Tea of Sayama and the Tokorozawa new tea festival

On the 28th of April, the 12th Tokorozawa new tea festival took place in Saitama prefecture, the north of Tokyo. The harvesting season of the new tea was just at the beginning. The tea produced in Saitama is known under the name Sayama tea.

Although it is only ranked as number twelve of Japan, in terms of production (4310 tons fresh leaves in 2007 in comparison with 179000 tons in Shizuoka prefecture), Saitama is still one of the historical regions when it comes to tea production in Japan. After the monk Eisai brought tea seeds from China in the 12th century, Saitama became one of the five most famous tea producing regions together with Kyoto, Nara, and the two regions, Ise and Iga, which today corresponds to Mie prefecture. At this time we are talking about the Kawagoe tea, and it is from the Edo period that one starts hearing about Sayama tea. A famous song sings about the quality of this tea by the words, "Shizuoka for its color, Uji for its fragrance, and absolutely Sayama for its flavor". The fact is that, one of the particularities of the Sayama tea is found in the hi-ire, the finale stage of the drying of the leaves, which gives the tea a strongly pronounced particular flavor. Another characteristic of the production in this region is that the producers have the ultimate control, from the harvest to the sales, which is different from elsewhere, where the activity of the producers ends at the production of the ara-cha, and where the hi-ire and the sales of the finished product normally is in the hands of wholesalers. One also has to draw the attention to the fact that in this region one cannot proceed with（harvesting more than twice a year, whereas in warmer regions it can be achieved 3 or 4 times. Lastly, Saitama is highly active in the research and making of new kinds of tea plants, among which, as many as 8 of the new varieties were registered there, and whereas the most circulated is called Sayama-kaori (fragrance of Sayama).

The festival started with a sunny morning and more than thirty enthusiastic participants. The first element was that participants were gathering and had-plucking leaves, fresh and tender, peeping out from the tea bushes. This task isn't so easy that it is understandable why machines replaced human hands. Among the participants, all of whom were amateurs within Japanese tea, one could find people who were joining for the first time, and others who participated at this kind of demonstrations every year and in all of the numerous producing regions.

The continuance of the festival brings us to the square, outside of Tokorozawa city hall, where hand rolling of tealeaves was demonstrated, which is today something very unusual. The artisans worked in relay for more than five hours to be able to obtain a finished product. We also could observe a mechanical production of tea and the machines presented here weren't the huge systems, which are the norm in the tea factories today, but the small antique machines from the Meiji period (1868-1912). The latter, are in principle not different, at least not when it comes to their small modern equivalents. Thereafter, tasting of the new tea and food made with tealeaves was evidently a natural part of it all.

Further, there was a small seminar about Sayama tea and the way to infuse the sencha (the type of Japanese green tea which today represents 80% of the production in Japan).
The different tea exponents have insisted on the cultural value of the consumption of tea in the form of leaves that are infused in a teapot, and not the tea on bottles, and the importance of teaching this to children. It is assumed that, in Japan today, the majority of the pupils in primary school have never seen a teapot in their life, and that those who know of it, because they have seen it at their grandparents' house. It is a paradox that this culture fades at the same time as the modern techniques allows one to keep a tea of high quality all year long, which, thanks to for instance vacuum packing and conservation in a cold place, preserves the freshness and flavor of the new tea.

The last part of the festival was a tasting competition, a kind of a blind-test, where one was supposed to recognizing the tea according to their region of production. It is a simplified version of the so-called cha-kabuki game. Its origin is quite old and goes all the way back to the end of the Kamakura period (1192-1333), the monks competed each other in tournaments where they had to distinguish the different qualities of matcha (the tea in powder form consumed during the tea ceremony). For the cha-kabuki, one needs at least 3 participants, 2 players, and a person to prepare the tea. The latter chooses and prepares 5 different types of tea and then announces to the players which will be the 5 types presented. Of course, the players don't know in which order the tea will be served. The simplest form is presenting 5 different types, for example a sencha, a gyokuro, a hoji-cha, a black tea, and an oolong tea. As this way, this form is too easy to interesting. A form that is a bit more difficult is for instance a sencha, a fuku-mushi-sencha, a gyokuro, a kabuse-cha, and a guri-cha. For those who know a little bit about Japanese tea, this still is easy. The real test would be served 5 teas of the same kind of way, but made from a variety of tea trees, or, even more difficult, produced in different regions. In the last two cases, it is not uncommon that even the skilled specialists fail. After each tasting, competitor has to give one's reply, which one cannot change later, which represents an additional difficulty. If one doesn't make any mistakes, one gets 5 points, otherwise it is clear that it is mathematically impossible to get 4 points, and that only 3, 2, 1 or 0 is obtainable.

For the attendees of the competition at the festival, we had to recognize which region the leaves were produced in, then the infused tea, everything with a very high quality. Only, here to make things a bit easier, before beginning the tasting, the products were presented to us one time together with their origins, and thus we then could try to memorize the characteristics (color, fragrance, and flavor). There were 5 kinds of sencha, respectively from Sayama, Shizuoka, Uji, Mie, and Kagoshima. The result of the competition was quite of a surprise as a French, the writer at your service, got first place with 7 points for 2 games.

It was indeed an enriching day, which showed again that tea, in the respect of culture, was still very much alive in Japan today. This beverage has numerous amounts of enthusiastic fans, due to its capability to reunite people in an extraordinary convivial way, which is well put, the fundament of the tea culture in Japan. The Japanese tea is definitely a treasure that should be preserved for generations to come.