Chapter 2 · 1 / 5
Introduction — The Climate and Cooking of Monsoon Asia
From India to Japan, from the Tibetan plateau to Indonesia. The outline of monsoon Asia, where nearly all the world’s major tea regions lie, and of the foodways that grew there.
The lessons are narrated in Japanese.
How to turn on English subtitles
- Start the video and click the CC button to switch captions on.
- Open Settings (the gear icon) → Subtitles/CC → Auto-translate.
- 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.
Curry in India, phở in Vietnam, soba and sushi in Japan. The foodways of Asia are remarkably varied, and each one reflects the climate, the history and the values of the place it comes from.
The anthropologist Naomichi Ishige wrote that food is a mirror reflecting culture. Eating is not simply the taking in of nutrients; it is a distillation of the knowledge a species built up in adapting to its surroundings.
The stage Tea Gong Academy is concerned with is monsoon Asia. Nearly all of the world’s major tea-producing regions lie here, and under a warm, humid climate the area has developed foodways of its own — fermented foods and spices, rice cultivation, root-crop farming built on palms and tubers, fishing, swidden agriculture, all tangled together.
Monsoon Asia is hard to define precisely. Here we take it to mean the broad region running from India in the west to Japan in the east, and from the Tibetan plateau in the north to Indonesia in the south.