Hello everyone!
Welcome to my third blog about my adventures as an Obubu Assistant Manager! Autumn in rural Japan is the season of higanbana (red spider lilies), persimons, chestnuts, beautiful fall colours everywhere, and cooler weather (we finally brought out kotatsus in Obubu house!).
It was also my third quarter at Obubu, marking my transition from kouhai to senpai. Unfortunately, this meant having to say goodbye to our amazing senpai Sarah (#4) who left for more tea adventures in Asia. Our other senpai Pau (#3) became Obubu’s newest staff member ! To mark the end of their year as assistant managers, they recorded together a recap of all of their adventures and higlights of the year in a lovely graduation video (the bloopers to which are also pretty fantastic).
Amidst all these changes, we also welcomed new team members : our wonderful kouhais Marcello (AM #7) from Italy and Katrina (AM #8 and previous intern #138) from Latvia, as well as many interns Julie (#181) from France, Beatrice (#182) from Lithuania, CC (#183) from the USA, Clover (#185) from Singapore and Alayna (#186) from the USA.
Farming
Of course, autumn on a Japanese tea farm also means the Autumn harvest ! This harvest was probably my favourite of the year as the weather is much cooler than during the summer harvest, and the overall atmosphere is more relaxed than during the spring since the leaves are lower in quality. It is amazing to see the changes of the tea fields throughout the year and experience how differently the leaves look and feel, as well as the flavour variatons from season to season. In autumn, the harvest bags tend to be quite big (like in the pictures above) as the leaves are bigger. You can also enjoy the sight of tea flowers growing everywhere which add an extra charm to the tea bushes. Early in the season, interns and staff processed some leaves in our factory to make delicious Sencha of the Autumn Moon. After that, we mainly focused efforts on tencha for Basic Cooking Matcha, because of the high matcha demand of this past year. Overall, my favourite parts of this harvest were sharing wonderful moments with interns and Akky-san during farming days and also riding on tea bags !
I also had the pleasure of leading the last harvest of the season with Beatrice, CC and Julie in Aoimori for tencha! We harvested Yabukita cultivar bushes in the morning, then shared a lovely picnic in the field, and enjoyed momiji at a nearby temple after the farming was done.
After the harvest, farming consisted in lots of trimming to keep the perfect round shape of the tea bushes and promote growth in the Spring. The last farming session of the year with Akky-san took place only a few days before the start of winter, during which we deep trimmed abandonned fields Minami and Kamiko, which, at times, felt more like jungle exploration than Japanese tea farming.
Personal projects
Towards the middle of autumn, as our kouhais became more independant in various tasks and leadership areas, Mac and I started focusing more on our personal projects. This is one of the key parts of being an Assistant Manager: each of us chooses a specific tea-related project that we want to explore and which we can work on in depth during the year. To learn more about international sales and put some of my skills to use, I decided to help George with wholesale. Together, we worked on different projects, the main one being the launch of the Wholesale Website. I helped with data sorting, web design, populating the website, fixing bits and bobs, and overall keeping sanity. This was both a great learning experience for me but also a very rewarding project, with the satisfaction of having contributed to Obubu in my own way.
In parallel to this serious business, I stumbled into a new rabbit-hole which later became my second project. After being far from home for so long, I had started really missing the one thing France does best: cheese. Luckily for me, my despair was felt and I received over 3kg of cheese from a kind donator. This led me to my second personal project: exploring tea and cheese pairings. I hosted several cheese and tea gatherings with interns and staff, with everyone providing excellent insight into the perfect pairings (and excellent comments like Akky-san saying “this smells like donkey farts”). Keep an eye out for my upcoming cheese and tea pairing blogs to learn more about tea, cheese, and how to best pair them!
Events
Early in the season, we finished up some renovations that were very needed. Firstly we remade the deck next to the Obubu house which had started to rot. We then added new floorings and a new kitchen space to the 2nd floor of our factory. This is part of our project to convert this space into a cafe area, to host people from all around the world and keep sharing our love of Japanese tea. While the cafe has not opened yet, it is a very exciting project that we all look eagerly forward to!
One of the main events of this autumn was our 2nd Kickstarter! We launched it to fund a bus line to connect rural Wazuka to Kyoto. Previous intern (#152) Sara Hagstrom came back to help launch the Kickstarter and to design the decal for the Obubu Bus. She is very a talented artist (find her portfolio here) who had previously created a beautiful mural on the Hojicha house at Obubu, so it only made sense to work with her again for this new design! She also became an Obubu Ambassador while she visited.
In November, our town of Wazuka hosted the annual event Chagenkyo Matsuri or “Teatopia Festival” which celebrates the local tea culture. Wazuka farmers serve tea and host tea-related workshops to share their passion with others. We also had the pleasure of participating in this event with an Obubu booth in the festival. Staff and interns collaborated to create drinks exclusively for this event. In particular, intern Alayna (#186) came up with the idea to serve bubble tea made from Obubu teas. After many delicious trials, she perfected four recipes, with a base of hojicha, wakoucha, matcha and genmaicha latte. These were a huge success the day of the festival, with our drinks being sold out at the end of the day! Alayna also wrote an interpretive story about boba (bubble tea) which you can read here.
Since we can never get bored of tea, we spent one of our weekends going to a tea festival in Nagoya, during which we tried out teas from different regions, each with their unique flavours and characteristics. Our favourites included a mimasaka bancha from Okayama (which I recommend reading about as it is a lesser known tea despite having a fascinating process and being delicious) , a wakoucha from Ibaraki and a fukamushicha from Kagoshima.
Towards the end of autumn, assistant managers went on a trip to Shikoku for even more tea related adventures at the annual Awabancha festival in Kamikatsu! Read more about this in Mac’s (AM #5) blog: Awabancha Adventures in Shikoku.
The beautiful fall weather also inspired us to go on several hikes. The key component is of course to always drink tea at the top of the mountain. While this can make the climb more difficult, it also engrains the moment in your mind for the rest of your life. There is nothing quite like sharing a hot cup of tea after hours of (vertical) walking. Highlights include drinking fukamushicha from Sonogi after seeing the first snow of the year on Mount Katsuragi, and hosting a matcha tea ceremony on Mount Kasagi.
If you haven’t read them yet, feel free to also check out my Spring and Summer blogs to read more about my year as an Obubu Assistant Manager!
See you in my next tea adventures!
またね!
– Alix (AM #6)
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