Tea Gong Academy
日本語

Chapter 1 · 5 / 6

Bancha, and What Tea Culture Aims At

Against the matcha and sencha born in the capital, a second lineage: the bancha raised by people living in the mountains. What has tea culture been reaching for?

The lessons are narrated in Japanese.

How to turn on English subtitles
  1. Start the video and click the CC button to switch captions on.
  2. Open Settings (the gear icon) → Subtitles/CC → Auto-translate.
  3. Choose English.

These are machine-translated from the Japanese captions, so expect some roughness — particularly around tea terminology. The text on this page is a proper translation, so read the two together.

There is a second lineage of tea that matters: bancha.

Matcha and sencha are an urban culture, formed in the capital — the centre of learning and of institutions. Bancha, by contrast, grew up alongside nature within the daily life of people in the mountains. It can fairly be called the tea culture of the hills.