Welcome to Wazuka!

Hello friends! It’s been a crazy few weeks as I’ve finally made it to Japan, emerged victorious over the brutal jetlag and have started grappling with 35+ heat at all hours of the day and night. I’m still not built for heat, but I’m getting better, and dare I say a bit of a tan is emerging?!

Two weeks in Japan give you a lot to talk about, so I think I’ll break things down into a few posts, otherwise I will spend this entire time rambling about food and specifically pickles. So today let’s have a review of what I’ve done in my first two weeks as an Obubu intern!

TLC at Aoi Mori

It’s the off-season right now between summer and autumn harvests, so we’re not harvesting or producing tea at the moment. But the tea fields still need lots of care and love, particularly Aoi Mori, which is entirely the interns’ and assistant managers’ field.

Obubu tea isn’t certified organic, because the process is really complicated and expensive, not to mention that these certifications aren’t universally recognised. But for all intents and purposes, the tea from Aoi Mori is organic, as it’s a completely natural, no-fertiliser no-pesticide field. So there is always a lot of weeding to do!

We usually do an early morning shift before it gets too hot. This week’s session had the added bonus of some lingering moisture from rain the night before, so within a few minutes of getting started, my feet and legs were completely soaked through and keeping me cool! Japanese tea fields are generally maintained in very orderly (and aesthetic) rows, so weeding is actually reasonably easy and efficient work – you just go up and down the rows, occasionally crawling a bit into the bushes, collecting ferns, knot weeds and other encroaching greens.

Working in a remote forest garden comes with its own challenges and adventures – it’s a wild ride to get there, with roads sometimes narrower than the car, a casual 25% incline or two, streams gushing across the path and a flat tire on the way back. And in a natural field like Aoi Mori, we encounter a lot of critters: praying mantis, golden orb-weaver spiders, wasps, horseflies, mosquitoes and more. On Wednesday we must have hit on a nest of ticks as well, because some of us came out of the fields absolutely crawling with ticks. We’ve had bug bites and wasp stings, but so far nothing to beat my encounter with that diabolical ant back in the UK a few weeks ago (iykyk 😭). Lots of suncream, lots of bug spray, and lots of checking each other’s backs before getting in the car to head home!

In the factory

As we’re not processing tea at the moment, it’s a perfect time to deep-clean the sencha factory. I say ‘perfect’ – it’s already 35+ degrees out every day, and the factory holds heat quite intensely, so that may be a bit generous, but it’s actually quite exciting work sometimes.

A place like Obubu accumulates a lot of stuff, and when there’s not an immediate use for it or its original purpose isn’t relevant anymore, it has to go somewhere. The upper levels of the factory are home to a lot of stuff like this. Obubu has some exciting plans for refurbishing and improving this space, so we’ve been spending a lot of time clearing it out, rediscovering old gems along the way – a highlight being the boxes upon boxes of Wazuka’s Teatopia festival cash from several years back featuring different teas on the different note denominations.

It’s hard work, and incredibly hot – so last week when we had some thunderstorms blowing through in the afternoons, taking breaks out in the hot rain to wash off at least some of the tea dust and sweat was an absolute marvel.

Tea tours & the business

I’m also really enjoying my time on tea tours – these are Obubu’s main draw for tea tourism. Visitors get a 4-hour experience in which they learn about Wazuka, Obubu and tea in general, try around 10 different teas, and everyone’s favourite part – visiting a tea field and the sencha factory.

As interns, we host these tours: greeting guests, giving the presentations, answering questions, sharing lunch and more. This is also where the pickles come in – lunch is a lovely simple bubuzuke with pickles and tea over rice. It’s a delightful chance to chat with other tea lovers and folks who are just along for the ride, and to share my own tea knowledge in a way that’s partially casual and partially a bit more formal. Good practice for certain projects I’m working on back home! 👀

I’ve also gotten involved in producing some social media content for the English-language Obubu Instagram, and soon there will probably be posts from yours truly on the Obubu blog too. I’m starting to think about my personal project for my time here as well – perhaps combining my tea nerdery with my linguistics background, and looking into etymology of tea-related words, tea names, and how aspects of Japanese culture get encoded in how we talk about tea here.

And so much more

Outside of intern responsibilities, there’s so much else going on all the time. Obubu makes a lot of tea, and of course I need to try all of it – oh, it’s hard life needing to taste a bunch of tea to make sure I know the products 😅

Because it’s so hot right now, I’m doing a lot of cold brewing. Of course I broke my rainbow unicorn cat water bottle on my first day in Japan, but luckily a previous intern had forgotten their bottle, so it’s passed on to me for my daily cold brew trials. So far, my favourite Obubu cold brew is the Mejiro Kukicha.

With my chasen in sorry state back home, I haven’t had a lot of matcha recently, but somehow the Obubu house is overflowing with matcha ware, I can’t think why. In any case I’ve rediscovered my love of matcha, and I’m drinking it daily again. This week we also helped out with a matcha latte comparison, developing the perfect latte recipe for Obubu’s Okumidori matcha. We got a few gorgeous foams going, and trialled a wide range of matcha:milk proportions, but the perfect pairing (at least for me personally) has proved a bit elusive.

Because Obubu interns arrive on a staggered schedule, our senpai group, who have been here two months already, are responsible for getting us new arrivals up to speed on everything. Not only have they been fabulous at helping me get my bearings around Obubu and Wazuka, they’ve also been presenting a weekly education series on Japanese tea history and knowledge as well as coordinating for us to attend sado (tea ceremony) classes with a local teacher. Obviously I’m not going to get years’ worth of instruction and practice in the next three months, but it’s an amazing opportunity to learn at least a little bit of the formal tea ceremony in my time here.

So, this is already a novel of a blog post, and I haven’t even started on non-work things. I’ve done a bit of hopping around the area already, with a trip to Kyoto last weekend for a Global Japanese Tea Association conference and Shigaraki yesterday to look at kilns and teaware. But I’ll save those for another post! I’m sitting outside writing this next to the little tea field just beside the Obubu house, and some dark clouds are pulling in – maybe we’ll get some rain and cooler weather this evening. Time for a wander around town maybe – there’s nothing quite like walking in the warm summer rain in rural Japan to the sound of cicadas, frogs and rice-field irrigation.