickly discards the rest.
When you know that matcha was designed to aid in mindfulness, meditation, and the pursuit of self-knowledge that has inspired centuries of art, music, and culture, you start to see it less as just another trendy health food and more as a window into a culture that belongs to real people.
I’m an avid and outspoken herbalist. I grow, harvest, and process most of my medicine in a small suburban garden. The West is so quick to forget the time and energy that go into growing, harvesting, and processing any kind of food or medicine. I consider the green tea plant to be potent medicine. Farming small-scale is hard. Farming on a large scale is even harder. These farmers, men and women from families in prefectures like Mie, Kagoshima, and Uji, devote their lives across generations to perfecting the art of creating high-quality matcha.
The West’s quest for novelty or the next big thing is boundless, yet the resources needed to fuel this beast are finite. Japan can’t just magically double its reserves of high-quality matcha overnight.
I’m not saying we should abandon matcha, nor am I shaming matcha lovers — I am one. But when we understand what really goes into the production of these precious ingredients, our relationship with them changes. Here in the West, we forget too easily that abundance is not a given, not in clothes, not in technology, not in food. It takes a tremendous amount of resources to keep that appetite fed.
As It Is
I’ve found a home in sencha where I used to find it with matcha. It’s easier and much cheaper to produce for farmers than matcha, and it’s more abundant for now.
One of the reasons I love sencha is that it struggles to be altered. It is tea in one of its purest forms: milk and sweeteners are rarely added because they would simply taste off. It must be enjoyed as it is.
There is also something to be said about its bitterness. When we oversweeten bitter drinks like sencha or matcha with creamy milk and sugar, we suppress the medicine, the very thing that makes them potent. That medicine lives in the bitter and tannic qualities, the parts the West most wants to remove. Within my practice, not everything needs to be made palatable. There are places where the nuance is the point, where sitting with bitterness is itself the medicine. Sencha and matcha are two of those places. I want myself and my family to drink these as they are, not for what they can be turned into.
The West’s fascination with our food and drink is a lot like how we design tea cups. In the West, our cups have handles: your scalding beverage can be picked up immediately, drunk carelessly, and if you haven’t waited long enough, you burn your tongue. In Japan, cups are made without handles. The idea being: if it’s too hot to hold, it’s too hot to drink. You must wait, with patience, for a good thing.
That act is a line I am always learning to walk, as an herbalist who cares not just about what a plant can do for us, but about the plants themselves. When I see something under stress the way matcha is, I find myself looking for alternatives while paying attention to my own consumption. My passion for the varieties of tea Japan produces has led me to fall back in love with sencha and to discover others: gyokuro, hojicha, and so many more waiting to be known.
My great-grandmother left Japan, crossed an ocean, and landed — generations later — living on through me. I don’t know what she drank in the mornings in Kyoto. I don’t know if she missed it. But I think about her sometimes when I’m waiting for my cup of sencha to cool.
References:
Chia, Osmond. 2025. “Matcha: World’s Thirst for the Tea Swallows Global Supplies.” BBC, July 25, 2025.
Efelle creative. 2026. “Sencha: A Celebration of Japan’s Most Beloved Tea | Sugimoto Tea Company, Japanese Green Tea Maker since 1946.” Sugimotousa.com. 2026.
Kerr, Cat. 2025. “Japan Struggles to Fend off a World without Enough Matcha.” The Japan Times. February 20, 2025.
栄西, 1141-1215. Eisai, and FurutaShōkin. 2000. 喫茶養生記 / Kissa Yōjōki. 講談社, Tōkyō: Kōdansha.
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