Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 445, A Bowl for a Coin.

I imagine that most of you, when you think of tea in a Japanese context, think of the

tea ceremony, or chano-you, that blend of hospitality and zen aesthetics, that is so very

associated with ideas of refinement and high culture in Japan.

And that is with good reason, the chanauyue is a fascinating cultural institution.

And yet when we focus on it, that blinds us to one important reality.

For most people, for most of Japanese history, this was not, in fact, how they experienced tea.

The Chano Yu is, at least in part, about experiencing tea as something refined and transcendental,

but tea, as anyone who has ever grabbed some out of their corner vending machine can tell you,

is generally a lot more mundane than that.

So today we are going to unpack the history of tea, not as a marker of refinement, but as a

commodity of Japanese consumer culture. How did tea become, in many ways, Japan's national drink?

And before we get into it, as the title might clue you want to, this is an episode that owes

its very existence to the absolutely fascinating book, A Bowl for a Coin, a Commodity History

of Japanese Tea, by William Wayne Ferris.

So if you are a tea head, so to speak, which I am not, I should say, I do drink it, but I prefer coffee generally.

I highly recommend you check it out.

So, our story begins, as so many Japanese stories do, in China.

The tea plant, Camelius Nensis is the scientific name, is native either to southwestern China or northeastern India.

It thrives in a lush subtropical climate with plenty of rainfall.

It's well adapted to those conditions.

Tea relies on more than 15,000 millimeters of rain in a year, about 590 inches,

...