FUJIEDA: From matcha ice cream to cake and chocolate, producers of traditional Japanese green tea are capitalising on growing global interest in its flavour - even as demand for the drink declines at home.
Bags of dried Japanese green tea leaves in a tea factory in Fujieda, Shizuoka prefecture on May 16, 2019. Sensing the shift, Suzuki branched into matcha-flavoured ice cream nine years ago, opening a shop where customers can choose gelato from seven levels of bitterness."NOT MANY SUCCESSORS" Tea leaves were first brought from China to Japan in the early ninth century and the tea was treated more as a medicine at that time.
"There's the cultural tea ceremony and practical bottled tea. But something in-between, like a cafe where customers can enjoy tea in comfortable surroundings, didn't really exist before," Ihara said. "The Japanese sell kimonos and tea ceremonies - the cultural side - overseas but in the meantime, farmers are crying" because they cannot survive, said Stephane Danton, the French owner of a Japanese tea shop in Tokyo.