Tokyo Weekender - October 2017
A day in the life of a geisha. Find your perfect Kyushu. Plus Q&A with anime director Keiichi Hara, are robots taking our jobs?, Explore Japanese cuisine at GINZA SIX, and Tsukuda guide
A day in the life of a geisha. Find your perfect Kyushu. Plus Q&A with anime director Keiichi Hara, are robots taking our jobs?, Explore Japanese cuisine at GINZA SIX, and Tsukuda guide
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Dream<br />
Powder<br />
Words by Alec Jordan<br />
Born out of a “crazy ambition,” new company Material<br />
Matcha Uji is looking to breathe life into the country’s matcha<br />
industry, and take the high quality tea beyond Japan’s shores<br />
Creating high quality matcha<br />
(powdered green tea) is no easy<br />
task. It demands an encyclopedic<br />
knowledge of the land where the<br />
tea is grown, an understanding of<br />
the wide variety of tea plants and their individual<br />
characteristics, and a deep sense of the<br />
tradition of tea making itself, all coupled with<br />
the fine nose and palate of a true connoisseur.<br />
They’re not the qualities that you’d expect<br />
to find in a former trader in the derivatives<br />
market and an expert in machine translation<br />
and speech recognition algorithms, but<br />
Morgan Josset and Etienne Denoual are full of<br />
surprises. The two Frenchmen have recently<br />
launched the company Material Matcha Uji<br />
宇 治 (MMU for short),<br />
and have dedicated<br />
themselves to bringing<br />
a new level of<br />
matcha to customers<br />
overseas.<br />
Between<br />
the two of them,<br />
Josset and Denoual<br />
have some 25 years<br />
of experience in<br />
Japan. But as Josset<br />
explained, they’d<br />
spent almost all of<br />
it in the corporate<br />
world, and after<br />
a shared period<br />
of soul searching,<br />
they knew that they<br />
wanted to do something<br />
concrete, something tangible.<br />
They just weren’t quite sure what that<br />
something was until they visited a friend in<br />
Uji, a famed tea growing region just outside<br />
of Kyoto, who took them to the oldest tea<br />
house in the world, had them drink a superb<br />
matcha, and explained to them that the<br />
tradition behind the beverage that they had<br />
just enjoyed was in danger.<br />
High quality matcha usually doesn’t<br />
make it out of Japan, their friend explained,<br />
and the plants that are used to make it are<br />
rapidly being replaced by high-intensity,<br />
low-quality agricultural products. Furthermore,<br />
the average age of a Japanese tea<br />
farmer is about 65, and many of them are<br />
finding it increasingly difficult to find someone<br />
who is willing to follow in their footsteps.<br />
And it’s not easy work. The tea plants<br />
need to be shaded during part of the growing<br />
period in order to ensure that they are of<br />
the fullest flavor, and the exact timing of this<br />
process is the sort of thing that can only be<br />
learned from years of experience. For the finest<br />
flavored tea, only the first flush, or harvest<br />
of leaves are used. Many farmers are forced<br />
to base their entire year’s earnings – and their<br />
financial stability – on the harvest that they<br />
bring to market, usually in May.<br />
All of a sudden, Josset and Denoual’s<br />
purpose became clear: they would help in<br />
their own small way to breathe life into the<br />
matcha industry and bring high quality tea<br />
to customers outside of Japan. Throwing<br />
themselves into their quest, they would spend<br />
time with tea farmers learning about what it<br />
takes to bring a harvest together, refine their<br />
understanding of tea while spending time<br />
with master matcha blenders, and come to a<br />
deeper understanding of both the tea ceremony<br />
and Japanese business practices.<br />
As the first result of their labors, they<br />
have created three varieties of matcha, each<br />
with a unique flavor profile: MMU01, MMU02,<br />
and MMU03, all of which are on sale on the<br />
company’s website. But their project doesn’t<br />
just end with the creation of a product.<br />
They’ve launched a Kickstarter project to secure<br />
a year’s worth of tea leaf harvest, which<br />
will not only allow MMU to create a large<br />
amount of matcha, but assure the tea farmers’<br />
peace of mind, allowing them to focus on<br />
what they do best: growing high quality tea.<br />
Josset explains, the project is a product of<br />
crazy ambition, but launching the new business<br />
has pushed the two of them to reach new<br />
heights that they wouldn’t have imagined<br />
before: “With a lot of passion, will and work,<br />
you get to surpass yourself and do things that<br />
you thought were impossible. You have to<br />
listen to your dreams and believe in yourself.”<br />
To find out more about Material Matcha Uji<br />
宇 治 , go to materialmatcha.com.<br />
32 | OCTOBER <strong>2017</strong> | TOKYO WEEKENDER