The tea route

West to east, following the history of tea in Japan, from Matsue to Kamakura

Tea reaches Japan in 1191, when the monk Eisai lands at Kamakura with seeds from China, and this route travels through that story, though not in its order: it runs west to east because that is how you travel it, which leaves Matsue — eighteenth century — first, and Kamakura, where it all began, last. Myoe plants them at Toganoo: the tea garden at Kozan-ji, northwest of Kyoto, is considered the oldest in the country, it has been restored and you can visit it. From there it moves to Uji, still the centre: Tsuen, by the bridge, claims a founding date of 1160, and at Fukujuen you can grind your own matcha on a stone mill. Kyoto also has the museum of the Raku family, who since the sixteenth century have made by hand, without a wheel, the bowls Sen no Rikyu made standard. The Jo-an at Inuyama, built in 1618 by Nobunaga's younger brother, is one of Japan's three National Treasure tea houses, and guided sessions do go inside. Matsue is a tea town because its lord, Matsudaira Fumai, was a tea master, and you can still taste it in its sweets. And Shizuoka is the other tea Japan: forty per cent of the country's production, on plateaus of green rows.

The itinerary, stop by stop

1. Matsue-Izumo2 days

   Matsue Castle, one of only twelve in Japan with its original keep, overlooks a canal-lined old town by Lake Shinji, famous for its sunsets; 30 minutes away sits Izumo Taisha, one of the country's oldest Shinto shrines.

   The route starts here because of the map, not the calendar. The story it tells begins in Kamakura in 1191, and Matsue is late Edo, so the first stop is chronologically the second to last: crossing the country from west to east, with your luggage always moving the same way, is worth more than honouring the dates, and the final stop takes care of closing the circle. Getting here costs something. The Yakumo from Okayama is about two hours and forty minutes, connecting with the Sanyo Shinkansen, and if you would rather not spend the day on trains there is a direct flight from Haneda to Izumo in an hour and twenty. Either way, Matsue is somewhere you go, not somewhere you pass through.

   Two days split themselves: one in the city, one in Izumo half an hour away. The tea day is the city one. Meimei-an is the pavilion raised in the eighteenth century by Matsudaira Fumai, the lord who turned his domain into a tea town, and the ceremony is open to visitors there; the rest of that inheritance lives in the sweet shops, Saiundo and Furyudo among them, with wakakusa and yamakawa as the house pieces. Around it fit the castle, which still has its 1611 keep, and sunset over Lake Shinji. The second day is Izumo Taisha, which has nothing to do with tea and where you greet the gods with four claps instead of two.

   What puts it in this route: Meimei-an teahouse · Matsue wagashi route with matcha

2. Kyoto4 days

   The old capital holds a density no other Japanese city matches: the garden at Tenryu-ji is the only one in Kyoto that keeps the layout Muso Soseki gave it in the fourteenth century, To-ji's Kodo holds twenty-one sculptures arranged as a mandala in three dimensions, and the Imperial Palace is now simply walked into, no application and no ticket, while Katsura Rikyu has to be applied for months ahead. Then there is the torii forest of Fushimi Inari, the gold leaf of Kinkaku-ji and the sand sea of Ginkaku-ji.

   Day trip to Nara

   The leg back is the one out in reverse, Yakumo to Okayama and then the Shinkansen, and what you gain on arrival is the centre of gravity of the whole trip. Kyoto is the long stop because the material beginning of Japanese tea is here, and so is its codification: the tea plot at Kozan-ji, in the mountains northwest of the city, is held to be the oldest in the country, it has been brought back and you can see it; and a short walk from Nijo, the Raku family museum holds the bowls that have been made by hand, without a wheel, since the sixteenth century, the ones Sen no Rikyu turned into the standard of the ceremony. Four days, and none of them spare.

   The sensible split is one day per front. Kozan-ji takes a long morning: the grounds are free and what you pay for is the Sekisui-in and the animal satire scroll, which is a reproduction. Another day is Uji, which happens along some six hundred metres between the two stations and the river: Tsuen, by the bridge, claims 1160, and at Fukujuen you can grind your own matcha in a stone mill or roll sencha by hand. The third leaves for Nara, for Saidai-ji, where they hold the ochamori: matcha whisked in bowls over thirty centimetres across, heavy enough that someone else's two hands hold them for you, four thousand yen as a donation and only in January, April and October. That is why this route has a date and not just a month.

