Trip Report: Tea, Wagashi, and Teaware

I just got back from 17 days in Tokyo. I’m not going to do a full trip report, because now that I’m on trip #20 or so, my trip reports are somewhat boring, but I wanted to focus specifically on tea in order to follow-up on [my guide from a few years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/JapanTravel/comments/euvwi6/beginners_guide_tea_and_wagashi_in_japan/). In that guide, I broke down a bit about tea and wagashi, and I went on to talk about three of my favorite places: Toraya, Sakurai, and Wad Omotenashi.

In this post, I’ll go over a few new places I went to. I’m also going to start with some general notes about post-COVID Japan.

## Post-COVID Japan – General Travel Notes

* As of writing this in October 2022, mask usage is 99% in Japan both inside and outside. Aside from eating and drinking in restaurants, I rarely saw people without masks, even when walking outside. Most masks being used are disposable surgical masks or similar, and they are plentiful if you’re looking to buy some. Pretty much any pharmacy and convenience store has boxes of them, in all different colors and styles. I bought a box of 30 masks for 789 yen.
* Indoor spaces like restaurants, shopping centers, and museums/attractions often want you to use hand sanitizer when you enter the building. There is always a station for it at the entrance, and often staff will direct you to use it. They might also temperature check you at the door. No one will check COVID tests or vaccination status, at least not at normal establishments, so you don’t generally need to be able to prove that on the fly.
* Things are generally open and operating as normal. There are some restaurants and shopping centers that are operating on shortened hours, but I didn’t really notice a significant difference in terms of availability of food or things to do versus pre-COVID Japan. Restaurants and shopping centers were busy, trains were busy, etc.
* Credit cards and IC cards are much more widely accepted than before. Aside from some restaurants and temples/shrines, I don’t think we used cash for much at all. In fact, I didn’t even have cash on me. Any cash transactions (of which there were very few) were handled by my husband. Off the top of my head, we paid for a few vending machines with cash (although most take IC cards), goshuin at temples/shrines, a couple of limited express tickets to Choshi we had to buy on the platform, and a few restaurants/coffee shops. Other than that, we used suica on our iPhones (if you have a physical card, that requires cash to top up, though) and credit cards for everything. I frequently went to convenience stores, drug stores (like MatsuKi), coffee shops, chain restaurants, stores like Loft and Itoya, and attractions (like Tokyo Tower) and paid by suica or credit card.

## Tea Stuff

Time to get into some of the interesting tea places I went to this time! I don’t really drink matcha, so the places I talk about below do modern tea preparation of things like sencha, genmaicha, and houjicha.

### Kuuya

[Kuuya](https://tabelog.com/en/tokyo/A1301/A130101/13002591/) in Ginza, Tokyo only sells one item: monaka. Monaka are small wagashi made of bean paste sandwiched between thin wafers. Kuuya is supposedly one of the most famous places in Tokyo to get them, and they are so popular that you need to reserve them in advance. My husband, who arrived in Japan before me, went to the shop and reserved some for my birthday. We picked them up at an allotted time slot and brought them home. The place is really small, and the monaka come [wrapped in a box](https://imgur.com/vCHDQVs) and are available in amounts starting from ten. They look like [this](https://imgur.com/8dCtIKh), and they are quite small, so you can eat many at once! As far as monaka go, these are some of the better ones I’ve had, although they are very traditional. They are typical and well-made sweet red bean pasta monaka, with no modern twists.

### Tokyo Saryo

[Tokyo Saryo](https://www.tokyosaryo.jp/) in Setagaya, Tokyo does a type of immersion/drip sencha preparation. It’s a small place, with only eight seats, although you can reserve a spot online at their website. At our seating, it was just me, my husband, a Japanese woman, and a Korean couple.

Their tasting set comes with two teas and a snack, and you’ll be given a choice from six different sencha teas, all from different regions and with different taste profiles. I went with a tea from Kagoshima and a tea from Kyoto. Our snack was a shortbread-like wagashi.

