How Tea Transformed Edo

A tōcha gathering in the Muromachi period.

Tea is spoken of today as a symbol of calm and quiet. It wasn't always that way. There was a time when tea lived in a world of frenzy and wagering.

A game called tōcha — "tea combat" — arrived from China toward the end of the Kamakura period. The rules were simple: taste a series of teas and identify their origin or variety. Guess right, and you won a prize. Guess wrong, and you lost something. Picture a modern wine-tasting competition, except the Muromachi-period version of tōcha was nowhere near that genteel.

By the Muromachi period, tōcha had exploded in popularity among warriors and wealthy merchants, and the stakes kept climbing. Records describe gold, silver, land, and even swords changing hands over it. What began as a simple exercise in telling honcha from hicha grew into something else entirely: the chayoriai, a lavish gathering that fused the tea contest with elaborate banquets. Flowers and incense were arranged, linked verse was composed, sake flowed, and tea was the final battleground — sometimes for an entire night.

The shogunate, understandably, didn't let this go unaddressed. The Ashikaga shogunate issued repeated bans against kasagake, tōcha, and sugoroku, naming them symbols of extravagance and gambling. That the ban had to be issued again and again says everything about how thoroughly people were hooked.

By the Edo period, the frenzy around tōcha had cooled, at least on the surface. But the underlying culture — the pleasure of tasting teas side by side and guessing their origin — quietly survived. The tea-tasting certification exams and tea-appreciation events held in Japan today trace their roots back to this gambling game.

▶ Read more about the rules and mania of tōcha

In 1853, Commodore Perry's Black Ships appeared off the coast of Uraga, and the shock reverberated across the country. More than a century before that, a quieter but far more fundamental revolution had already reshaped daily life in Japan: the invention of sencha.

The tea we now call sencha, or simply green tea — leaves in a teapot, hot water poured over them — was developed in 1738 by Nagatani Sōen, a farmer in Uji-Tawara, near Kyoto. Historically speaking, that's recent.

The aosei-sencha method Nagatani Sōen developed.

So what was Japanese tea like before that? Matcha was the dominant form, but matcha belonged to the formal world of the tea ceremony, and it was largely out of reach for ordinary people. What commoners actually drank was mostly bancha or simmered tea — brownish in color, with a taste and aroma nowhere near what we associate with sencha today. "Having a cup of tea" didn't mean the bright green, refreshing drink modern readers might picture. The aosei-sencha method Nagatani Sōen developed — steaming the leaves, then rolling and drying them, a process that remains essentially unchanged today — is what produced that vivid green color and clean, savory aroma for the first time.

Sōen brought this new tea to Yamamoto Kahei, an Edo tea merchant whose business would later become Yamamotoyama, and it became an overnight sensation. People in Edo had never seen anything like it — a vivid green they didn't recognize, a clean fragrance that unfolded the moment it touched the tongue. Sencha swept through the city almost immediately, embraced by writers, poets, merchants, and craftsmen alike, cutting across every social class.

Without this manufacturing breakthrough, the sencha culture we enjoy today simply wouldn't exist. It's not an exaggeration to call Nagatani Sōen the single most consequential figure in the history of Japanese tea. Worth noting, too: his descendants went on to found Nagatanien, the food company still known today for its ochazuke seasoning packets.

There's a second historical thread running behind the sencha revolution. In the sixteenth century, Sen no Rikyū perfected wabi-cha and established the tea ceremony as a discipline of spiritual refinement. After Rikyū's death, his leading disciple, Furuta Oribe (1544–1615), took that world and deliberately broke it apart — misshapen bowls, eccentric designs, an aesthetic that came to be called Oribe-gonomi, pushing past even his teacher's austere formality into something freer. And yet the tea ceremony still belonged to warriors and aristocrats; it remained out of reach for ordinary people. Nagatani Sōen's sencha was a third kind of tea — neither the formality of matcha nor the roughness of bancha. Rikyū had built the structure. Oribe had broken it apart. Past the end of that lineage was a man who would carry tea outside the world of formality altogether.

Around the same time Nagatani Sōen was perfecting his sencha method, an unusual old man appeared on the streets of Kyoto. He carried a small set of tea implements on a shoulder pole, set up an open-air tea stall wherever he pleased, and served tea to whoever happened to be passing. A former mendicant monk, his name was Baisaou — "the old tea seller." Born Shibayama Motoaki in 1675 in Hizen Province, present-day Saga Prefecture, he would spend his later decades exactly this way.

A portrait of Baisaou. He kept company with leading painters of his day, including Itō Jakuchū and Ike no Taiga, and his likeness survives in a number of their works.

In Baisaou's time, tea lived at two extremes. On one side stood the tea ceremony descended from Sen no Rikyū — a disciplined, formal world of spiritual practice reserved for warriors and aristocrats. On the other stood the bancha of ordinary people: bitter, brown, and purely functional. Baisaou belonged to neither.

