The sweet comes first, and that is not a detail
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
In formal Japanese tea practice the sweet is eaten before the tea rather than with it. The bowl of matcha is thick, bitter and undiluted, and the sweet is eaten and finished first so that the tea arrives on a palate that has been prepared for it. Two broad classes are used: namagashi, fresh moist sweets of bean paste and rice flour, shaped and coloured, served with thin tea and with thick tea at the more formal end; and higashi, dry pressed sugar sweets, small and hard, used with thin tea. Neither is intended to be eaten alongside a mouthful of tea. This inverts the arrangement most readers know. A biscuit with a cup of tea is an accompaniment consumed in alternation; a wagashi is a course. The consequence is that the sweetness is much higher than a Western pairing would tolerate, because it is not competing with the tea for the same mouthful — it is preceding it.
The seasonal repertoire
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Namagashi are made and named to the season, and the repertoire turns over continuously through the year — plum and camellia forms in late winter, cherry in spring, wisteria and hydrangea into early summer, translucent kanten sweets that read as cool in the heat, chestnut and maple in autumn. A sweet has a name, and the name is part of what is served: it may allude to a poem, a place, a weather condition or a festival, and the host’s choice of it is a statement about the occasion. Kyoto confectioners maintain the repertoire as a working commercial catalogue, not an archive. For a reader, the useful observation is that the seasonal reference in a Japanese tea gathering is not carried mainly by the tea. The tea is largely the same through the year; the scroll, the flowers, the utensils and the sweet are what move. A catalogue organised around what is in the cup will miss the mechanism by which the occasion is dated.
Matcha as a flavour, and where it went
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Matcha-flavoured confectionery inside Japan is old enough and ordinary enough to be unremarkable: green tea ice cream, matcha in castella and mochi, matcha versions of national chocolate and biscuit brands, seasonal matcha everything. Two things distinguish the Japanese market from the export one. The powder used in confectionery is a different grade and often a different product from the powder used for drinking, and Japanese products are frequently formulated to be genuinely bitter rather than merely green. Abroad, matcha as a flavour arrived largely through sweetened café drinks and desserts, so a great many people’s first matcha is a sugared one and the bitterness reads as a fault. Colour is where this gets commercially awkward. Bright green is what a consumer expects and is not what stored, milled or heated matcha does on its own, so colour is stabilised, blended for, or added, and a vivid green dessert is telling you about formulation rather than quality. TeaHQ notes this as a market fact and not as an accusation about any product.
Sweets with tea outside the tea room
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
The pairing habit is general in Japan and not confined to formal practice. Green tea is served with sweets to visitors at home; a tea shop will give a small sweet with a cup; department-store confectionery halls sell wagashi as a standard gift; and the association is strong enough that offering somebody tea and offering them a sweet are close to the same act. Hojicha and bancha are served this way as readily as sencha, and matcha in a café is generally accompanied whether or not anybody asked. The one place the logic reverses is bottled tea, which is drunk with meals and with nothing at all, and which has no pairing culture attached to it because it has no occasion attached to it. That is a fair summary of what industrialising a drink does to the customs around it: the drink survives intact and the surrounding practice does not travel with it.