Summer convergences, big and small

Summer greetings from Maren, AM #18!

The summer heat and humidity have hit with vengeance and a fair amount of violence – and that’s after a typhoon season that washed away part of our road to Aoi Mori and little section of our Somada tea field. Tea farming in the deep countryside at the height of Japanese summer in a landscape destabilised by climate change is no joke – but at the same time, it’s also been lots of fun. 

After five months with my fellow Assistant Managers, our team is beginning to feel like family. And with two intern cohorts now come and gone, I’m enjoying every spontaneous sushi night, tea break, and house dinner all the more. The ephemeral nature of Obubu makes for intense bonds, and as heartbreaking as it is to say goodbye to every intern that moves on, that heartbreak is only so acute because of the joy of friendship and camaraderie that came before.

The spring harvest this year was a beautiful and overwhelming experience. Through a fluke of scheduling, I was lucky enough to be able to follow the teamaking process at every single stage on our Jinja Oku field, from initial trimming and weeding, to shading the field, and finally unshading, harvesting, and processing the full batch of Kabuse Sencha. Because there are so many of us supporting operations at Obubu, it can be hard to follow the full process like this, so I feel incredibly lucky to have had this in-depth experience.

And spring turned quickly into summer – before I knew it, the rains had come and we were in for numerous typhoons. These gave way to intense summer heat and no less humidity, the sort that fogs your glasses up the moment you take a step outside. Between these weather swings we continued into summer harvest, producing tencha, summer sencha, and wakoucha.

Now, on the other side of summer harvest and in the summer tourism lull, I’m enjoying having more time to work on my other projects. One of my areas of responsibility at Obubu is education; in addition to coordinating and improving the Japanese Tea Basics course that interns get to experience, I’m also working with Pau and Garance to create an online form of the course which will hopefully be available later in the year.

This project is particularly close to my heart, as it combines so many things I’m passionate about: not just in tea and education, but in transforming learning content for different contexts and audiences. Learning is never neutral or context-independent, and I’m finding it incredibly rewarding to reconceptualise the education material we have created for use at Obubu in other environments. This is more behind-the-scenes, future-oriented work than many of the exciting things going on at Obubu day-to-day, so sometimes it’s not super visible, but there are exciting things brewing here – stay tuned!

This season has been marked for me by a confluence of the big and the small, the larger factors at play in the world and how they manifest and impact our small day-to-day lives. The ‘matcha shortage’ looms, driving questions from tour guests and concerned wholesale customers. Climate change rears its head in uprooted tea bushes strewn across the road. And amidst it all, questions about how today is shaping tomorrow is shaping the wider future.

3 highlights from this spring-summer transition

• Typhoon season sweeping through town, flooding the river, and almost washing us off of Tenku for one of my most memorable farming experiences ever
• Hosting my ‘fishy’ tea lounge, where I asked people to deeply consider their approach to describing what they taste in tea through the lens of ‘fishy’ flavours
• Shaving my head at sunset on our Monzen tea field

3 things I look forward to this autumn

• The natsukashii of experiencing summer in Japan as in my intern days: heat, sweat, bugs and all
• A new batch of Assistant Managers joining us in September: a chance to transition to a senpai role in all the areas I’m starting to feel confident in
• Having my hobbit coming-of-age birthday in Japan: a reminder that I am younger than I sometimes feel, and that milestones are when you choose them

Seasonal non-standard brewing recommendation for summer

Lemon tencha cold brew!

5g tencha in 350ml room temperature water with a slice of lemon. Keep in the fridge overnight and serve over ice! Bright, refreshing citrus flavours layered with the vegetal sweetness of tencha.