   It is worth knowing what goes wrong. The Raku museum closes completely while it changes over between its four annual exhibitions, so there are whole weeks when you simply cannot get in: check that before you fix dates, not after. Fukujuen's workshops have irregular closing days and a last admission time that varies by activity, so a phone call saves the disappointment. In Uji there is almost nobody first thing and by mid morning there is a queue for Nakamura Tokichi's matcha jelly. In Nara, chagayu, the rice cooked in roasted hojicha eaten for breakfast there since the Todai-ji monks did it, is mild and savoury, and anyone expecting a hearty bowl will be let down. And the uncomfortable truth: of the four days, tea fills two and a half; the rest is Kyoto being Kyoto.

   What puts it in this route: Historic tea houses of Uji · Uji tea workshop at Fukujuen · Ippodo and its Kaboku tea room · Raku Museum and the bowls of the Raku family · Kozan-ji, the Sekisui-in and the first manga in Japan · Ochamori, the giant tea bowls of Saidai-ji · Chagayu, breakfast rice gruel in tea

3. Nagoya1 day

   The city where you watch Japan being manufactured: the Toyota museum traces the jump from the loom to the car with the machines running, and an hour away you can look down from a walkway onto a real assembly line, kanban cards moving along it. The castle has rebuilt its residential palace in cypress with traditional joinery — you go in barefoot — and you eat hitsumabushi, grilled eel served three different ways in the one bowl.

   Day trip to Inuyama

   This needs saying plainly: on this stop, the tea is not in Nagoya. The catalogue credits the city with not a single tea activity, and what earns it a place is being the Tokaido Shinkansen hub that puts Inuyama half an hour away. That does not make it a formality, because the day it gets fills itself easily between the castle's Honmaru Goten palace, the Toyota museum and a dinner of miso katsu, tebasaki or hitsumabushi, with the morning service and its red bean toast the next day. But the reason this stop is on the route sits one commuter train away.

   Inuyama has the Jo-an, one of only three tea houses in all of Japan designated National Treasures. Oda Uraku, Nobunaga's younger brother and a pupil of Sen no Rikyu, built it in 1618 inside the Kennin-ji precinct in Kyoto; it passed through the Mitsui family and arrived here in 1972, into the Urakuen garden laid out by Sutemi Horiguchi. The ordinary visit goes round it from outside, fifteen hundred yen, half past nine to five, closed Wednesdays, with the matcha at the Koan pavilion charged separately. Setting foot inside is only possible on the guided sessions the Urakuen runs most months, with few places and dates published month by month: you book that before the train ticket, not after.

   Two specific warnings. The first is Wednesday: if the Inuyama day lands on one, the Urakuen is shut and the stop loses its point, so you build these two days backwards, from the Jo-an outwards. The second is the Inuyama festival, thirteen three storey floats with wooden automata and three hundred and sixty five lanterns after dark, which falls on the first weekend of April. Leaving around the twelfth to catch the Shizuoka harvest, you arrive a week late. There is no way to have both, and it is better to know that now than to work it out on Honmachi street.

   What puts it in this route: Urakuen Garden and the Jo-an Tea House · Inside the Jo-an Tea House

4. Shizuoka2 days

   Tokugawa Ieyasu's old castle town at the foot of Mt. Fuji, with Shizuoka Sengen Shrine, the Toro rice-paddy ruins, Sunpu Castle Park, and the Nihondaira viewpoint, linked by ropeway to the Kunozan Toshogu shrine-mausoleum; the heart of Japan's biggest tea-growing region.

   The scale changes here, and so does the subject. Until now tea has been liturgy, utensil and monastery; in Shizuoka it is a crop that yields around forty per cent of the country's production, more than any other prefecture, across whole plateaus combed into green rows. This is the easiest leg of the route: direct Tokaido Shinkansen from Nagoya, Hikari in about sixty minutes and Kodama in eighty, five thousand nine hundred and forty yen unreserved and covered by the national JR pass, with the one catch that the Nozomi does not stop here. You enter Tokugawa Ieyasu's city through the tea industry's back door.

   The two days split between the leaf and the town. The tea day starts easily, with tastings of local varieties in the tea rooms and shops beside the station itself, and then climbs to the fields; from late April to June you can join the picking, and that date is what governs the entire route, because arriving earlier means seeing the rows without touching them. The other day is Sunpu, the vermilion Sengen shrine, the Yayoi village remains at Toro and, after dark, the black oden of the Aoba alleys, eaten on skewers under a dusting of dried fish.

