BY MARIE DOEZEMA, STAFF WRITER
I will never drink a PET bottle of tea the same way again. It used to be such a thoughtless gesture–put a few coins in the vending machine, push the button and out it would come. Thanks to a day of tea-picking in Shizuoka Prefecture, I’ve replaced urban nonchalance with an agrarian awareness of what goes into producing that 120-yen bottle of tea.
On a recent spring day, the ichiban-cha, or first tea of the season, was prime for the picking. When a friend invited a group of us to her family’s tea farm, we leapt at the chance, eager to experience the rich tradition of tea picking and prepared to endure a day of backbreaking work in the fields.
When we arrived at the tea farm–after leaving Tokyo at 6 a.m. and taking the slow train, for miserly reasons–it was already lunchtime. Feeling somewhat guilty for arriving after missing a morning of work, we gathered on a plastic tarp for a feast of homemade onigiri and freshly picked veggies. After scant sleep, a cold beer and the first sun on my skin since last summer, I was feeling decidedly soporific but enthusiastic to begin.
I am chagrined to admit that my previous knowledge of tea fields went no further than the idyllic photo on the front of the tea package I buy from my local shop. My excuse? No tea fields on the prairie where I grew up.
Tea picking 101 didn’t seem too daunting at first. The most important thing is to pick the right part of the plant, only the delicate top leaves. Because plants are clever little things, there’s a natural breaking point, which means that humans with a deft enough touch can pick fairly easily.
The hard part is the slowness of it all, especially for novices like us–progress was plodding at best.
It was easy to be distracted by the sheer beauty of it all. The intensity of green and wide open spaces were almost overwhelming after a gray Tokyo winter.
After only a couple of hours picking, it was time for a tea break and a demonstration of the almighty machine. Even the Luddites of the group had to admit that the lawn mower-like apparatus managed to perform the same amount of work we had toiled over for two hours in a matter of minutes.
Even the non-Luddites among the group, however, had to admit that a certain romance was drowned out by the buzzing of the machine and the smell of gasoline.
After tea, we wandered through the fields of green, stopping to pick oranges and lemons, before ending the day with dinner at a local restaurant.
As we headed back to Tokyo–again on the slow train–we dozed and dreamed of tea fields, knowing that our brief encounter with the leaves, while too fleeting to be backbreaking or blister-inducing, had made us a bit less likely to take our daily cups for granted.(IHT/Asahi: May 26,2007)