Once you pick your teas, they do three steepings of them. On the third, they add their own hand-roasted genmai (roasted rice) to the tea to add some complexity. The steepings themselves are done in devices that _look_ like coffee pour over filters, but they aren’t really. Although Saryo calls their technique “pour over”, it’s really just immersion—they fill up the filters for a short time and then release the tea from them at once. You can see the setup [here](https://imgur.com/EsvufQK) and [here](https://imgur.com/QO7NZB5).

[Here](https://imgur.com/57AQf65) are my teas on their first steeping, with my snack. [Here they are](https://imgur.com/ZLN7qH3) on their second steeping—you can see the Kagoshima tea on the left is noticeably darker, and that both teas have opened up a bit. The Kagoshima was meaty and umami like I generally expect from that region, whereas the Kyoto was sweeter and subtler.

The whole experience was very lovely. The woman attending us was very nice, although she didn’t speak a ton of English. My husband conducted most of the conversation in Japanese, although everyone was laughing and relaxed by the end of the experience. The shop is beautiful and minimalist. I would definitely go back to try whatever they have in season next time I’m there.

### Higashiya

[Higashiya](https://www.higashiya.com/en/shop/ginza/) in Ginza, Tokyo is famous for their wagashi. They are a pretty old-school tea shop with traditional wagashi styles and traditional teas. You can make reservations on their website for tea, tea and wagashi sets, and full meal courses. We went with a lunch course, and it also came with tea and wagashi.

They don’t really allow photos of the restaurant, but I snuck in one of the [tea preparation area](https://imgur.com/9esQOtU), which was just behind my husband’s head. Lunch was excellent. It was several courses of rice dishes, fish dishes, tempura, and assorted Japanese snacks. It was quite filling and all the food was great. With lunch, they served us a special fruit blend tea, which was a dark-roasted bancha that had been infused with pear.

For the after-lunch tea and wagashi, they allowed you to choose between several tea and wagashi options. I picked another, different bancha, and a [persimmon wagashi](https://imgur.com/jN6s1P5) (since that’s in season right now). My husband had a genmaicha blend and a [white bean paste wagashi](https://imgur.com/3bGqtoq).

Higashiya was another excellent experience, and I’d compare it a lot to Toraya in terms of atmosphere. It’s quiet, subdued, and a bit formal. But the food and tea were excellent.

### Artistic Nippon

[Artistic Nippon](https://artisticnippon.com/) in Choshi, Japan is a teaware seller that sources pieces from local Japanese artisans. The owner, Yoshikawa-san, is the third generation owner of the shop, and he is somewhat famous in teaware communities for his offerings. I’ve been buying online from him for years, and I wanted to visit the shop in person.

One problem. It’s in Choshi. Which I _thought_ was close to Tokyo, but… it isn’t. It’s a 2.5 hour limited express train ride away. Regardless, my husband was totally up for indulging me on this seaside adventure. It was unfortunately raining for the day we chose to visit, which meant that walking around was unpleasant, but Choshi itself is quite cute. It has a soy sauce factory, and the air literally smells like soy sauce. It also has a waterfront area, and a lighthouse that’s accessible by local train lines.

We didn’t end up staying long, but we were there long enough to spend an hour in Yoshikawa-san’s shop, get lunch, and walk around town a bit. We also ran into a little Hawaiian restaurant that serves great malasadas. You can see pictures of Choshi in my [full album](https://imgur.com/a/k2cglB2) (at the bottom), and I go into detail on the pieces I bought at Artistic Nippon in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/y3fh1r/my_visit_to_artistic_nippon_in_choshi_japan/). It was great to meet Yoshikawa-san in person, and he’s a really nice guy with excellent English skills.

Ultimately, unless you’re fanatical about teaware or tiny, sleepy, seaside towns, I’m not sure I would recommend a trip out to Choshi, but it was worth it to me personally.

_You can find my full album of photos from these places [here](https://imgur.com/a/k2cglB2)._