“The Japan Tea Cheat Code” (ft. Hakone, Hadone & Chaseki)
In which, after three months of stringing readers along, I finally reveal how to find the best tea experiences in Japan.
They wanna know how I do it. It freaks them out. They exasperate. They gasp. They—meaning the unfortunate souls who I drag at random intervals into tea joyrides—wonder out loud, “how did you find this place?”
For a few years, I’ve kept it a secret. I laugh. I let the questions fizzle out. I assume—that they assume—that in a world of interweb tea-fluence, I must have simply seen someone post about something somewhere and managed to sneak it into an itinerary. That, the story has gone, is how I find these places.
Don’t get me wrong. There are morning, afternoons, evenings—whole days even—when I do embark on well-researched tea quests with whomever happens to be with me for a given interval. Usually, it’s the partner in crime. Other times, it’s someone else. Most often, it’s me roaming solo.
Recently, I brought the proprietors of Downtown Los Angeles’s legendary Matcha & Green Tea outpost Tea Master on a whirlwind Tokyo tea tour that started with Sushi Breakfast ended with Shibuya Yakitori but included no less than four of Tokyo’s tea haunts in between. In that case, they knew about the excursion in advance—asked for it, in fact—and gave me no stick about being too tired from walking or too wired from caffeine. Some of the same bewildered questions followed as these Tokyo natives were shown tea features they hadn’t yet been privy too. All I could do was shrug and say, “tea is slow river but there are new currents moving fast.”
I never said that. Who would say something so ridiculous? Instead, I went off on a rant about the new wave of young tea-heads in Japan driving the culture. I won’t revisit that rant here since I already get the warnings from Substack that “this post is too long for email.” So, this is my best effort at making things shorter. But as Mark Twain once said in a letter, “Sorry for the length, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.’
What I’m trying to say is that I shoehorn tea into my life at almost every occasion that presents itself. Just last week, I brought two other local natives—for a conversation about world football, LAFC, Kamakura International FC, and Kawasaki Frontale—to Chabakka here in Kamakura. Chabakka’s unique contribution to the tea world is that they offer draft tea—like, non-alcoholic cold brew tea on draft—which is pillowy soft and rather exquisite. Those two football-savvy gents also asked me how I found the place. To me, having a shop so close to Kamakura Station and having their teas used by other local culinary culture drivers like Amazake Stand (for a Hoji x Amazake sludge) and House Yuigahama (which sells Kimy Kombucha, including an excellent Chabbaka green tea version) makes it pretty hard to miss Chabakka if you have even a fleeting taste for tea and visit Kamakura more than once. This is all before I add that Chabakka is an apt moniker for me: cha=tea, bakka=fool.
But other times, I accept the perplexed looks of my companions as a compliment. For an instant, I let it seem like I’m just a leaf-shaped magnet and these tea places gravitate to me as a force of nature. A kind of tea destiny that renews and fulfills itself over and over.
Yesterday, after basking in this green-streaked glow just one last time, I finally revealed my secret. It’s not that tough, really. What I do—what you can do, dear reader, if you ever find yourself anywhere in Japan (and I mean really anywhere, from urban centers to tea producing areas to warehouse districts and village backstreets) is open Google Maps on your phone, simply select the area you are in (or will be in when you want to enjoy some tea) and type these characters into the search bar: 茶葉
Then, the magic happens. A place or two pops up. Sometimes they are established and famous with active social media pages and a whole cast of tea-fluencer fans. More often though, they are newer—or off the beaten path, or factory stores or really any other variety of tea houses that you wouldn’t have found using a tea guide or scanning hours of Instagram pages, tags, and posts.
Why does this happen? How can two small characters storm the gates separating you (on the outside) and the tea experiences of your dreams (on the inside)? How did I find this combination?
