Load-Bearing Myths
On over-mythologizing matcha, and what the myths are really holding up.
Walk through a serious puerh market in China and one word will get pushed at you in almost every shop: gushu. Old tree or ancient tree. Tea from trees over a century old, supposedly. It is one of the first quality indicators anyone learning puerh picks up, which is exactly why the merchants push it so hard. If gushu is what sells, then every cake of sun-dried maocha with a half-plausible origin story gets stamped gushu and sent out the door, whether the trees were old or not.
And here is where the loop gets vicious. A novice buyer takes that cake home and tastes it, and whatever it happens to taste like now becomes their reference point for what gushu is. They tell friends, write a review, then buy from the same vendor next year because their version of gushu is all that is known. The false label has spread downstream into the very thing they were trying to learn. The market does not just sell fake tea. It trains consumers to recognize fake tea as real, and to distrust real tea when it is finally encountered. Learning how to actually taste gushu, to feel the difference between a three-hundred-year-old taproot and a cultivated bush, becomes nearly impossible, because half of the reference points in the market point the wrong direction.
Meanwhile, the underlying idea, that old trees make better tea, is not entirely wrong but is badly oversold. Processing, altitude, cultivar, the season of harvest, the skill of the maker, and whether the tea is stored well after it leaves the mountain all matter as much as tree age, probably more. But gushu has swallowed the category. The Chinese have a name for what the tourist pays in that market. They call it the intelligence tax. It sounds cruel. It is also honest. A lot of what specialty is, at its worst, is the cost of not yet knowing what you are paying for, and not yet knowing how much of what you think you know has been quietly planted by people who wanted to sell you something.
All too often load-bearing myths attribute quality to the wrong thing. This creates incentive cycles for fraud or definitions so wide it could almost be characterized as legal fraud, at least when you measure the delta between what consumers believe they’re buying and sourcing realities.
In Japan, ‘Japanese wine’ was for decades a label more than a fact: roughly 80% of bottles sold under the name were finished from imported bulk wine or grape concentrate, with provenance carrying weight the contents could not. A 2018 labeling reform finally restricted 日本ワイン to wine made entirely from domestic grapes, revealing how much of the category had been load-bearing language rather than load-bearing fruit and terroir.
Once you see the pattern, you see it everywhere. Roughly 40,000 tons of tea are sold worldwide each year as Darjeeling, against about 10,000 tons actually produced there. Manuka honey, a New Zealand product built on a genuine scientific principle, now sells globally at four to five times what New Zealand can physically produce in a good year.
Matcha has its own load-bearing word, Uji, a four-prefecture trademark that lets tea from Nara, Mie, or Shiga prefectures be sold as Uji matcha so long as it is refined inside Kyoto. The city of Uji itself produces roughly 37 tons of tencha a year, 1-2% percent of what is legally sold under the trademarked Uji matcha name.
Staunch defenders argue that Uji matcha has always been a blended product encompassing material from neighboring towns and prefectures, but upon closer inspection that claim does not hold water when you look at the history of tencha cultivation and processing (stay tuned for a deep-dive on Uji matcha in future articles).
There are two competing definitions for “Uji matcha” which don’t agree with each other and neither is what most consumers believe they are purchasing when they buy a tin labeled as coming from Uji, Kyoto, Japan.
Japanese Patent Office “Uji matcha” trademark definition which allows tencha grown in Kyoto, Nara, Shiga, or Mie to be labeled as Uji matcha so long as it’s finished anywhere in Kyoto prefecture.
The pending UNESCO “Uji Tea Landscape” bid, which recognizes only the Yamashiro region in the southern part of Kyoto encompassing regions such as Uji City, Ujitawara, Wazuka, Ide, Kyotanabe, and Joyo among others.
All these examples share a structure. A load-bearing word props up a price the underlying material cannot defend on its own. That is the obvious work the myth does. The less obvious work is what the myth quietly buries: the people, the methods, and sometimes the histories the label has written out of the story. Load-bearing myths do not just misallocate credit. They also launder historical violence, when the tradition has any to launder, and chanoyu has plenty.
What the myth carries
The reason these labels don’t change is that the myths behind them are not decoration. They are load-bearing, and what they are bearing is money. Uji does not describe a cup. It artificially lifts the price of the material underneath it. That higher price feeds the farms, the blenders, the wholesalers, the cafes, the importers, and eventually the next round of content explaining why Uji is worth paying for in the first place. Everyone in the loop has a reason to keep the wall standing, even the consumers, who have spent years learning to prefer Uji and do not particularly want to discover that the preference was manufactured. The intelligence tax is the fee the system charges to keep the loop turning.
The deeper problem is what the myth credits. If you stack rank the variables that actually determine matcha quality, the list starts with fertilizer, cultivar, shading method, processing, hand-picking, and the accumulated skill of the farmer. Soil and microclimate sit well down the list. This is not a controversial claim inside the industry. Kiyoharu Tsuji, one of the most decorated tencha producers alive, farms in Uji and will tell you at length that his fertilizer choices, not his soil, are what he spends his life managing. How clay versus sandy soil affects absorption. How protein-rich versus plant-based fertilizers alter amino acid production. The damage caused by salt residues from certain fish meals. He is famously obsessed with what he chooses to put into the ground, not the ground itself.
