The eighty-eighth night
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Hachijūhachiya counts eighty-eight nights from risshun, the traditional beginning of spring in the old calendar, and falls in the first days of May. It is the conventional marker for the first flush in much of Japan, and tea picked around it is sold on that association. The date is a calendar convention rather than an agronomic one — Kagoshima in the far south picks considerably earlier and northern districts later — but it functions as a national reference point in a way that no other tea date does. Shincha, new tea, is the commercial expression of it: the season’s first tea, sold quickly, priced at a premium, marketed on freshness and on a green, sweet, slightly raw character that fades over the following months. The premium is real and so is the difference in the cup. Whether a given bag of shincha is worth the difference depends on how long it has been sitting, which is the awkward part of selling a tea whose selling point is recency.
The song
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Chatsumi is also a school song, taught nationally, whose opening lines name the eighty-eighth night and whose accompanying hand-clapping game is known to essentially everyone who has been through a Japanese primary school. That is an unusual position for an agricultural practice to occupy: the harvest has a soundtrack that the whole population can sing, including the large majority who have never seen a tea field. It is a substantial part of why the season registers culturally at all in a country where farming employs very few people. The imagery the song carries — women in cotton sleeves and red waist ties picking by hand into baskets — is also the imagery used at every festival and on a great deal of packaging, and it has fixed a nineteenth-century picture of the harvest as the way the harvest looks. What is happening in the fields is different, and the gap between the two is the subject of the next section.
What the harvest is actually like now
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Almost all Japanese tea is picked mechanically: two-person shear harvesters walked along the row, riding harvesters straddling it, or self-propelled machines on the larger flat estates. The hedge is trained and trimmed to a curved picking surface precisely so a machine can take an even cut, and the shape of a Japanese tea field is a direct consequence of the harvest method. Hand picking survives for the highest grades, for competition lots and for gyokuro and tencha in some gardens, where it is genuinely necessary and genuinely expensive. Festival hand-picking is a third thing again: a public event at which visitors, schoolchildren and dignitaries pick a little leaf in costume, and which is a promotional and educational activity rather than production. TeaHQ separates the three because photographs of the second and third are routinely used to illustrate the first, which leaves readers with the impression that Japanese tea is a hand-picked product. It is a highly mechanised one, and its quality does not suffer for that.
Frost, fans and the shape of a tea district
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
The other visible feature of a Japanese tea landscape is the forest of tall electric fans standing over the fields. They exist for late frost: on a still clear spring night cold air settles into the rows, and the fans pull warmer air down from above and mix it, which is why they are switched on at the exact moment the first flush is most exposed. A late frost is the single largest annual risk to the crop in most districts, and the fans are the reason a Japanese tea field looks unlike a tea field anywhere else in the world. Shading is the other structural feature and it arrives on the same calendar. Fields destined for gyokuro, tencha and kabusecha are covered for a period before picking, historically with reed screens and rice straw and now mostly with black synthetic cloth, so a district’s tea landscape changes colour in the weeks before the harvest. Both features are agricultural rather than ceremonial, and both are far more informative about Japanese tea than any account of what happens in a tea room.