The Hauntology of Good People’s Tea
In which ghostly nightmares of organic matcha are broken by a slow-motion clarity.
There is a new tea bar in Tokyo. It’s called People’s Tea. It’s run by a fellow who goes by Co. Or maybe Ko. Or maybe Kou/Cou. I didn’t ask about spelling because that’s no way to treat someone who’s just blown your tea-soaked mind.
It’s hard to say with certainty how I found People’s Tea. Or rather, how People’s Tea found me. It doesn’t matter who found who, I guess. All I can say for sure is that it was not through my Cheat Code method.
You can see the sign from a quintessentially narrow Tokyo street just southeast of the beloved Shimokitazawa neighborhood. The sign brings to mind several things at once: Hippie Vans, Africa, Brazil, David Bowie (somehow) and then also something of its own. A gentle lightning bolt kiss of design with colors that could be said to represent the light, the liquid, and the leaf — or something that could have been chiseled into a rock wall somewhere and spray painted over. All would be good. All would be true.
After all, this is People’s Tea. It’s tea for the people. And like the people, the tea is good.
I had my first experience at People’s Tea with a friend who was in town and Ko. Having just opened up shop last month and more used to evening customers, he was pleasantly surprised to have two guests pop in around 3 PM on a Thursday afternoon. The space is what my friend and I call a haunt — by that we mean, it contains strong elements of hauntology — defined as: “a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.”
The ghost in this scene is a bar. The bar looked to have been a classic Showa-era Tokyo dive, the type you might find in Golden Gai or any of the other old-school tiny-bar districts around the country. Velvet vibes. Wicked mirror shape vibes. The color maroon. The feeling of a worn-in counter. Vintage vibes where all the clutter has been taken out to leave room for people to pour out their yesterdays and tomorrows, today. Except in this case, all the drinks are tea based. There are straight teas (matcha, sencha, oolong, black tea) there are blended tea drinks (matcha palmer, oolong lotus seed latte, hoji milk tea, orange black tea) there are alcohol-infused tea drinks (sencha gin and tonic, matcha beer).
I should say they are all good tea based. He uses the same grade of tea for every drink: meaning that when you rock a matcha lemonade, you are getting the same grade of matcha that’s in the straight matcha. This challenged a few conceptions of mine: including one that is suspicious of how matcha marketing schemes usually say things like ‘we only use ceremony-grade matcha in our _____.” Sometimes that blank is filled by words like ‘ice cream,’ which—if true—feels like it would be as disrespectful to the matcha as it was to the farmer: essentially a waste. More likely, it’s simply not true as it would also be incredibly expensive to use the volume of ‘ceremonial’ matcha needed to beat out the milk and sugar to still taste like matcha. This is all before taking into account that ‘ceremonial grade’ isn’t even a grade at all. It’s just words. Words, people, words. Words: as cheap and easily thrown around as wind, since, well, humans.
But before I go further off the rails, let me say that it was the conviction of Co to use the best quality tea for all of his drinks that light up the neon “people’s tea” sign in my mind. The reality is not everyone who enjoys tea enjoys it the same way. Not everyone wants unsweetened tea. Not everyone wants sober tea. People also want dessert dranks. People also want to get tore up. To live up to the name ‘people’s tea’ is to offer something for everyone. One way to keep that treatment between visitors even is to make sure each gets the same grade of tea, regardless of how they prefer their tea served up.. This is sincere. This is egalitarian. This is beautiful.
The next challenge that People’s Tea presented came in the form of organic matcha. I won’t get into the great debate on how the word ‘organic’ relates to the Japanese tea industry (but I did right a lengthy attempt once on Tea Master’s website here). After sharing a short but powerful story about his farmer friend in Uji—near Kyoto, Co’s home town—our host presented us with two teas: an organic matcha and an organic sencha from the same farm.
Both of these challenged my conceptions of what these, perhaps Japan’s most well known teas, can be. I’ve drank enough of both of them over the past 15 years to fill a small lake. When it came to organic matcha especially though, my experience has left a lot to be desired. Organic matcha’s tend to be some of the lowest grades produced by many farmers (mostly since ‘organic’ isn’t a selling point for most Japanese customers) and as a result, all the organic matcha I’ve had is borderline undrinkable. It tends to be astringent and chalky. It makes my throat close up like it’s being attacked by tiny faux-emerald tipped needles.
This was something else. It was soft, smooth and still complex. Each sip was a ride. Co stood by cooly and let us whip up three bowls (one by him, one by my friend, and one by me). Even this style of serving is rather unconventional but combines a teaching with a hands-on experience that is much needed in what can be a very top-down tea world. This wasn’t simply the best organic matcha I’ve ever tried — although it very much was that too — it was also some of the best matcha of any kind. He brewed it hotter than I’m used to. He was more casual about how we rocked the whisk. Even leaving all these factors inexact — the tea shined. In my experience, sometimes you don’t know how good a tea is until you give it something you’re not supposed to: too much time, too hot (or cold) of water, too much/or little leaf. This one was unreal.
The sencha also surprised me—but for different reasons. It was by no means a classic sencha, with a vivid green liquor. Instead it was a mellow, slow sencha—a long drive along the coast at sunset of a sencha—maybe even that plus stuck in traffic on that sun-soaked beach highway sencha—that Co suggested I brew at Gyokuro-level low temperatures, with the lid off (like the top down in the whip — or to use a less pleasant metaphor, walking around without underoos) and up to 5 times. It gave me more aged Chinese green tea feels than sencha feels—and that was a quality that Co said he prefers over the high energy of the teas from my beloved (and forthcoming) shincha season.
Despite these delicious adventures and revelations, my favorite feature of People’s Tea was Co himself. Having spent almost a decade in the US, the Kyoto-native also spent years introducing the city of his birth to tourists in English. He’s an excellent host with a gentle, honest manner. Like the best teas, we felt opened up. Like the best bars, we had a chance to connect in a way we might never have on the street. Word is that he’s got a gallery space upstairs and is going to offer Airbnb-style experiences for visitors who want to explore tea so this is all really just beginning. Co the latest example I’ve seen of a younger generation in Japan reimagining what tea culture looks like in their home country, inspired—by Co’s own admission—by what’s happening abroad. This is even down to the name, which was inspired by a party Co used to attend when he was living in the Bay Area.
When he described the origin of the name, that’s when I knew why I felt at home, because my favorite tea has always been People’s Tea. That’s the sentiment I was going for when I started serving tea to guests of FCFC in the first place. It’s a sentiment that exists without my or Co’s doing anything about it: that great tea is not a privilege only of the rich or connected or in-the-know, but something that anyone could have access to, if they follow the path down the alley.