Imagine a Japanese distiller trained in Scotland, using a Scottish method with surgical precision, distilling in Hokkaido. You would not call the result Scotch. You would call it Japanese whisky with a Scottish lineage, and you would credit the distiller. Now picture a Nara-grown tencha from multi-generation farmers practicing double shading and hand-picking, processed at a Kyoto factory using techniques that originated in Uji, sold to you as “Uji matcha.” That is the distillery in Hokkaido calling itself Scotch. A label that credits place is crediting soil for five hundred years of human work. That is the misattribution. The myth is load-bearing on the wrong thing.
Chanoyu names its own four virtues: wa, kei, sei, jaku. Harmony, respect, purity, tranquility. A myth that credits soil for centuries of human work cannot quite live up to any of them.
What the myth launders
None of this is a modern marketing failure. The habit of letting matcha’s mythology carry the wrong weight has been at work for centuries. Most matcha writing tells you that Zen Buddhist monks drank matcha to stay focused during meditation, and that this is how the tea came to Japan. Some of the earliest Japanese writings about tea praise it as a hangover cure. An early emperor heralded it for exactly that purpose. “Secret mystical herb of Zen monks” is a story that can bear the weight of a premium price tag. “The thing the emperor drank after a long night” is not. So one got remembered and the other got quietly shelved.
If the myth can quietly edit a hangover cure into a meditation aid, the question is what else it has edited. The answer is in Kyoto, on a small grass-covered mound a few hundred meters from the shrine where Hideyoshi is enshrined as a god.
Even the rustic Korean-style ceramics that wabi-sabi prizes most have an origin the tradition prefers not to tell. Hideyoshi invaded the Korean peninsula twice in the 1590s. His armies sacked villages, raped civilians, and brought tens of thousands of Korean captives back to Japan, many of them skilled potters taken specifically to replicate techniques their captors coveted. Japanese historians have a name for those campaigns: the Pottery Wars. Arita, Hagi, Karatsu, Satsuma, and Takatori all trace to those abductions. The bowls stayed in the tradition. Almost nothing of how they got there did. So much for harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility.
These are the quintessential objects of the wabi aesthetic, the rustic vessels meant to display the “dignified poverty” that chanoyu so often wishes to portray itself as. These are blood diamonds. Trophies of conquest, made by enslaved potters, still passed down and celebrated as the purest expression of a philosophy of humility. The mythology remembers what it needs to keep standing and politely forgets the rest.
The warlords, nobility, and feudal lords of Rikyu’s time that were enjoying matcha, the supposed practitioner base of chanoyu’s founding era, were much more complex and savage than most Japanese care to remember. History is stained with hypocrisy, and I can think of no group less harmonious, respectful, pure, and tranquil than the constructors of the “Mound of Noses,” or Hanazuka (鼻塚) in Japanese, enshrining tens of thousands of Korean and Chinese pickled noses from the so-called Pottery Wars.
At least 38,000 Korean and tens of thousands of Ming Chinese noses are interred there, pickled in salt brine and shipped home as receipts for Hideyoshi’s commanders, whose orders were to “mow down everyone universally, without discriminating between young and old, men and women, clergy and the laity.” Around 150,000 to 200,000 Koreans were killed in the war, roughly one in six, with another 100,000 abducted to Japan as forced labor, including the potters whose hands made the bowls that wabi-sabi still prizes today. The mound was later renamed Mimizuka, the “Mound of Ears.”
This is what the wabi myth has been carrying. Not only a price tag but a silence. The blood diamond is not metaphor. It is provenance the tradition stopped telling, and a set of hands the tradition stopped naming.
What to do about it
Both kinds of myth, the credit misallocation and the historical laundering, dissolve under the same correction. Tell the truth about who and what is actually in the cup.
The answer is not to knock the wall down. My co-founder Zongjun argues that without mythology there is no romance, no demand, no business, and therefore no tea. A product this labor-intensive cannot survive on accurate labeling alone. It needs stories that make people willing to pay three times what a commodity tea would cost. Nishio voluntarily withdrew its geographical indication protection in 2022, the first product ever removed from Japan’s GI list, because the rules pushed prices too high to stay viable. Strict labeling without supporting mythology is commercially fatal.
The answer is new demand, and new romance accurate enough to bear it. Romance about the farmer, the cultivar, the fertilizer philosophy, the processing choice, the region doing work the label has never heard of. Credit routed to the humans whose decisions are already in the cup.
The best matcha you will ever drink will not taste of a place. It will taste of decisions. Someone chose a cultivar. Someone decided how many days to shade the leaves, what to feed the soil, at what temperature to steam the leaf and how quickly to cool it. By the time the tea reaches your bowl it has passed through dozens of human hands, each of which could have made it slightly worse, and did not. These hands belong to the ones who should be elevated to legendary status. That is what the romance should have been holding up the whole time, and it is worth paying for.