Tea arrived in Japan in the 9th century, brought back by Buddhist monks and adopted early by the samurai class, and from that point on, the culture that formed around it was almost entirely built on green tea. Centuries of tea ceremony, cultivation knowledge, and consumer taste all developed in that one direction. It's not that Japan couldn't have gone another way. It's that green tea got such a long head start that everything else had to develop in its shadow.

Climate and palate both played a role

Japan's growing conditions happen to suit green tea cultivars particularly well, and generations of Japanese tea drinkers grew up on the lighter, more vegetal flavor that comes with it. Black tea, with its heavier, more tannic profile, never built the same following domestically, and producers had little reason to specialize in something the market wasn't asking for. When your expertise and your customers both point the same direction for a few hundred years, that direction becomes the whole story.

Why that's starting to shift now

Global tea drinkers have gotten more curious about what else Japan can do beyond matcha, and that curiosity is reaching producers willing to experiment outside the green tea tradition they inherited. It's showing up in more than one place. Houjicha, a roasted green tea, has picked up global attention for its warmth and lower caffeine. Fermented tea, made using kurokoji, is a genuinely rare category that a handful of producers are pushing further than it's ever gone. And a small number of black tea makers, working in regions like Shizuoka, are refining a steamed-then-oxidized process that doesn't resemble black tea from anywhere else in the world.

What this means for a catalog like ours

We carry teas from three of these threads: Terracotta, our roasted houjicha, Red Onyx, our black tea, and Afterglow, our kurokoji-fermented tea, alongside Emerald Cove, the matcha that's always been the center of Japan's tea identity. They exist because small producers kept experimenting in the corners of a tea culture that mostly looked one direction, and we think that experimentation deserves the same attention matcha has already gotten.

Japan will probably always be a green tea country first. What's changing is how much room there is for everything else it's quietly been capable of the whole time.