It’s easy enough to explain, really. 茶, pronounced ‘cha,’ means tea. 葉, pronounced ‘ba,’ means leaf. Remember what I said on the about page: tea is like air. You can’t just google ‘tea’ and expect to find the goods. That’s like going to national park and looking for ‘fresh air.’ In short, by doing this, you are moving from poking the wall (Googling ‘tea,’ or ‘tea shop’ or ‘tea café’ in English with pretty mixed results that could include any variety of desert shops or convenient stores), to heaving boulders at the wall (Googling ‘茶,’ using the Chinese/Japanese character for tea) to strapping C4 to the wall and blowing it to smithereens. Breech. Gleeful screech. In you go.
Of course, you can find some decent results in other searches. Plugging in 茶屋 (Chaya, tea house) may even get you more architecturally satisfying options—including 茶道 (sadō) or traditional tea ceremony—spots. And admittedly, sometimes 茶葉 gives you some more casual tea vendors inside of markets or malls but I’d argue, even these can lead to great finds.
Yesterday a trio of us went to Hakone. We did what people do in Hakone: we soaked our weary bodies and rejuvenated our broken souls in an onsen hot spring. Then, we braved the rather gnarly crowds at Hakone Shrine. Then, as we prepared to drive home, I took no less than 5 seconds of my time—and having done exactly no research beforehand and having stashed exactly zero Hakone tea culture ‘someday’ visit spots into the file cabinets of my mind—cracked 茶葉 into my phone and found one option. I didn’t even look at the pictures. I just told them we were stopping by a tea place on the way home. Someone asked which place, I just shrugged. We drove. We got out. And, just like that, we found a gem.
I’ll try to be brief. The gem is called 茶石 (chaseki, tea stone). It’s a beautiful space, recently opened about 6 months ago, with a giant window and Hakone-style wooden chair designs that you pull up on. The owner converted an old salon into a modern tea bar (in the mold of Sakurai or Higashiya, even down to some of the teaware and instruments). We drank hojicha, kabusecha, and gyokuro. They were delicious. We got to talking. We got to vibing. The owner let us sample four cold brews after that. The wakocha (Japanese black tea) was my favorite. She told us her story, about how her son—a student of Senchado in Odawara, just down the hill from Hakone—designed the place all the way down to the custom Shishi-mai (Chinese-inspired Lion dance) mold for their house-made artisanal sugar. She lamented how foreign visitors often plop the sugar into their tea. We shrugged and understood her plight. She told us about how when summer comes they are going to set up benches in the nearby garden and serve tea, tea-infused alcoholic drinks (matcha beer, gykuro-gin cocktails, hojicha-whiskies, green tea-infused sake) and kakigori (shaved ice). She told us how she used to live and work on a tea from in nearby Shizuoka. That’s where he love for tea came from. That’s why they sell and serve real-deal tea-leaf options at Chaseki. They house-roast their own hojicha—something I’m now recognizing as a mark of any tea vendor that wants to be taken seriously. The experience was phenomenal and a fraction of the cost of similar tastings in Tokyo.
On the way out, I decided to buy some tea. I was surprised to find they offered tea from the prefecture I call home and of which Hakone is a part—Kanagawa. Hadano (秦野) is a town near the mountains that sit on the border to the northwest of the prefecture. They also make sake and apparently used to grow tobacco, but now the old tobacco farms are being converted to tea farms. I hiked nearby Oyama in the past and remember nothing about locally grown tea. I discover that Mt. Tanazawa, the tallest peak in the range, is probably the area where Hadano Tea is grown.
I’m drinking the tea now. It’s more rugged than most sencha. It has a more yellow and less green color, even though it’s the standard-issue yabukita cultivar so popular all over Japan. It’s a less complex, less refined—in short, less-fancy—tea. I dig it. I’m slurping it from a little cup. I’m sharing it with the unfortunate souls who I dragged there yesterday but know deep down they liked it as much as I did.
There is something not-so-ironic here about the fact that when someone is starting their tea journey the first step is going from tea bags to real tea leaves. I just tried to find it on Google Maps on my computer using ‘tea’ or ‘tea house’ and could not. This is why 茶葉 is a cheat code. Sometimes serendipity needs a little coaxing.
Call it the grease for your next unexpected leaf-fueled joyride. Call it my no-paywall gift to you. Call it the password to heaven. Wherever you are, for goodness sake, call it a good day.