He set up a mobile tea stall he called Tsūsen-tei on the streets of Kyoto, charging just a few mon a cup — a price ordinary people could actually afford. It was less a shop than a street cart; no bench, no tatami. But there was no distinction of rank there. Samurai, townspeople, and farmers all drank from the same stand.

The tea Baisaou served wasn't matcha; it was sencha in the Ōbaku Zen tradition — brewed loose-leaf tea rather than whisked powder. Freed from the formal rules of the tea ceremony, this way of drinking tea — just a pot, hot water, and no ceremony required — resonated with the spread of Nagatani Sōen's aosei-sencha happening at the very same time, and together the two became the current that opened Japan's tea culture to ordinary people.

Late in life, Baisaou is said to have burned all his tea utensils. It's been read as a message: don't grow attached to the objects — enjoy the tea itself. That uncompromising freedom drew some of the era's leading artists to him, among them Itō Jakuchū, Ike no Taiga, and Yosa Buson, and a kind of cultural salon formed naturally around him.

The culture of freedom Baisaou planted eventually gave rise to sencha-dō, a new school of tea practice that established a second world of tea distinct from the ceremony. Freedom over formality, conversation over silence — that spirit lived on in the bustle of the mizu-jaya tea stands and in the calls of the botefuri peddlers who walked the streets.

▶ Read more about the life of Baisaou

As sencha spread through Edo, a new kind of place began appearing on street corners across the city: the mizu-jaya.

A mizu-jaya was a small tea stand set up along a road, at the entrance to a temple or shrine, or by the foot of a bridge. Sit down on a bench, hand over a single mon coin, and you'd get a cup of tea and a skewer of dango — a chewy dumpling made from rice flour. Travelers rested their feet there; townspeople traded gossip; merchants closed deals. It was, in every meaningful sense, a café.

Townspeople relaxing on benches with tea and dango.

By the middle to late Edo period, hundreds of mizu-jaya are believed to have operated across the city. Asakusa, Ueno, and the foot of Ryōgoku Bridge were especially fierce competitive ground, drawing an endless stream of temple visitors, sightseers, and travelers.

Kasamori Osen, as painted by Suzuki Harunobu. She was the signboard girl of the mizu-jaya Kagiya, in front of Kasamori Inari shrine in Yanaka, and a celebrity across all of Edo.

No account of the mizu-jaya is complete without mentioning the kanban musume — the "signboard girl." Putting an attractive young woman out front to draw in customers was a standard tactic of the time, and a stand with a famous kanban musume could pull customers in from far outside the neighborhood. Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro both depicted mizu-jaya signboard girls repeatedly in their ukiyo-e prints — one of the defining motifs of Edo popular culture.

The most famous of them was Kasamori Osen, the signboard girl at a mizu-jaya called Kagiya, in front of the Kasamori Inari shrine in Yanaka. Her beauty made her a sensation, and once Suzuki Harunobu began depicting her in his ukiyo-e prints, she became a celebrity across the whole city. In modern terms, she wasn't far from an influencer who'd gone viral.

A mizu-jaya was never just a place to buy tea. Information changed hands there. Romances started there. Culture grew there. Haiku poets composed verses, popular writers gathered material, merchants swapped market gossip. As an information hub for the entire city, the mizu-jaya played a role far bigger than its size suggested.

The way we open a laptop in a café today, catch up with friends, or exchange business cards with someone we've just met — people in Edo were doing the equivalent on a mizu-jaya bench. The setting has changed. Tea's power to connect people hasn't, not in three hundred years.

If the mizu-jaya was where Edo went to drink tea, the people who carried tea to them were the botefuri — traveling peddlers who moved constantly through the city.

A botefuri carried goods balanced on a shoulder pole, walking through the streets and calling out to announce what they were selling. Fish, vegetables, tofu, natto — practically every category of food that sustained Edo's daily diet moved through the hands of botefuri, and tea was no exception.

A tea-selling botefuri walking the streets of Edo with a shoulder pole.

"O-cha wa ikaga de—" — "How about some tea?" The calls of the tea-selling botefuri walking through the alleys were simply part of daily life in Edo. Because they sold leaves in small portions, ordinary households could buy just what they needed, and good-quality tea ended up reaching far more people than it otherwise would have.

Looked at with modern eyes, the world of the botefuri was remarkably sophisticated. They remembered what regular customers liked and brought "the usual." They let people know when the new season's tea came in. They gave loyal customers a small discount. It's hard not to see this as an early prototype of subscription services and customer relationship management.

The relationship between tea and customer that the Edo-period botefuri built eventually evolved into fixed-location tea merchants, giving rise to wholesale tea houses and specialty tea shops. As the decades passed, as transportation networks expanded and the internet arrived, that same current carried straight through to online tea retail.

The peddlers who carried tea through the streets on their shoulder poles could never have known that what they carried would, three hundred years later, become a digital catalog with next-day delivery. But the one thing that hasn't changed at all is the simple wish behind it: to get good tea to the people who need it.