   The awkward part is local transport. The Nihondaira viewpoint and Kunozan Toshogu, where Ieyasu's first tomb is, depend on a city bus with only four weekday departures and a ropeway at six hundred yen one way, and neither is covered by any JR pass: that half day is paid for separately and planned with the timetable in hand. If the trip is tight, Shizuoka works as a single day, the leaf one, giving up Fuji from the plateau. What it does not take is coming out of season and expecting a harvest.

   What puts it in this route: Tea tasting in Japan's top tea-growing region · Tea Fields and Leaf Picking

5. Hakone1 day

   Hakone is not a spa town but a forty-square-kilometre caldera with a dome in the middle: seven historic springs, each with its own chemistry and temperature, which is why the afternoon in the ryokan's rotenburo is the plan and not the trimming. You come up on Japan's oldest adhesion mountain railway, with three switchbacks, and cross Lake Ashi by boat. June brings hydrangeas along the embankment; October, the golden susuki of Sengokuhara.

   This is the route's weakest stop in tea terms, and it is worth admitting that before defending it. What is here is a thatched house on the old Tokaido, the Amazake Chaya, and what it serves is not tea: it is alcohol free amazake and chikara mochi, the same recipe and the same family for some four hundred years. What earns it a place is not the leaf but the institution: the roadside chaya, the compulsory halt for anyone walking the highway this route has been following east. After two weeks of tea rooms and bowls, finding it beside the old paving makes sense.

   One day does not stretch far, so pick a whole shape for it: the Hakone Tozan mountain railway with its three switchbacks, Lake Ashi, the paved stretch with the tea house and an onsen at the end, or simply an empty afternoon in a ryokan with a private bath, which is how Japanese travellers actually use Hakone. The museum circuit does not fit. Two warnings: this is the most expensive stop of the trip, and it is the only one that does not belong to the history of tea, so if a day or a budget has to go, it goes here without the route losing its thread.

   What puts it in this route: Amazake Chaya tea house on the old Tokaido

6. Tokyo3 days

   It is not just Shibuya and Asakusa. Tokyo is the stone base of Edo Castle, once the largest in the world, sitting in a free public garden; it is Toyosu, the biggest fish market on earth, with glazed walkways above the tuna auction and sushi counters serving from first light; it is kabuki at the Kabukiza with single-act tickets sold same-day at the side window, no booking; and it is the whole forest wrapped around Meiji Jingu, minutes from Harajuku.

   Day trip to Kamakura

   Tokyo closes the route by geography and by airport, and the tea it offers is urban and sweet. In the Hamarikyu garden there is a tea house in the middle of a seawater pond, which is a very Edo way of framing the whole business. And there is the kanmidokoro, the parlour where Japanese sweets are eaten sitting down rather than on the move: Umezono, in Asakusa since 1854, where awa-zenzai was invented and the anmitsu runs around nine hundred yen; Funawa, a hundred metres away, with an imo-yokan that keeps for only two days; and Toraya in Akasaka, the house that supplied the imperial court, with yokan and matcha for about fifteen hundred.

   But the day that really closes the route is Kamakura, and it is worth saying why it sits at the end instead of the start: this is where Eisai landed in 1191 with the seeds that set everything before it in motion, and it turns up on day sixteen only because chronology and the map will not fit on the same line. The tea is drunk at Kisen-an in Jomyo-ji temple, a room rebuilt over the original of 1365, matcha facing a dry garden with the steady knock of a shishi-odoshi; and there is another tea house inside the bamboo grove at Hokoku-ji. Around them, the Great Buddha and the oldest Zen temples in the country.

   Two practical things for the end. Kamakura gets overwhelmed: the Enoden can build up hour long waits during Golden Week, and since 2018 the city has given residents priority access at Kamakura station, extended in 2026 to season ticket holders. Leaving in mid April puts you here just before that bottleneck, which is one more argument for the date. And the other: after two weeks of plantations and tea bowls, three days of Tokyo are an enormous change of volume. It works better to take them as decompression and as a city than as a last serving of tea, because forcing it here does not go well.

   What puts it in this route: Hamarikyu Gardens · Kanmidokoro: the traditional sweet-shop tea break · Matcha at the Kisen-an tea house of Jomyo-ji Temple